Would any of us be any different.

"But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

We would all like to think that had we been at the helm in the old pc pioneering days, things would have evolved better. However once someone is in a position of power, greed is often an irresistible temptation and Bill succumbed to it. His company's decisions have cost humanity billions of man hours in poorly documented interfaces, buggy and slow software, and using it's monopoly to block more innovative products from entering the market.

Today, as a software developer I am hugely disappointed with the "progress" that the PC market has made, ubiquitous or not. Running a current version of MS word on a modern today is slower than running an old version on a machine of that era. Opening documents takes several seconds. Starting the OS takes half a minute while dos with windows 3.1 was faster than this. Microsoft has no excuse for this. Unfortunately optimization and efficiency rank at the bottom of MS's priority list.

Crediting MS/Bill for single handedly creating the PC revolution is incredibly naive (it's not entirely his fault). I still think the author was correct that if market forces had selected someone driven by technical excellence instead of Gates, the computing world today could be very much better.