The desktop computer market has been extremely innovative and robust over the last two decades without much of this kind of legal turf-grabbing. This kind of thing is ultimately only going to hurt consumers.
Maybe the legal turf-grabbing has been so vicious that you haven't noticed. Microsoft basically sued Linux off of store shelves in the 2000's. The only reason they had nominal competition from the Mac was that Apple is one of the only companies with enough patents to keep their lawyers at bay.
I strongly disagree about robustness (mostly due to the turf-grabbing, so I'm actually agreeing with you at this point). One company controlled the platform for most computing for most of the modern computing era and they were pretty lousy at it. It's shocking how long it took Microsoft to put things like a useable e-mail client and calendar into a standard PC (because it would have interfered with their Outlook sales). The browser most people use sucked for most of the 00's and you have to wonder if misaligned incentives were at play.
During the windows rule, hardware specs went up but not much happened otherwise. Hard drives and RAM became 100 times bigger, but there was the same Start button, the same IE5 that became IE6 (sigh), the same games and videos on CDs. The only big innovative thing born in those years was 3D acceleration.
In the last few years we've seen a tremendous explosion of modern web, content streaming services; in the same time, rich mobile devices caught traction. They failed to do so for the whole 00s despite everyone predicting them to each year.
Basically, that's what having a platform monopoly or having no platform at all gets you.
Things would have been more interesting without the Windows monopoly, I agree. But in that time we got cheap but extremely powerful personal computers with robust, mulitasking operating systems and a huge ecosystem of very capable applications. Maybe there haven't been many radical innovations in the WIMP interface but these things go in cycles and the this one served consumers very well.
"Everyone wants to be part of a winning stack, but even better is to be the bottleneck in a winning stack so that everyone else can join in only on your terms—and at your price." That's one cool line!
