>>How did moving from 8 track to cassette affect the companies that made the tapes and recording devices, or even the playback devices?

That's not a good analogy, Craig.
Anyone who could read knew that there was a battle going on and that there was a risk involved in a large commitment to one format or another.

Tech does move on tho, and that's a good thing.
In my personal view, MS's luster it still pretty bright but it has faded a lot lately.
I've been surprised lately to hear several highly competent network tech colleagues of mine who make serious bucks supporting Windows-based W/S, servers, etc, touting Linux, Mac, etc.
This isn't idle grousing.
They are making big moves in that direction with some of our mutual clients and sooner or later that will have an effect if MS doesn't do something about it.
They are telling us that if we're smart we'll start developing on Linux-compatible platforms.
Of course that's just one input source, but we have to listen to it.

Novell didn't listen and almost overnight Windows NT Server turned it into a puff of smoke.