Alternate (Japanese?) Operating Systems

Starting from my POD in 1979 in Avoiding Lost Decades is it possible to create more successful non-Microsoft operating systems? Possibly one stemming from Japan?

If you don't want to read my timeline (fair enough, I suppose ) the basic POD and result is that Japan avoids the stagnant 1990s and the rest of the world also does somewhat better economically as a result.

I think the Japanese could really bring in stylus based computing because of Kanji (could they just buy Apple's Newton group, assuming it arises in the ATL?) but their main problem is the same as that of Microsoft—horrible user interfaces. Check out the otherwise awesome Japanese mobiles, their UI blows.

So with butterflies only weakly reaching the shores of the US throughout 1980-88 what can we do in the American computer market? (Making Apple do better is much harder than it looks, by the way, but making Microsoft do worse is pretty easy.)

Further who would be the leading candidate in Japan to develop a full-on operating system (perhaps evolving upwards from the console, a la the NEC PC-Engine) that may be more pen focused to deal with Kanji better.

How would it translate/alter the rest of the world's computing landscape? (I imagine it could do very well in Asia if Microsoft isn't as dominate as IOTL.)

Bump.

Is there some company that a Japanese corporation might think to buy in the 80s for their computer business and get an operating system out of it?

Atari, Commodore, and Amiga are what I come up with off the top of my head. Commodore because it seems adrift in 1984 after Tramiel resigned. Amiga because it's cheap. Atari just because they seemed to be the only other option I could come up with.

In the 1990s I imagine either Be Inc. or NeXT are the likely companies to buy, with perhaps Apple on the boards when it falls low in the mid '90s. Sun & Microsoft are certainly too expensive, and I kinda doubt Palm or General Magic could scale upwards from the PDA.

What about an Apple-Sony alliance? Particularly in the early 90s with NewtonOS ideally suited to small platforms and handwriting (Kanji) and perhaps Pink/Taligent also under consideration by Sony; a bunch of money from Sony and a partnership deal would almost certainly be better than the Taligent project Apple did with IBM—not least because Apple would do all the work and Sony would just provide cash and get people trained and the OS afterwards instead of the Apple/IBM corporate culture clash of OTL Taligent.

Anyway, I figured I'd give the thread one bump in case somebody wanted to chime in .

NEC enters into a license agreement with Commodore, helping finish the Amiga project - calling it the 'PC-9801'. This'll give them a modern OS and a foundation for a worldwide m68k standard, much like MSX was for Z80. Further, this standard needs to be open (if it's too much like PC-98 OTL, that's not a good thing) - if it's open enough, all the major players in the m68k computing market would be able to adopt PC-98 as the baseline for hardware and software compatibility. This Gang of Eight (NEC, Sharp, Sun, SGI, Apple, Atari, HP, Commodore (who all adopted m68k at some point OTL - some for workstations, some for home computers...)) would be able to challenge IBM/MS and the x86 clone market quite successfully under the banner of such a standard.

Not entirely sure how well this would work - I'm new to this. I think I've managed to sketch out a scenario where a credible alternative to Wintel appears - and possibly manages to break its back. This, incidentally, would give you a few Unix clones and some very good home GUI OSes, all of which would make it easier to implement a solid IME.

Stylus computing would probably still remain niche, confined to tablets and
PDAs. It's probably faster than 10-keying, but if you know the IME well? No way.