What if Ethernet failed? - PC Advisor

"We would have gone through a much longer period of proprietary networks," says Jon Oltsik, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The goodness of IP, including the Internet, wouldn't have happened as quickly."

And IBM - not Cisco -- may have been the 800-pound gorilla in networking if Token Ring had won out in the LAN. IBM was long an advocate of Token Ring but that advocacy, and a huge chunk of IBM's networking business, succumbed to Ethernet and Cisco in 1999.

"IBM would have doubled in size because it would have controlled another standard," says ESG's Oltsik. "Cisco wouldn't have had the chance to ride the standards wave like it did. They and everyone else would have been in IBM's shadow."

Read the entire article at PC Advisor.