It would certainly accelerate the development of language. How many new words will be invented, or existing words subverted, to serve clandestine communications and slip past the filters? Steganography, anyone?
Can I See Great Etchings Near Dubai Ending Roughly? <- That's a bit weak, but you get the idea.
I worked in local government that used Unix workstations for GIS (Graphic Information Systems) - mapping of the local government's property boundaries and many other layers. The DB was held on a DEC Alpha, and it was all very pricey, albeit very good at its job. ESRI ARCGIS, etc
When the time came to replace, they moved it all to Windows. The workstations were beefed-up PCs running NT4.0 and the DB was on a server with NT 4.0 server. DEC was gone by then, absorbed into Compaq, Alphas were discontinued, and no-one wanted to migrate to SUN or HP.