If Microsoft was smart, they'd create an "OpenDirectX" divorced from Windows that could be ported to run on OSX, Linux, non-WinCE mobile platforms, etc. They'd get a lot of goodwill, and driven the nail in GL's coffin.
But what would Microsoft gain on that? I think they (unfortunately) make perfect business sense now. They have no particular interest in killing OpenGL. Winning an API war doesn't bring any cash in. DirectX in itself is not generating any profits for Microsoft. It's all about selling copies of Windows and preserving the OS monopoly. DirectX makes Windows the only gaming OS for PC, and Linux and Mac is never going to gain any serious market share unless you can also play games. And with Xbox it's of course also about making sure the best games comes to their platform of choice. To me it seems like MS started getting it right about when they went into the console business. I'm not sure if that's because they got some hardware experience on their own, or simply because they put more effort into DirectX because of it.
Now if they were to release an OpenDirectX, then that would be inviting Linux and Mac into the gaming community and making these platforms a lot more attractive for a lot of people. I don't see the business sense of that from Microsoft's point of view, although I would applaude the move if they did. The best thing for Microsoft would be if DirectX kept widening the gap, while OpenGL stayed around and bogged everyone else down.
Instead, I think Apple and the Linux community must realize OpenGL is a burden at this point. Quite frankly, no one cares (or at least no one should care) about syntatic sugar and convenience functions (that belongs in D3DX/GLU/GLUT anyway) and the exact functions that you call to make things draw on the screen is irrelevant. All that is going to be stuffed behind your own abstraction anyway if your code is well written.
The best thing would be if there was an opensource innitiative to create that OpenDirectX that would bring native bindings into the Linux kernel and allow IHVs to write drivers for it. And then write a GL-to-DX wrapper and deprecate the OpenGL support. In the long term that would be a gain for the IHVs too. Only one API to support.
And perhaps also take a page out of Microsoft books, "embrace and extend", to bring extensions to the DirectX as well and let you do fancy stuff on Linux and Mac that the native interface in Windows can't do.
Quite frankly, I think that's the only way anyone's ever going to break Microsoft's monopoly and bring some competition to the OS market.
Isn't it possible to reverse this unfortunate event or will most of the OGL dev community drop it if they can? There must be some drive to fix what's wrong and since most devs seem to openly show their displeasure It wouldn't be that far fetched to see the Khronos group going back. I don't work with this, so I don't know how it works in the industry. But being that OGL is important to many platforms It'd be weird if they didn't try and redo this to keep or gain some confidence again.
If you take twice the time and deliver less than half of what was promised, I don't know what will give people back the confidence in it. And it's not the first time either. The API was also going to be rewritten for OpenGL 2.0. There were a lot of visionary talk and in the end we got a bunch of extensions promoted to core. People were disappointed then too. This time people really expected those visionary talks to finally come true. And all we got was a bunch of extensions promoted to core. No one's going to believe a word of what they say from now on. It's a lost cause at this point as far as I'm concerned.