DevilsPGD wrote:

In message "Anthony
Fremont" wrote:


I can't help but think of "the incredible liar" from Saturday Night Live
fame. Yeah, that's the ticket. ;-) $80,000 still seems a bit low to
me as they would have had more than that invested themselves. But I
will concede that you actually did back up your statement, even though I
don't believe Bill for a minute. ;-) I certainly will never believe
that DOS 2 and DOS 3 were included in that $80K.


I think the key is that it wasn't JUST $80K... It was $80K, plus
Microsoft got unlimited distribution rights of their own.

In other words, Microsoft got somebody else to pay the development costs
of a product that Microsoft was now selling.


No, "in other words" Microsoft had the insight to retain distribution
rights on non-IBM products and IBM didn't mind one whit because they didn't
take the PC market seriously to begin with. Besides, it was a 'steal' at
$80,000 and who gives a dam about 'clones'?

Microsoft has the same kind of arrangement with Apple and they didn't care
either because both Apple and IBM figured on a 'system' sales model of
hardware and software. IBM expected their 'business machines' reputation to
swamp all other considerations and Apple depended on closed hardware.

On the other hand, Microsoft decided to be simply a supplier of software
that ran on any clone.

In fact, the 'Windows' GUI was originally developed as a means to run
Microsoft's 'Apple' business software, like Word, on PC clones and that is
not a trivial distinction. While IBM was trying to sell an 'O.S.', because
you 'have to' in order to sell hardware, Microsoft was selling Word (and
the rest), which happened to run on Windows. It's the applications that
sold the O.S., not the O.S. by itself.