On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:09:43 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:02:25 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 20:54:43 -0700, rbowman wrote:

Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the
biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since
long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from?

Gates used his early money to buy out his competition and enhance his
monopoly position. It became a perpetual motion machine, make more
money, buy out more competitors, until he owned over 95% of the
business PC market. "Arty" people may be using Apples to do their
particular art (CGI etc) but the payroll department is running windows
office.

The early success that put them in a near monopoly position, was not
about buying out competition, but by being
very lucky to have been chosen by IBM to provide the OS for their
first PC. That's how MSFT owned the business PC market. IBM and
all the IBM clones ran MSFT OS and had no choice. It was the power of
the IBM brand, setting a standard that really put them where they
are today. Later they used that success to expand into other areas,
eg applications, internet, etc, a lot of that through acquisitions.


Bill Gates bought DOS from Digital Research without telling them about
the IBM deal and most of his "innovation" since then was also from
simply buying a better package from a competitor.
His biggest stroke of luck was that IBM had just fended off the DoJ
anti trust suit that had gone on for a decade and IBM was not in a
position to buy DOS from him outright and start that process all over
again.
It is also why anti trust suits are good for the consumer. Without
having an unbundled hardware and software model, there would not have
been a clone PC market. They would still be a business machine, priced
out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was.