On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 10:48:00 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article ,
says...

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.





That is only partof the story.

GAtes and a company called something like Digital Research were in
competition. Gates out smarted DR. He asked IBM to put out both and let
the public choose. DR sold the system for about $ 150 and MS for $
49. People being what they are bought mostly the $ 49 version.


That gave MS a big start money wise. There was a couple of other
operating systems out,but they never made a go of it. I am thinking
maybe DR. DOS


DR DOS was Digital Research (the DR part) and that is where Gates got
DOS in the first place. Both were derivatives of CPM.
The shared market thing was between IBM (PC DOS) and Microsoft
(MSDOS). They were virtually the same product up until around V.4 when
the features started diverging and by 6, they had different numbers.
(MS was 6.22, IBM was 6.3 for a similar product)

MS sort of stole the windows design and the mouse from other companies.
Both Apple and Microsoft stole the mouse from Xerox. That is also
where the GUI idea came from.