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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.

That's a lie with Office alone, let alone the Xbox etc.
And didn't happen with Windows either.

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.

That's very arguable. IBM wanted to get things
done quickly with the PC and that's the reason
they took a completely different approach with
that product and were silly enough to have the
full circuit diagrams and the bios code in the
manual so it was trivial if not legal to clone it.

They would still be a business machine, priced out
of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was.

But that wasn't because of the anti trust suits.
It was due to how IBM chose to do the PC.