On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 2:45:38 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:10:48 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



wrote in message
.. .
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.

There are a lot of features in office that were derived from things he
bought like Consumer Software co that gave him a lot of Excel and Fox
that contributed to Access. He bought a half dozen companies to get
the 3d technology in your Xbox
The pattern was simple., If he saw a product he would have to compete
with it, he just bought them out.

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.

IBM was being very careful not to get itself back in Anti-Trust
trouble. The 1969 case had just been dismissed but the DoJ was still
filing motions. They wanted the PC to be an open architecture product
to get wide acceptance with a 3d party software vendor available to
avoid the "bundling" issue that got them in trouble in the 60s. It was
a legal decision more than a business one. They did have a proprietary
system and software (PS/2 and OS/2) but that was really only aimed at
IBM business customers and not actively marketed to the consumer.

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.

They gave the PC business away to establish the x86 standard and pave
the way for their proprietary machine. Although most people seldom
ever saw a PS/2 except on TV, it was very successful for IBM in the
business world. The goal was to replace every dumb terminal with a
PS/2 and that was very successful.

You are operating under the delusion that big old IBM, which should be a
dumb monopoly like AT&T if I follow you, somehow could see the whole
future of the computer industry in 1981 when they took a flyer on a
PC when no one at the time could even figure out why anyone needed one
or what they would do with it.