I didn't downvote you, but I'llgive a counter argument.
If you go back to the 80s it was a very different world. Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW. Prices on PC HW just started dropping -- margins all but disappeared.
The model virtually everyone else did -- and note the Apple model was the dominant model in this day -- was you did the full stack. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sun, SGI, DEC, etc all built the HW and the OS -- with healthy margins built it. But they couldn't compete pricewise with MS + commodity HW.
The other thing Gates did was to realize that disruption works from the bottom up. Microsoft became the master w/ disruptive SW. They would come into an existing market with a powerful, but expensive marketleader and offer a weaker, but far less expensive competitor. I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price.
What Gates didn't have a plan against was the natural disrpution to MS's disruption -- free software.
People now say, "Microsoft SW is so expensive!", but few recall that early versions of WordPerfect could cost $5,000 per seat.
Microsoft brought prices down for much of software into the $49-$299 range from the $5,000-$10,000 range. Without the licensed OS model that runs on commodity HW, I'm not sure we would have seen such drastic downward pressure on SW pricing.
"I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."
We now have Google entering your market and offering a better product for free.
Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS. The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads. Not to mention much of the world still runs offline whereas Google assumes de facto connectivity in most things they do.
Of course where search, mail,browser and android are concerned, Google has done an excellent job, but for productivity software MS is still the king.
The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads.
And in exchange get a system where when your non-tech-savvy friend breaks their computer their data is still safe waiting for them?
Or when they want to send you a document they just press the share button?
Google Docs and MS Office are very different products, but saying Docs is inherently worse ignores the benefits provided by a web based system that Office just can't provide.
> Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS.
For many it is, for others it's insufficient. But: "do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."
The only reason we have MS Office at work is Exchange and Outlook, and that's because we dogfood a component of the service we're providing to our customers. Everything else is taken care by OOo/LO and we have a Google Apps around (used mostly for XMPP) but that one would be put to full use the moment we drop Exchange.
I was referring to the fear, not the actual products. If Google entering your market doesn't scare you, you are either a fool or lucky to be in a defensible position.
> Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW.
That was happening before gates -- MS-DOS 1.0, renamed from QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) was a clone of CP/M, an O/S that had already been available for essentially every hardware capable 8080 or Z80 based system at the time. MS-DOS was just a clone for 8088/8086 based systems.
The fact that 8088/8086 became the dominant PC architecture (rather than e.g. 68K) has a lot to do with IBM's lack of innovation (they just needed to counter apple's rise, so they built something which was very close to an intel reference design -- making clones easy and mostly legal).
To a lesser extent, this was also happening with Unix.
DOS was a clone of CP/M in the same way as Linux is a clone of Unix ... it preserved some compatibility, but the internals were rewritten from scratch. And that's not a clone in my view.
I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless. What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.
> I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless.
Context is everything. CP/M was already useful in 1973. MSDOS made an appearance in 1981. Which word processor could you run on the PC in 1979? (Yes, that's a trick question ...)
> What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.
No. The only thing that made the PC shine is the cheap IBM clones of the time. Motorola's 68K (in 1978) was years ahead of the 8086 (introduced in 1978) -- and it also cost 20 times as much. The same vintage 1978 68K was still years ahead of Intel's 80286. And then Intel almost killed themselves with the 432, which was not backwards compatible and had miserable performance.
Intel returned to usefulness with the 386, that was comparable to the 68030 (same time, and price comparable as well) The 486 was to the 68040. But at that point, the world was unfortunately owned by the PC and x86 architecture.
If you ever programmed for the 68K, and then looked at the mess that is the x86 32-bit architecture, the only possible response is WTF!?!?
The point is there were other players with OS's similar to DOS ready to license it. E.g. remember the controversy over how Digital Research supposedly lost out on the contract with IBM? The market for CP/M like OS's (of which DOS is/was one) was not confined to Microsoft. To believe that in that environment if you were to take Microsoft out of the equation nobody else would step in (quickly) seems ludicrous to me.
If you go back to the 80s it was a very different world. Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW. Prices on PC HW just started dropping -- margins all but disappeared.
The model virtually everyone else did -- and note the Apple model was the dominant model in this day -- was you did the full stack. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sun, SGI, DEC, etc all built the HW and the OS -- with healthy margins built it. But they couldn't compete pricewise with MS + commodity HW.
The other thing Gates did was to realize that disruption works from the bottom up. Microsoft became the master w/ disruptive SW. They would come into an existing market with a powerful, but expensive marketleader and offer a weaker, but far less expensive competitor. I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price.
What Gates didn't have a plan against was the natural disrpution to MS's disruption -- free software.
People now say, "Microsoft SW is so expensive!", but few recall that early versions of WordPerfect could cost $5,000 per seat.
Microsoft brought prices down for much of software into the $49-$299 range from the $5,000-$10,000 range. Without the licensed OS model that runs on commodity HW, I'm not sure we would have seen such drastic downward pressure on SW pricing.