Quote:
Originally Posted by WI wide body
My computer smarts are just about equal to Mule's Super Bowl knowledge but my kid insists that if not for the Apple guys there would be no Billy Gates empire today...or if the Apple guys had known how to take control of the market as did Microsoft. That's his opinion.
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Actually Bill and Steve used to hang in the same circle and were a bit more than just acquaintances.
The "Big Bang" for Microsoft was due in large part to a critical mistake by IBM.
Apple pretty much owned the PC market at the time. IBM wanted a taste of it. Macs were proprietary as was the OS. No opportunity to reverse engineer it.
IBM rushed out a box built with off the shelf chips (mistake 1, see reverse engineer) then went shopping for an OS which they got through Bill.
Mistake 2 was IBM's position that the OS did not matter, it was about the hardware so IBM licensed the OS from MSFT instead of buying it outright.
That left the door wide open for knock offs (enter Toshiba) that ran the same OS as IBM's boxes and by extension the same applications.
The rest as they say is history.