Tech Nostalgia: Here We Go Again ⭐

As I wrote the article series that became the book Windows Everywhere, I confronted a history I had lived through and, for the early years of that history, had relived many times through books about Microsoft, Windows, and the personal computing industry. This history is full of what-ifs, as is this Tech Nostalgia series, times in which things might have gone quite differently.

Some of this will be familiar to those who remember the earliest days of Microsoft and personal computing. For example, the time IBM wanted to get CP/M for its then-secret first Personal Computer (PC) from Digital Research but failed, triggering a chain of events that led to Microsoft buying a functional clone of CP/M it called MS-DOS, and licensing it to IBM, which named it PC-DOS. And how Apple was inspired to push graphical user interfaces (GUIs) by the work it had seen at Xerox PARC, created the Lisa and then the Macintosh, and partnered on the latter with Microsoft, which of course inspired Bill Gates to push his company to create a GUI for MS-DOS. Yes, there was a lot of inspiration in those days.

Less well-understood, perhaps, is how these seemingly unrelated events intertwined and influenced everything that happened in subsequent years. In partnering with both Apple and IBM, two hardware makers that competed with each other for dominance of this emerging industry, Microsoft was setting itself up to betray one or the other. That it immediately betrayed both isn't coincidental, and these acts provide some insight into the brutal business strategies that Bill Gates brought to bear in our industry. In both cases, Gates saw the future, or at least a future, in which Microsoft could expand its market power and then did.
IBM and Microsoft, IBM vs. Microsoft
The friction that existed between IBM and Microsoft in the 1980s is well-understood, but its roots can be tied to IBM's need to enter the personal computer market quickly because sales of the first home computers were exploding: The TRS-80 was the first of these "toys" to sell over 100,000 units in a year and the Commodore VIC-20 was the first to sell over 1 million units. And so IBM allowed a small team to use an open architecture for its PC and source the parts from outside the company, ignoring its slow-moving and expensive internal processes.

This decision was fortuitous in that it helped IBM do the impossible and get the PC into the market in just one year. But it also made IBM overly reliant on outside partners like Microsoft. And thanks to the unusually business-savvy Microsoft CEO, it perhaps gave away more than it might have otherwise. In addition to agreeing to pay Microsoft a per-unit license for PC-DOS, terms it had previously denied to Digital Research when it was negotiating for CP/M, IBM also allowed Microsoft to license its DOS as MS-DOS to other computer makers, including so-called PC clone makers that undercut IBM in this market.

IBM spent much of the 1980s butting heads with...