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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

And how Bill mom (IBM board member) helped him to win the contract for... IBM, despite better options on the market. Thanks to that we were all rewarded with such gems like Windows 98 ME or Windows Vista.

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Why reason in hypotheticals?

Microsoft has been crucial into bringing compute in people's homes, the evolution of video gaming, the internet etc.

They fluked a lot, they used their advantageous position like most companies try to, but assuming that we would have gotten better alternatives is not a given.

Also, in hindsight was IBM wrong to bet on Microsoft? They sure have done multi hundred billions $ together.

It's not like CP/M was really better. Some of the minicomputer operating systems were but it's not clear they would have been a good fit for the IBM PC and, in any case, companies like DEC and DG wouldn't have been inclined to play in that space--especially for a reasonable price--at the time.

Exactly. "Better options on the market"? Better by whose definition? Certainly not IBM's.

And it's naive to assume that other companies wouldn't have used the same tactics that Microsoft did.

Yes. If you look at the Alto, the Unix OS or the original mac (which itself was a kind of inferior ripoff of the Alto), Microsoft's domination was very much a case of bad products driving out the good and setting back personal computing by decades. Not until Linux, the Internet and the Iphone did we start to get a taste of where most people in the 70s and 80s thought personal computing was headed.

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