They were all dependent on luck and outside circumstances. Without Bill's mother's connections that got him in the door at IBM, Microsoft may've never been anyt

They were all dependent on luck and outside circumstances. Without Bill's mother's connections that got him in the door at IBM, Microsoft may've never been anything more than a blip. Without the gross indifference to search pre-Google (Y! focused on being a "web portal", not search results), Page/Brin may've just been starving grad students that eventually found a semi-OK job in academia. Most blatantly, if Jobs didn't have a passive engineer like Woz to co-opt, he would've been just another self-centered burnout.