You make the common assumption that success is caused by property, rather than by the most important criterion of “right place at the right time”. It would not

You make the common assumption that success is caused by property, rather than by the most important criterion of “right place at the right time”. It would not surprise me at all that in an alternate universe, the exact same language was released a mere six months later, and was forgotten into obscurity. Microsoft is undeniably the giant it is today largely because at that exact moment IBM needed a cheap operating system for it's line of personal computers and that Bill Gates' parent at the time worked for IBM and could arrange that deal certainly also helped. The success of many giant companies can be traced to a pivotal event that was sheer dumb luck — for FedEx, this event was actually gambling in a casino with what money they had left when they were close to bankruptcy.