If you look at the software that was being put out in the mid-80s, there's a clear picture of "IBM being IBM" in that it had designed some graphics APIs that wo

If you look at the software that was being put out in the mid-80s, there's a clear picture of "IBM being IBM" in that it had designed some graphics APIs that worked according to their corporate view of what applications needed[0]...and then the market ignored it, and programmed the hardware registers directly. And many of the features make sense in this light as being something designed to the APIs they had in mind, but then otherwise not given much attention or support. A critical part of Microsoft's rise in this era was in grabbing up pieces of market share that the competition had overlooked, and their graphics story with Windows definitely enters into this. GDI didn't have conflicts of interest from being both a hardware and software maker, and so it could focus just on compatibility - a classic example of "worse is better". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manag...