>Microsoft won for one simple reason -- the licensing deal for DOS I think bigger and gutsy move was licensing DOS/Windows to Compaq inspite of IBM not being h

>Microsoft won for one simple reason -- the licensing deal for DOS I think bigger and gutsy move was licensing DOS/Windows to Compaq inspite of IBM not being happy with it. Microsoft could've had an Apple like vertical integration(and immense profits) by making hardware too, but never made PCs. Licensing to PC clones drove the prices of PCs down and made them affordable to a wide swath of the world and helping the Internet come about. If computers cost $3000 like back in the day, adoption would have been quite low. >Microsoft's legendary persistence -- fast following rival products and iterating them until they didn't suck and eventually drove competitors out of business -- would have been fruitless without the dominant position IBM simply handed to Microsoft with the original DOS deal. Sure, but lots of companies have a lot of money to throw around but the difference with Microsoft was they kept at it and waited for missteps from competition while continuously making improvements. Eg. Netscape with the big rewrite http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html or more recently, Sony with the PS3 security issues and Move.