That's not how history happened. Apple was busy shooting itself in the foot as a boutique brand. IBM was not interested in lowering prices. Sun (and SGI for th

That's not how history happened. Apple was busy shooting itself in the foot as a boutique brand. IBM was not interested in lowering prices. Sun (and SGI for that matter) were heavily wed to the workstation and high-end server market. Microsoft (and Intel) by careful work made it possible for cheaper hardware to still run a product people wanted, and so create the market pressures you're referring to. They were a pure software company, and used that to enable competition in the hardware market.