I completely agree with the advantages of open vs closed system when it comes to technology proliferation and participation. That is exactly why the PC took over and Mac did not.
But I disagree about the market building and the rest. In 1984 Apple was by far the largest PC maker. And they had a foothold in schools, businesses, etc. Had Steve Jobs not been so greedy and such a control freak, Apple could have easily taken over the whole industry. IBM's primary contribution was twofold: (1) They created a semi-open standard that guided everyone and prevented every clone vendor from marching to its own drummer. (2) They added *some* aura of legitimacy for some bigger businesses that it was ok to invest in the PC.
But IBM did not create the market and was not necessary for it. The PC was going to take off with or without IBM. When IBM tried to fix their mistake by creating PS2 and OS2 in 1987 ('88?), they utterly failed. The industry moved on without IBM and eventually IBM exited that business all together.
As for Microsoft, much has been written about the inadvertent transfer of power from IBM to Microsoft. It happened b/c at its core, IBM did not believe in the PC and never expected it to take over the world like it did. Otherwise they would not have scrambled to license a glorified loader as the operating system and would have actually written an OS for the PC. It's not as if IBM didn't have expertise in writing operating systems. They just didn't think it was worth their while. But that is all water under the bridge now.
One key difference between Tesla/Musk and Apple/Jobs is that Tesla actually innovated and built its tech and Musk is a hands on technical person, whereas Apple "borrowed" pretty much everything from everyone and Jobs would not be able to do zip in an engineering team if his life depended on it...Woz was the engineer, Jobs was sales and marketing and managerial.
But that is mostly immaterial. The business dynamics of Tesla vs the big automakers is pretty much the same as Apple vs IBM and we are in 1984. And the other newly funded pure EV makers (LI, NEO, LCID, etc) are like PET, Commodore, Tandy, etc. |
