I agree with you completely that IBM screwed up bigtime with the PC, and that this was one main reason they did not capture the PC market (they were far too busy with mainframes and other much higher margin machines). I'm sure you remember the IBM PCjr, what a joke that was.
That's not necessarily at odds with my point, which is that even though IBM saw the PC as small fry, they could have and would have crushed their competitors in that industry anyway, simply to remove the threat. And they would have tried to do just that had the government not been crawling all over them for supposedly monopolistic and unfair practises.
The original IBM PC was built with the Intel 8088 chip and MS DOS. IBM's usual policy would have been to build the chips and operating system in-house, or at least to buy the companies making the chips and operating systems (Intel and Microsoft). The guys at IBM who built the IBM PC wanted to make a machine that was not brain-dead and wanted to build it quickly. They knew that if they used IBM parts, the IBM PC would have been over-priced and under-powered, and so they used Intel and Microsoft and the rest is history. But this type of independence was against IBM's usual corporate policy, and would not have been allowed had IBM not been worried about the government. Furthermore, after the PC became established and clones started cropping up all over the place, IBM started suing these companies and trying to put them out of business by moving the PC market onto proprietary IBM standards. It didn't work. My belief is that IBM would have tried a lot harder had they not been worried about the government lawsuit. And that's not just my opinion. Bill Gates said the same thing on several occasions. That's why he was so worried. In his senate testimony, Gates said that IBM could have crushed Microsoft any day with OS/2 when Microsoft was just learning to walk with Windows. In another interview, he said that one reason IBM didn't do it was fear of government regulators.
Now all this relates to Microsoft in the following way: Whether you believe Microsoft engaged in unfair practises or not, you may agree with me that they have recently been nicer to their competitors (the love-fest with Apple comes to mind) because of their worry about the government, and the similarity with IBM is in that. So just as the government lawsuit against IBM forced IBM to put away some of the nastier weapons and practises in their arsenal, I think the lawsuit against Microsoft is having the same effect.
Have a nice day (Egad is it ever gray in New York today)
Logos |
