The way to make money in technology,” a young Bill Gates told me in the summer of 1990, “is by setting de facto standards.” It worked, too. For years, Microsoft enjoyed more than 90 percent of the market for several categories of PC software.
The IBM PC may have defined a hardware standard, but IBM contracted the work of supplying an operating system to Microsoft and, in haste or a corporate fit of unconsciousness, permitted Microsoft to sell its software to other hardware manufacturers. The first microcomputers could do nothing without Microsoft’s version of the BASIC programming language.
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