Bundled Out by The Fishbowl

fishbowlDOTpasticheDOTorg:

...

Blaming Ballmer for the woes of Microsoft, though, misses the fact that every problem the company is experiencing today was written into its DNA in the 1980s.

In 1980, IBM were looking for an operating system for the IBM PC, their entry into the nascent personal computing market. When attempts to license CP/M from Digital Research stalled, IBM went to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't have an operating system so they licensed a CP/M work-alike originally called QDOS (literally “Quick and Dirty Operating System”), filed down some of the more jagged corners and licensed it on to IBM.

Not long after, seeing the success of the IBM PC, a company called Compaq realised that there was a market for “PC Compatible” computers. The only two parts of the PC that weren't off-the-shelf hardware were IBM's proprietary BIOS (which Compaq engineers reverse-engineered), and the PC-DOS operating system, which Microsoft was happy to start selling to third parties as MS-DOS.

DOS wasn't the best PC operating system. It wasn't even a particularly good one. All that mattered is that it was the operating system on the IBM PC, and then on the “PC Compatible” clones.

Microsoft did not make its mark as a builder of great things, but as a very successful bundler of good-enough things.

Microsoft built its empire making products that complemented DOS, and that would eventually become symbiotic with DOS so that each would ensure the others dominance. Microsoft then used its monopoly position to exert absolute control over the channel that delivered those products to customers. I’ve heard a first-hand accounts of Microsoft’s ruthless dealings with OEMs in the DOS era, and they’re even worse than you think.

Eventually by the mid-90s an argument could be made that Microsoft was making the best PC software in its class. Not because it had suddenly found the ability to develop cool, innovative products, but because everyone else was dead. This was the ‘golden era’ that most modern-day pundits seem to be hearkening back to: the two great serpents of Windows and Office, each with its jaws eternally locked on the other’s tail; Microsoft the victorious monopolist.

...

via TheLoop