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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally those are excuses based on Microsoft’s current market position.

When they invested in Windows 1.0, their existing users were not asking for it and didn’t have a use for it. MS-DOS wasn’t a good foundation for a GUI, the IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics), and obviously Apple was miles ahead.

The product didn’t fit any of Microsoft’s existing strengths and felt like a toy rather than a credible business tool. By the same logic that’s applied to AR/VR today, Microsoft absolutely should have exited the GUI market in 1988. (They were even a leading Mac software vendor! Why bother making their own worse GUI?)

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It's ok to make short sighted investment decisions based on current market position, especially when one of your biggest bets from the last decade is striking gold in a big way, and you need all hands on deck to reap maximum strategic value during the temporary opportunity window.

In that phase, it makes absolute sense to reduce or cut anything that is not CURRENTLY performing well, in favor of the area that is taking off and needs all the push you can give it. When the gen AI market stabilizes, ideally with Microsoft in a dominant position, it will again be appropriate to diversify bets. That includes pushes for markets where MS can grab 2nd or even 3rd place.

The old Microsoft wasn't so myopic which resulted in not one but two of the biggest software dynasties with windows and office and in more recent times Azure.

You can't get a winner if you leave the game early.

> IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics)

In 1985 it was terrible for games due to no sprites, but business applications run on the Hercules graphics card (monochrome but 720x348) or EGA, which had decent resolution and was way better than the competition for business applications. It had worse color resolution than say the Amiga, but by 1988 the VGA had fixed that as well.

How was it better for business? Text mode?There were plenty of terminals available at that time with better monochrome and color text modes and fonts, even line graphics support. It was about various attractive business software available for PC, not about EGA being superior somehow.

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