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Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus refused. In late 1987, Philippe Kahn said "People are afraid Microsoft is going to take control of the operating system." [1]

Microsoft was afraid that IBM going to take control of the operating system.

Windows 3.0 was enough of a success for Microsoft to intensify it efforts....

[1] http://voteview.uga.edu/gates.html

True up to a point. From at least the early 90s, Microsoft was trying like crazy to get companies to write Windows software instead ;-)

There are probably more bugs in most non-Microsoft applications, it's just that they don't have enough users to find them....

That's not a mystery: it went to license Microsoft Basic, which was the most widely recognized Basic of its day. It dated back to the MITS Altair.

So IBM would have gone to Redmond regardless of Mary Gates.

However, it probably helped with the DOS deal, whereby Microsoft offered to save IBM's operating system bacon. Basic was a known quantity but MS-DOS didn't even exist.

The saying was based on the fact that IBM, like the 7th Cavalry, would ride in to rescue large accounts if they screwed up.

I never heard it said of Microsoft in the 90s because Microsoft was never a big proportion of anybody's spending. It sold to hundreds of millions of consumers and small companies, rather than Fortune 500 companies.

I did once discuss this with one of the Microsoft salesmen who handled giant corporations, and who had been hired from IBM. He said IBM tried to get 33% of a company's IT sending whereas Microsoft tried to get 3%.

It was a scavenger that extracted the remaining value from failing and failed companies.

I'm not saying it was bad for the ecosystem ;-)

However, the Unix business was a huge mess at the time. First, the all vendors were at war with one another, then they divided into two warring camps (SVR4 vs OSF).

While they were busing fighting one another, Microsoft nicked their cheese.....

Update: Of course, Windows NT was designed by the same guy as DEC's VAX VMS, so it's got that in its DNA. Maybe he was thinking of servers as well...

Unfortunately I can't find a list of Windows retail prices, but originally Windows was sold much like an application. That is, it assumed you already had DOS installed.

From what I recall, the official retail was something like $99 and you could pick up a copy for around $80 or so. (Some programs came bundled with a run-time copy of Windows, though you couldn't used that copy with a different application.)

Windows 95 upped the price because Microsoft was charging for both DOS and Windows at the same time. On that basis, something like $200 doesn't sound wrong, and that's around the price Windows has sold at ever since. (Unless, of course, you buy a pre-launch offer.)

Software and hardware prices were generally much higher in the old days, of course.

On stability, I found both NT4 and Windows 2000 to be very stable. With other versions, they were stable if they were correctly set up on decent hardware, you only used Microsoft drivers, you were pretty careful, and you restarted every day.

I could usably run Win98-XP for about week. I would never find out how long I could run NT4 because I was dual-booting it ;-)

Eggs are fragile, but they generally don't break if you handle them carefully. It was much the same with Windows...

Microsoft and IBM started the development of OS/2 because IBM wouldn't support Unix. (Microsoft had the most widely used Unix of the day, in Xenix.) IBM required a proprietary OS and had a long-running war with AT&T.

Microsoft backed OS/2 strongly but sales were, in Bill Gates's word, "dismal". It was a flop. However, Windows was a hit.

Microsoft wanted to go to a 32-bit OS/2 v3, which is what became Windows NT.

IBM had sold tons of 16-bit IBM PC/AT machines and insisted on a 16-bit operating system.

Hence the divorce, where Microsoft kept Windows and got a bundle of cash ($25 million, if I remember correctly). IBM got OS/2 and an ultra-sweet deal on Windows ($9 a copy, if memory serves).

> Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was.

This is true, but Microsoft only became the IBM of PC software. Intel became the IBM of processors. Cisco became the IBM of routers. And so on....

IBM was the IBM of everything, and at one point, was twice as big as every other IT company put together. Today's youngsters have absolutely no idea how powerful it was. (And after decades of failure, IBM is still almost a $90 billion company.) Microsoft never had that degree of power.

In the end, IBM's monopoly was split between a lot of different but less powerful companies, each with its own niche. Today, I think, only IBM's mainframe monopoly is left....

You had to vape your PC to run it.

By contrast, you could pick up a copy of Windows for $40 and run it on top of DOS without losing your DOS software. If you didn't like it, it hadn't cost you much time or money.

And there was a boom in Windows software with lots of cheap programs to try.

Seriously, how would anyone expect OS/2 to win that battle?

SAA tied together all IBM's enterprise systems (except the Unix ones) and it mandated IBM's version of OS/2 on the client.

Some people felt that IBM had sufficient market power to impose it. I assume Lotus did, too. It turned out that IBM was wrong, and Lotus's strategy sank along with IBM's.

OS/2 was part of a strategy to take back control of the PC industry by shifting the whole thing to an IBM-controlled base with PS/2 systems, MCA buses, and the OS/2 operating system.

(Paul Andrews worked for the Seattle Times and Microsoft was his beat. I guess he just had more and better contacts.)

Hard Drive did well because it came out first and filled a big hole in the market. However, Gates was sufficiently better to become a best seller.

> Man OS/2 Warp was going to be AWESOME and than the infighting killed the whole thing. :(

OS/2 Warp was actually the IBM monopoly's last concerted attempt to kill little upstart Microsoft. One of IBM's senior managers at the time told me "We're going to burn Bill's butt."

By that stage, it wasn't infighting, it was war. (The infighting was Microsoft's attempt to get IBM to accept Windows NT as OS/2 version 3.)

As it happened, Microsoft had a very strong ally in Kirkland called ... IBM. Big Blue's PC division was interested in selling PCs and it was selling lots of PCs running Windows. PCs running OS/2 were virtually unsaleable.

Eventually, Gerstner arrived and told the OS/2 guys they'd lost and they should just stop.

Microsoft's original DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan.

It was perfectly possible to run Windows 95 without it crashing. I ran it for around a year before the launch (the Chicago beta) and it was very stable by the end IF you had decent hardware and IF you set it up correctly.

But the PC hardware industry wasn't very well developed in 1995, and there was a huge variation in products that took a while to shake out.

Bear in mind that Windows 95 was running on tens of millions of PCs that had never been designed to run it, and that had never been tested with it. A lot of the ones in the field were almost unique (because of variations in processors, RAM, graphics cards etc), and Microsoft had never seen many of them.

And they got away with it because people could get a PC with a good GUI and masses of compatible software for a very low price.

They were! I think they've shrunk, though that might be an optical illusion... And I can't see a simple way to make them bigger (simple as in: not editing the css file).

You could always try tweeting him. He's also on HN.

In the context of billions of users doing billions of searches, HN readers could be fairly extreme outliers...

Protopage is somewhat similar to Readspike and you can add your RSS feeds of choice.... http://www.protopage.com/

I managed to be a ThinkPad fanboy for decades while despising IBM ;-)

Luckily I didn't buy any of the models that included that feature (and none of them were ThinkPads) or I would have had to run Lenovo's LSE Windows Disabler Tool from https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/gb/en/downloads/ds104370

Either way, the potential for damage wasn't that obvious: it could have happened to any company. (Employees often make commercial decisions without understanding the technical ramifications.)

Also, Superfish said it wasn't its fault: it blamed Komodo's tool. This amounts to a similar type of buck-passing.

I've bought a couple of Lenovo machines since Superfish, mainly because they were fantastic value for money. I also know that if I wasn't happy with the installation, I could download Windows 10 from Microsoft and do a clean installation.