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Bill Gates Reveals Secret of Microsoft's Success
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Gates, in a interview with the BBC, revealed the secret of Microsoft's success: 'Most of our competitors were very poorly run. They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together,' said Gates. 'They did not think about software in this broad way. They did not think about tools or efficiency. They would therefore do one product, but would not renew it to get it to the next generation.' Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation, has a different view: 'Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving. I'd like to smoke what he's smoking.' Gates also said that he took a 'conservative balance sheet approach' to running Microsoft explaining that he wanted 'great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do.'"
IBM PC compatible operating systems.
How can you have a monopoly over a market you create ?
Other companies tried to compete with far superior products, but had their contracts dry up when Microsoft enforced per-processor liscensing.
Clearly they weren't "far superior", or customers would have preferred them.
If a company did choose to go with DR-DOS, MS would dump MS-DOS on the market at below market prices to lock out the competition.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about the timeframe when "IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly", not 7 years after that when DR-DOS was released.