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Microsoft was the first successful software vendor. They were a little fish in a big pond of massive hardware vendors who thought that software had little intrinsic value. They thought that the value was that the machine could be programmed to do whatever the customer wanted.

Actually, Gates and Jobs were at about the same place at about the same time. If Gates hadn't been there and if Jobs hadn't priced himself out of the market (more or less), 95% of users would run Macs now.

I do not think the lack of Bill Gates would make the big difference.

The computers would be a bit more exclusive (read: expensive) in the beginning, but as Macs got enough momentum (read: market share) the prices would have fallen there too.

Nah, don't glorify Bill Gates. He had a good idea and knew how to use it, but he wasn't by any means alone.

Nalle Berg.
./nalle.

Not true. There was succesful vendors before Microsoft and Microsoft is not the sole succesful vendor to day. Most succesful financially, yes, but not the only one - nor the first.

Companies such as Digital Research, Visicorp, Ashton Tate, Lotus, Borland and MicroPro (to name only a handful) were doing rather well for themselves before Microsoft grew rapidly in the mid-80's.

I don't think he was talking about the computer business as a whole, but really only selling software as a business.

Before microsoft there really wasn't anyone doing it, IBM and Apple sold the whole kit, hardware and software.

"Not really. They weren't the first to go into the computer business."

They didn't go into the computer industry, they went into the software industry, and they did create the blueprint for how proprietary software companies develop and sell software.

"Heck, until Windows, they were just a little fish in a big pond."

Have you ever heard of MS-DOS? MS BASIC for every PET/VIC20/C64/TRS-80/TI-99. their software has been on almost every consumer machine for decades.

CP/M was much more important than MS-DOS until the IBM clone market appeared in the mid-80's.

Due to an early poor decision by Microsoft they also made very little money from their BASIC on Commodore machines, and didn't provide BASIC for machines from Apple, Sinclair and a few other 8bit micro vendors of the time, so although Microsoft BASIC was important, it didn't generate as much money for them as you might have thought.

Microsoft as we know them now didn't appear until the mid-80's and it took them a few years to come up with that "Blueprint" that a lot of people now accept as "Just the way things are". Prior to that they were just another software vendor who happened to have a BASIC you could licence.