IBM licensing software from Microsoft rather than developing their own.
IBM licensing software from Microsoft rather than developing their own.
Microsoft’s failure to see search as an exploitable technology, opening the door for Google, deserves honorable mention too.
Not exactly a company killer. IBM is doing quite well.
A behemoth company like IBM about-facing to dominate a new market, and such a monstrously huge market as personal computers, was a miracle. Its sheer unlikeliness trumps their accidental charity in giving Bill Gates his own mint.
Not that the continued success of Microsoft was made inevitable by its original foothold. That was something else altogether; they easily could have found themselves on the ash heap with countless other pan flashes.
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
— Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.