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by cturner
3956 days ago
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IBM's investment in Linux was political. For decades, IBM's identity was as a platform company. It was becoming a regular loser outside of its enterprise monopoly. It was late to the party on home computing. It created the PC but still lost control of the platform. It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well. Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves. Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle). |
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Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. So non-PS/2 hardware was a lot cheaper, because there were a hundred companies trying to sell it. But that cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 (at least initially).
But when Microsoft was able to keep pace (more or less) with Windows, nobody wanted the PS/2, because Windows on commodity hardware was good enough, and less expensive.