[pravda]

You've got it backwards. He is right and you are the one who is wrong. Sorry.

You really thing IBM thought, "wow, we are making so much money with these PC things ... better turn them into a commodity so our profit margins will go away!"

I forget how much the original XT cost, something like $2K or so? The margins on that must have been incredible.

[pjmorris]

I'm with Thomas_Lord... IBM's PC division took a radically open stance with the PC market. I remember being astonished to see the circuit diagrams in the IBM 5150 Technical Reference manual, but understood the point to be that IBM wanted to make it easy to build compatible hardware and software. They reversed their stance - and lost their leadership - with the second-generation MicroChannel and PCjr architectures, largely due to the profit margin problem you identify.