[rbanffy]

> Microsoft got lucky, once

To be fair, they got lucky a good many times. They wrote a BASIC interpreter (MITS even paid them to work on that) for the nascent personal computer industry that was mostly there when needed.

Microsoft's BASIC was the first language many of us learned to program in. The other day I solved Google's "are you a programmer" tests using both an Apple //e and a TRS-80 Model III (emulated with MESS). It was nostalgic.

[kenjackson]

I think it might be fair to say that MS has gotten "lucky" more times than probably any other tech company, including Apple. Maybe only IBM has gotten "lucky" more often, but they also have a much longer history.

[rbanffy]

Microsoft didn't have to count entirely on luck - the were also aided by some really incompetent competitors...

I remember shopping for a new desktop PC right after OS/2 2.0 was launched. IBM charged more for a PC with their own OS (even though it included Windows) than for one with Windows alone, the sheer boneheadedness of that baffled me so completely the person on the other side of the phone taking my order thought I hung up. In the end, I forked out the extra US$ 50 or so and got the OS/2 box. The OS was really nice, very advanced for the time.

At that time, running a Unix GUI on a PC was a ludicrous proposition.