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Back then every big company was doing this, or attempted to do this. The goal was to dominate the desktop and get as much grip on the end user as possible. Proprietary file formats for just about everything. Remember Desqview (by QuarterDeck)? DR DOS? GEM (also DR)? OS/2 (IBM)? NetWare (Novell)? All those companies did what Microsoft was doing with one small difference, they stopped at the OS or Desktop layer and never saw beyond that, to the applications. They saw the system as the ideal place to dominate and they set themselves up for being slaughtered.

The combination of dominating two or more levels is what made it lethal, OS/GUI/Application companies aplenty back then but only one company that did them all and that used its own internal knowledge in order to make life very hard for the competition. And the final key in the lock was the Application level and nobody that made it big in the systems sphere ever got there besides Microsoft.

Microsoft may have lost their anti-trust lawsuit but the damage was done and it won them the war until the web came along.

If Sir Tim should be remembered for anything at all it was for breaking the stranglehold Microsoft had on personal computing, freeing us from the Application level headlock.

Oh, and in my time we didn't have walking sticks.

[jodrellblank]

But you did have conspiracy theories. Politics, idiocy, decisions from above, spec from contracts, engineering idealism, planning for things which didn't happen, technical limitations, stuck with previous design choices, inexperience...

Proprietary file formats - what happens when you don't set out to make a shared format, or an evil plot for lock-in and dominance? You decide.