| Later. Not then. In 1977, the "trinity" of dominant home computers was the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, and Microsoft was a tiny startup. Microsoft didn't enter the OS space until 1980 - before that they sold and licensed BASIC interpreters, and they were small enough that Commodore/Tramiel infamously managed to buy a fixed price (single payment) license that they hung onto for many years to avoid having to negotiate a new deal for newer versions. They got in the region of $50k or something like that. In 1980 they licensed Unix and launched Xenix. It was first in 1981 PC DOS/MS DOS made its appearance. At that point they had only 100 employees. By 1983, Microsofts revenue finally reached $55 million. In 1981 Commodore saw an explosion in their unit sales with the VIC-20, while Apple milked far higher revenue per unit instead. For comparison to MS $55m in 1983, Commodore had revenues of $125 million in 1980, $186 million in 1981 and $681 million in 1983, before reaching its all time peak of $1.2bn in 1984 (they exceeded $1bn again once more in 1990) Apple had $118 million in revenue in 1980 and $1.51B in 1984. It was first towards the end of the 1980's that Microsoft became dominant. |