David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But Bill saw something that no one else did. I don't know if it was directly in exchange in the negotiations, but the other lever that he saw, that he pulled was Microsoft retained the rights to own DOS and to own their languages and license it and them to anyone else they wanted at any price on any terms. It's so interesting, because what ended up happening that Bill Gates masterminded was once we distribute our operating system through IBM's PC, that's going to become the thing everyone buys. Now, in the 16-bit generation, when there are people building programs for computers, not just developers, once those application developers who are writing programs are targeting an operating system, then that is the operating system that every other OEM, every other computer maker is also going to want and really need, and we're going to be the ones that they have to come to to buy it. I can't figure out, did IBM miss this fact? Or did they know it? Basically, what IBM did was they were the one place where every business needed to go for their computer needs. What they did in this negotiation was they actually handed that over to Microsoft. They said, we are going to become a commodity, just like every other hardware manufacturer, and you are going to be the point of integration for the whole ecosystem. You're going to be the linchpin that everyone has to target for their applications.…

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