David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…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. I think there are two things going on here, one small and one big. The small thing is actually related all the way back to the beginning of the episode, what you said, Ben, about the antitrust concerns within IBM. To hear them say it, they actually didn't want ownership of the software. They wanted it to be separate because it would look better. Because then they have the plausible deniability of, how could we possibly have a monopoly? We're buying off-the-shelf...…

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