Imagine a Microsoft-Free Life

It's interesting to look back on the early days of this industry -- I was around as reporter for the Windows, Word and Office introductions -- and realize how completely everybody, from industry executives to analysts to academics, missed this hidden X Factor in tech.

Twenty years ago, it was generally assumed that whatever company has the most innovative product in a given market won the game. A more nuanced view held that, while innovation won in the short term, marketing (including user support, tools, training, etc.) was the ultimate winner. There was also a vague understanding -- though a few people, like Bill Gates, understood it very well -- that the goal was to have your product become the "industry standard," a term that in those days mostly referred to accepted industry design rules (i.e. IEEE 488, etc.)

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The irony was that examples of the sheer power -- and burden -- of having your product become the industry standard were all around us. And none was greater than that offered by IBM. The IBM 360 mainframe computer had made Big Blue the richest manufacturing company on the planet, more dominant in tech then than any company today. And the penumbra of brand loyalty, compatibility, comfort and sense of inevitability that surrounded the 360 made it easy for IBM to move into, and instantly dominate, any other business it chose to enter, such as minicomputers.

It was, after all, IBM's decision -- the result of a series of unlikely and sometimes curious events -- to adopt the Intel 8088 and Microsoft DOS as, respectively, the central processor and the operating system of the IBM PC that made those two technologies the de facto standards of the emerging personal computing world and ultimately made Intel and Microsoft the most valuable companies of their time.

Why didn't we recognize this in 1982?

One obvious reason is that another unlikely historic conjunction was taking place and we were so busy watching the downside of becoming a standard that it distracted us. Once again, it was IBM: after more than a decade of owning the computing world with the 360, the company managed to transition its users to the follow-up 370 series. But it had been painful, Big Blue finding itself for the first time faced with the issue of legacy -- the vast body of users who had put long hours and huge sums into 360 applications and weren't interested in upgrading to the new generation.