> Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was.
This is true, but Microsoft only became the IBM of PC software. Intel became the IBM of processors. Cisco became the IBM of routers. And so on....
IBM was the IBM of everything, and at one point, was twice as big as every other IT company put together. Today's youngsters have absolutely no idea how powerful it was. (And after decades of failure, IBM is still almost a $90 billion company.) Microsoft never had that degree of power.
In the end, IBM's monopoly was split between a lot of different but less powerful companies, each with its own niche. Today, I think, only IBM's mainframe monopoly is left....
They didn't miss the boat, they got on a much earlier boat that wasn't quite going in the right direction. Some better touch screen controls and MS would have had the iPhone a decade earlier.
Totally:
"As it happened, Gates's mother sat on the same charity board as IBM's chairman. She got IBM to talk to Gates with the promise of an OS for their underwhelming PC (which was nothing two kids in a garage couldn't have come up with – in fact, it perpetrated many of the flaws of the Apple II, which for its flaws was still very innovative for the time). Gates didn't have an OS, so sent IBM to talk to Gary Kildall of CP/M fame, but Kildall was not prepared to talk to IBM, so IBM went back to Gates. Gates was friends with the chairman of Seattle Computer Systems, who he convinced to sell him the OS for $50,000 – that bit is accurate. Gates did bluff IBM, but he then bought QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System from SCS." [1]
Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat.
Regarding Windows NT, its interesting to note who Dave Cutler [3] was (one of the designers of DEC's OpenVMS, and a UNIX hater). Windows NT put a dent in the UNIX server market because it was a cheap alternative running on commodity hardware (the happy Wintel marriage), but in the end it was *BSD and Linux (or GNU/Linux) which replaced UNIX and partly Windows NT as Linux dominates the server market.
> [...] so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben [...]
Andy Rubin.
[1] http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.htm...
[2] No source here, I'd just like to note its Apple iPod which created a cash cow for Apple. Its what caused the momentum (and cash) for Apple to start the iPhone.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler