It's easy to say they put back "the industry" for years, if we define the industry as chip design, but I think it's just as easy to make a case that they greatly expanded the industry over this time by giving people a platform and OS combo that could continue to run their software from a few years back even after upgrading every component. In my opinion, consumer confidence likely greatly outweighed the other benefits, as it allowed economies of scale to really be reached, and spurred the whole industry forward from the massive demand.
If he thought he couldn't make any money implementing it, that means he didn't think there was a market for it that would return the investment. I think it's entirely possible he created that market by driving adoption until the point where that feature it could be supported.
The question can essentially be flipped, and you can ask why Intel didn't create the hardware with those features initially. The answer is likely that it would have taken more research (if it didn't already exist in much more expensive processors) and would have driven the cost of the processors to the point of not being worthwhile. Is Intel then responsible for setting the industry back by years, because they didn't market a processor they likely could if they took longer and/or charged more?
> The Intel guys offered not only to fully fund the development, but to fully staff it and pay Microsoft for all the bother.
In a world where increasing software complexity or having outsiders contribute a sizable or complex piece of code to your private codebase has no cost in future development complexity or runtime, this might have been purely an upside. In the real world, there's there are other considerations, which is likely why it was rejected. Otherwise, why would anyone turn down free development time? Are we to assume Gates was so capricious as to turn down something this beneficial, or that he had resons we haven't adequately covered yet?
> If someone wants to philosophically believe in rational markets and insightful and honest executives, well, that is a choice they can make.
I don't believe in entirely rational markets and honest and insightful executives, but I do believe in people following what they think that market will do, and in executives that turn down things they think are a bad idea, right or wrong. I'm willing to bet Gates had a lot more information than we do when making this decision, and had his reasons. I think it's possible that he could have been right.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_mode#Operating_syste...
So, here's a thought for ya: MS Excel from back then won't run on anymore, 16-bit apps aren't recognized by modern Windows, etc.
But a .XLS created back then sure will. And lots of business logic is codified in Excel spreadsheets.
I posit that .XLS is a more stable platform than Windows itself.
Here's a thought for you: it actually does run on Windows 10.
In particular, Excel 3 for Windows 3 installs and runs on Windows 10 out of the box. Here's a screenshot on my system[1]
Again, let me emphasize: this is software with a GUI written in 1991 for an OS released in 1990 which just works on Windows 10 in 2018 -- no VM required.
This is the second major release of MSOffice for the PC. The previous release, Excel 2, was running under Windows 2.0, which nobody wants to remember, and which is indeed not supported.
On the other hand, its installer - a DOS program - runs fine because DOS programs still run in windows 10.
The compatibility breaks on 64-bit releases of Windows. But all the major versions are available in 32-bit, which you can run on any hardware you can put the 64-bit version on.
They certainly will run, even if only through emulation or API conversion. In fact, that's probably what modern MS Excel does to old XLS docs, which is convert them to an in memory format that probably more closely resembles The Office Open XML format than the Excel Binary File Format (the extension may or may not change, but the format did).
> I posit that .XLS is a more stable platform than Windows itself.
Well, ignoring that we've drifted quite far from hardware, I would say that Excel (which would be the actual platform, not the container format) is not a general purpose computing platform (at least not a feasible one), not something that necessarily defined what architecture is being used, except tangentially.
Hardware had removed the 640K memory limit - but Windows stuck with it for years afterward. Not for any technical reason, but because they dominated the market, and neither needed to change nor wanted to change - no matter how hard that made things for developers.
I worked with Microsoft guys, and they were very blunt about not wanting to change their working OS code if they didn't need to - so Bill held back the entire industry for years.