That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else.
Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.
The did because they got in there first, not because nobody else where willing to license theirs, so this is bogus argument. The whole point is that original claim I addressed about Microsoft making computers affordable is based on the assumption that Microsoft somehow provided something unique at the time. They did not.
There's little basis for thinking that if you were to travel back in time and take Microsoft out of the equation, IBM would not have been able to quickly sign a deal with someone else, and that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.
Nonsense. Whether someone else could have exerted a similar downward pressure on the cost of computers does not change that Microsoft did. "Could have" is worth very little.
>that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.
That someone else would have to resist the temptation of making mega billions by tying their software to hardware that they sell at a premium.
I think this is a lot of what people are missing. Microsoft did things differently, and because of that, were successful. Whether or not you agree with their business tactics, their contribution was undeniable.
I don't think anyone here is questioning Microsoft's success. The question is more whether the tactics used by Microsoft to achieve that success (and the consequences of that success for people who weren't Microsoft employees) were admirable or despicable.
I don't think it's binary. They had more than one tactic. Their initial tactics were admirable. Long term, their tactics tended towards despicable. But then again, most large corporations fall down that hole.
Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.