MikeB said:
To me, it is all very straight forward. Whilst PC's were a great machine to own, until Microsoft came along, they were not user friendly to the majority of the users. Microsoft allowed people to easily access PC's to do regular work as well as more complex.
MSDOS was very bad, it was a direct CP/M rippoff (even down to the source codes), it was the most handicapped and limited OS I've ever used.
MSDOS is at the core of Microsoft's success, they already were dominant within the market during this era, well before Windows 1.x became popular for home usage.
IMO the reasons for Microsoft's success.
1) IBM choose for MSDOS for their computers despite better options existed. IBM unlike Microsoft was a big name back then, especially amongst businesses. Better options like QNX existed, but may have been too expensive considering usage (mainly brainless on and off activity at factories and such).
IBM thought there wasn't a market for PC home usage, later on of course they were unhappy giving this might to Microsoft when the clones arrived. It was too late to launch their own operating system OS/2.
2) More user friendly and powerful systems like the Amiga, Atari ST, Acorn, Apple, etc existed. But they were more expensive and overkill for simple tasks.
3) More advanced versions of applications like Word Perfect were discontinued for the Amiga (Window controlled, Copy & Paste, multitasking enabled, etc). Instead Word Perfect as well as a non multi-tasking version of Lotus 1-2-3 were exclusively available for MSDOS, these were market leading applications at the time.
People wanting to continue their work at home would pick a MSDOS PC to run Lotus and/or Word Perfect. No matter more advanced software existed, other apps were not compatible with those used at work.
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