I'm so interest about microsoft history, how they can be so success and what make them become a super power company. So i seaching on the internet and found some interesting info. I just wanna share this article to u all.
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In the late 70s a number of individuals and companies were making and distributing home computers. Nobody can honestly say that they predicted back then, just how pervasive home computers (or Personal Computers as they have come to be known) would become.
IBM noticed this phenomenon, and saw it as a way of impressing upon small business just how plain good IBM machines are - the original IBM PC was made of steel, I've got one if you're into lifting weights...
The BIOSbootscreen The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is a chip inside your PC which takes control of the machine as soon as you switch it on. It does a quick memory check, finds the hard disk, and starts booting the Operating System.
IBM wanted other companies to be able to make plug-in expansion cards for the IBM PC, but wanted to be the sole manufacturers of the PC itself. So they published the source code to the BIOS, which meant that everyone could see exactly how the BIOS worked (which would be necessary for 3rd party manufacturers to build expansion cards), but licensed it under a license which forbade duplication or imitation. This was a pretty smart move - the BIOS is essential for a PC to be a PC, and it took about two years before a clone was on the market. A company called Ajwad set up a team, and showed them IBM's source code to the BIOS (these people, having seen IBM's code, could not now write their own BIOS). This team then wrote up, from IBM's source code, a detailed functinal specification, stating exactly what an IBM-compatible BIOS would be required to do.
A second team, who had never seen IBM's code, and were therefore under no obligation to IBM's agreement, took this document created by the first team, and wrote their clone. This cost around $1m at the time, because they not only had to do the work, they had to ensure that it was fully and provably documented that they had strictly followed this "clean room" method, and therefore not broken the agreement with IBM.
This is seen as perfectly valid competetive practice under our capitalist system.
DOS - the Disk Operating SystemIBM did a deal with a small company called Micro Soft to produce the Operating System for their PC. As already mentioned, nobody predicted the huge growth of the PC market, so IBM didn't pay too much attention to the details of the deal. IBM could distribute DOS with their PCs, paying Micro Soft a royalty for every copy sold. Micro Soft, however, could also sell DOS independently of IBM.
In the early days, before Award reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS, everything went as expected - IBM built machines, shipped them with DOS, and application developers wrote applications such as word processors and spreadsheets, to run on DOS. Now that anyone could make a PC clone, they also needed to license DOS from Micro Soft.
Of course, these new PC clone manufacturers could have used the alternative CP/M operating system, or developed their own, but during the time Award had been reverse-engineering the BIOS, certain applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 had become "killer apps" - that is, people were buying PCs just to run Lotus 1-2-3. Since Lotus 1-2-3 was written to make use of features offed by both the IBM BIOS and DOS, these customers also needed DOS. Not because it was better than anything else, and not because customers were explicitly asking for DOS, but because customers wanted Lotus 1-2-3, and that depended on DOS.
The deal with IBM for the distribution of DOS was probably the smartest thing Microsoft have ever done.
Source : http://steve-parker.org/articles/microsoft/
