Microsoft and IBM

Microsoft and IBM

Many people are too new to the computer industry to remember that IBM once occupied the lofty position that Microsoft currently enjoys. Today, it's a Microsoft versus The Rest of the World computer industry. Yesterday, it was IBM versus everybody else.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, because of its size and power, just like Microsoft, IBM took the blame for everything wrong with the computer industry. Like Microsoft, countless articles were written about how evil the company was, and how, if not restrained, it was going to destroy the industry and dominate the world order. In 1986, a book by Thomas DeLamarter, senior economist for the U.S. government, was published with the title "BIG BLUE, IBM's Use and Abuse of Power." Its subhead read "The Truth About IBM's Success and the Ominious Implications of Its Stranglehold on the Information Society."

There was anti-IBM sentiment everywhere. And what seems inevitable when there is absolute power, the government had to step in to keep IBM from taking over the service bureau industry and later to soften Microsoft's heavy-handed licensing.

IBM may have given Microsoft the keys to the kingdom with DOS, but, in so doing, it shed a lot of negative press. In the process of losing control of the PC to Microsoft (as well as Intel), IBM turned itself into something akin to a giant, benign bear that still controls the heart and soul of corporate data processing, but is no longer in the crosshairs of everybody's daily wrath. See Gates & Co., Microsoft, Microsoft trial and IBM.