alt Hacker NewsPeople here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:
Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.
The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.
Replies
htrp • today at 6:28 PM
>the original Microsoft business model
From 1981
>Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer,[9][10] hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS 1.10 for US$25,000 that July
No the original Microsoft business model was to get the incumbent (IBM) to bundle your product (DOS, bought from someone else) onto their product so that you had a near-monopoly, then use that to sell your other software onto that, occasionally making technical changes to make it difficult for your competitors.