Nope, Microsoft and Apple didn’t just sell GUI. They built an entire solution for a problem around GUI. And even then, they made their money elsewhere. Apple on hardware and Microsoft on enterprise licensing of a full end to end stack of almost everything a person would need. They did so much they got sued for antitrust because of how many fucking pies they were trying to shove themselves in. To call Microsoft and Apple success as “GUI companies” means that you would have no idea what an AI company is. Certainly it won’t be ones developing the basic platform then.

Companies selling GUI toolkits in the 90s are all dead. No company made money on selling “GUI” as a technology. No one called Microsoft and Apple “the GUI companies”