Its been Microsoft's strategy since its formation to make a lot of proprietary technology when it moves into any space and do so in a way that locks customers in such that if and when it is no longer the top product the customers can't easily leave. They do this in every single product and market they operate in. Where they can't ultimately win they buy their competitor and integrate the product then slowly kill it.
It is important to remind people of this, because they imagine that MS is integrating open source projects like git, linux, and others for the goodness of their heart. It's well know that this is just step 1 of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Next step (underway) is to add many features that will work only under the MS ecosystem and finally declare those original tools as legacy that should not be allowed in corporations.
They even do that with ISO C. They claim that portable functions like strlen are deprecated and insecure, and their recommended replacements are MSVC-specific.
I don't think anyone is under the impression that Microsoft is integrating with projects like git or linux out of the goodness of their heart. They do it for the exact same reason anyone does - thats were users/customers are, and they want to make money from them. This isn't some evil conspiracy, it's just normal boring ways to build products for people.
Microsoft is never looking for normal, boring ways to build products. A software company does't get much ahead thinking like this. They're using their old and successful strategy of embracing, extending, and extinguishing.
Honestly, having worked on Excel at Microsoft (though pretty far from the file format and a long time after OOXML was introduced), I'm pretty sure that the structure of OOXML is convoluted because it was easier to align with the data structures used by the app.
. . . being a savvy businessman is a con man? There's loads to criticize about MS in the 80s and 90s, but buying DOS fair and square and then building an ecosystem around it was just a good business move. The stuff they got sued and almost broken up over is the sketchy part.
The point that he's a con man is that he signed a document with IBM to supply an OS when he had none. Of course in retrospect he was "smart" to go around and buy one, but in fact he was promising IBM something he didn't have and in an alternate universe he could be sued for that.
If I order a new car, it may well not exist yet. The deal is that there will be a car on hand at some agreed upon date. I don’t think Gates did anything more illegal than the analogous car deal. More risky, perhaps, but that’s another thing entirely!
It's unethical to sell someone something if there are hidden risks. You wouldn't knowingly order a car from a company that tells you they know how to make cars but doesn't actually have the experience.
Maybe IBM was informed and understood the risk, but from what I've read about it Gates was less than forthcoming about what Microsoft actually had.
IF you order a car from an unknown company, you might get lucky and it turn out to be Lamborghini in 1963 but it also might turn out to be Aptera Motors in 2004.
However, Microsoft knew that a small company named Seattle Computer Products had developed an operating system similar to CP/M called QDOS, for Quick-and-Dirty Operating System. Microsoft suggested to IBM that QDOS could work as the IBM PC’s operating system. IBM asked Microsoft to license and further develop the operating system, which led to the formal contract on November 6, 1980. After the contract was signed, in December 1980 Microsoft would license the QDOS operating system to begin development of the IBM PC version.
New business idea: selling small luxury chairs to big tech CEOs. Subscription service, if they don't pay a million per month, they lose their license to jump over their chair.
