AIUI, what happened with Apple vs IBM is that Apple had a good foothold with either the Apple II or the Mac in the home market, while IBM had the business market sewn up. IBM wanted to enter the home market, but realised that by the time they'd designed something from the ground up, Apple would be well on the way to having an unassailable share of the market. So IBM had to get something to market quickly, which meant buying components from other manufacturers (Intel chips and whatnot) and only writing their own code for a small part of it. One session in the cleanroom later and someone (Compaq, IIRC) had a 100% compatible clone. A good supply of the off-the-shelf components and it's "Hallo clone!"
This means, of course, that all the hardware manufacturers designed for the PC, because it was relatively open. Apple wouldn't let anybody build a clone or compatible for *years* - I remember them suing a manufacturer in the late 90s for it. Consequently, the PC compatible market became flooded with product, leading to growth. Microsoft did a deal with IBM to get MSDOS on the IBM PCs (but that's another story
) and also made it available to the clone market. Hence, MS get a big foothold in the home OS market. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're the "best". The only MS software I run is Windows, and that's only because I'm too lazy to learn to work Linux.
Open source software rocks, however.
Norton: I remember when I was a fledgling geek that you weren't worthy of the name unless you had Norton Utilities on floppy disk.
IMO Norton's problems started c1995 when they sold to Symantec, who took Peter Norton off the box and replaced him with J Random Model. What was worse, however, was what they replaced the contents of the box with...
If it wasnt for Microsoft, we wouldnt all be sitting in front of the computer now. Microsoft made it easy for everybody do use computers. They set standards on how computers should work, everybody used them, and everybody liked them.
Wasn't the Windows Icons Mice Pointers interaction invented by Xerox at PARC?