" It seems to me that some of them were working/owning Digital Research at one time."
Yep- here:
http://www.maxframe.com/idr.htm
Digital Research
Digital Research Family Members
Digital Research had developed a graphic interface called GEM Desktop in the mid-1980's. It was fairly neat but never really got much attention. Then, most desktop computers were still running DOS/MS-DOS, so they were limited in both memory and hard drive capability. A 10-meg hard drive was a luxury.
Windows didn't really catch on until version 3.0 around 1991. By then, more offices were converting to desktop computers.
The big problem in the late 80's and early 90's was format compatibility among software programs. For example, the common use wordprocesssors were Multimate, Wordstar, and WordPerfect. MS-Word was a late starter. Offices demanded the ability to convert from one format to another. Even so, during the next few years, the shakeout occurred. Wordstar couldn't seem to gravitate to a GUI interface. It died. Multimate was too complex to operate. It died. WordPerfect was the grand master, but it sold to Novell and a couple of other entities who let it die. MS-Word became the predominate wordprocesser by default.