[Locomotive Breath]

Apple made it very difficult to be a developer, IBM practically begged you to develop and share.

And now IBM is a dominant force in the PC software market.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but MS in it's own way is just as closed of a system as Apple. IBM's big screwup was in thinking that the profit was in the hardware and not worrying about the software which let MS capture and hold a virtual monopoly.

[Sunnyflorida]

IBM tried to compete with MSft with OS/2. It was decent but was hung up on having to play nice with the mainframe biz. MSFT also arm twisted the system builders into signing an agreement that said if they shipped any PC with windows they had to ship all PCs with windows. This meant all PCs came with windows for “free” but you had to pay extra for OS/2 or any other OS.