A closer look
International Business Machines, better known as IBM, made one of the most spectacularly terrible economic decisions in corporate history in 1980 by allowing a young Bill Gates to retain the licensing rights to the MS-DOS operating system. IBM executives smugly believed that the real money in personal computing would always be in selling the physical hardware, viewing the software as just a minor secondary feature. Microsoft eagerly agreed to provide the operating system for a flat fee while keeping the right to license it to other computer manufacturers. This colossal miscalculation allowed Microsoft to monopolize the entire software industry, turning Gates into the richest man on the planet for decades while IBM slowly faded from absolute tech supremacy into a boring consulting firm that mostly just sells highly expensive enterprise solutions that nobody actually understands
