Comment by a-robinson
10 years ago
The author claims that "Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours", but then says that IBM was wrong when they "happily allowed Microsoft to own the OS market".
Wasn't IBM a classic case of not trying to build the layer above them on the stack?
The Wikipedia page on IBM PC DOS even claims that their "radical break from company tradition of in-house development was one of the key decisions that made the IBM PC an industry standard".
Oh IBM tried building it: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-sy...
OS/2 was too little too late - by the time they realised what was going on, Microsoft was already a new major player.
Didn't stop Microsoft from going out of their way to sabotage them, though.
In fact, the history of 32-bit OS/2 is more complex than that, and involved MS a lot more than this. It used to be my favorite topic.