Actually your history is flawed....
When the IBM PC came to market it was a novelty. No one would consider buying one except as such. What brought the PC to acceptance was the "killer app". Maybe you guys were not around when corporations began buying PCs to do one thing and one thing only: Lotus 123. The finance manager's dream come true. And since the finance managers in large part have control of the purse strings and they WANTED lotus do finally be able to do a financial spreadsheet on something better than a 13 column pad, they were buying PCs like hotcakes.
Lotus was the killer app that made the PC attractive to corporate buyers.
As far as the clone market, IBM countered it with micro-channel architecture. IBM's gambit to keep some propreitary control in the marketplace. IBM, in their usual arrogance, was counting on the IBM logo to maintain dominance in the market, failing to realize the commodity aspect of the clone PC market. No one cared what the logo was as long as it ran Lotus 123 and they could buy it cheaper, which made it even easier to get PCs into the hands of managers who would be able to provide finance with their spreadsheets.
Then along came cheap PC based word processors, compared to dedicated word processing machines that were still costing 12,000.00. So buying a 3,000.00 PC with 500.00 word processing software became killer app number 2.
PCs represented computing independence from stuffy, "Big Iron", centralized computing control IT departments, allowing management to get their hands on something that worked, right now.
So, partially your history is correct. But the reason PCs dominate the landscape is not becuase of Microsoft or IBM, but the credit has to go to Mitch Kapor at Lotus for marketing the "killer app" that made it economically attractive.
Forget about the fact that VisiCalc or SuperCalc may have been "superior" products in the spreadsheet arena. Marketing still wins every time.
