Apple's mistake in not licensing the Mac OS...

OK, it's already been slashdotted. But it's such a great post that I'm pointing to it too.

This idea has been repeated so often by so many sources that today, most people, even Mac users, simply take it at face value: If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh, they could have been Microsoft.

But this is not a fact. It’s conjecture, and barring a time machine, it can never be proven. But even if you could go back to 1984 and show Apple’s then-executives a glimpse of the future and the Mac’s eventual market share — merely “licensing” the Mac very likely would not have made a difference. In fact, in an alternate universe where Apple had licensed the Macintosh or Mac OS in the mid-80s, things could have ended up worse for Apple, as in bankrupt-and-out-of-business worse. [Daring Fireball]

This is a very strong, fact-based and very rational analysis.

The key point is that at the time, licensing the Mac OS wouldn't have been enough. Diskettes weren't big enough to hold the necessary code that Apple supplied in hardware via the Mac ROM, screens were character-based, and generally, PC's just couldn't run anything remotely like the Mac OS. They were able to run MS-DOS and other simple character-based OS's. If Apple really wanted to compete by licensing, they would have had to market something like MS-DOS, most logically something based on the Apple II, and not very much like the Mac.

This is an important article, in my opinion, for understanding what did and what could (or could not) have happened in the evolution of the computer industry in the 1980's.