CP/M - better than MS-DOS? (Score 1)

See below for what MS-DOS could have been, but wasn't. It's an excerpt from Dr. Peter Denning's Book, "The Innovator's Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation, MIT Press (2010)." It shows how Bill Gates, who had an inferior OS ("It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system") but a better business acumen, won out and got rich. "Gary Kildall was the true father of the personal computer operating system. In his PhD research at the University of Washington in the early 1970s, he worked with one of the best-designed operating systems of all time, the Burroughs B5500, becoming thoroughly familiar with advanced concepts such as multitasking and interactive computing. Shortly thereafter, while an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, he acquired one of the new Intel 4004 process control chips for his lab. He soon realized that the 4004 was a general-purpose computer and not just a special purpose chip. He designed an operating system that used a floppy disk as its memory and incorporated the advanced concepts he had learned about operating systems. This program was called CP/M, for “control program, microprocessor”. Intel contracted with him to develop CP/M and an associated portable programming language PL/M, for the 8008 and later the 8080 chips. He started Digital Research, Inc., in Pacific Grove, to market CP/M, which quickly became the operating system of choice in the nascent microcomputer market in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, IBM decided to start its own PC effort and visited the young Bill Gates of Microsoft for an operating system. Gates referred them to Kildall. Kildall was not willing to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreements. Miffed, IBM went back to Gates and decided to use Gate’s DOS, a quick-and-dirty CP/M knock-off. Kildall was infuriated that Gates would try to copy his software without license, but Gates, flanked by a phalanx of IBM lawyers, forced Kildall to back off. It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system. Many people speculate that if Kildall had been more accommodating toward IBM, he would have closed a deal with IBM and he not Gates would be the industry’s magnate. Kildall was clearly an inventor but not a dedicated businessman; his invention made it into a relatively small market, the first PC users. Gates was not an inventor, but he was an astute businessman; he provided an innovative business model that eventually propelled Microsoft to a 90% market share of all PC operating systems. Kildall was the inventor of PC operating systems, Gates the innovator."