A major plank of Microsoft's corporate strategy has always been to buy products from its competitors, rather than pour resources into home-grown developments. Famously, back in 1980, when IBM was seeking an operating system for its PCs, Microsoft bought q-DOS (a.k.a 'Quick and Dirty Operating System') from developer Tim Paterson for $50,000 and called it MS-DOS. As we all know, MS-DOS licenses subsequently earned Microsoft billions.
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