In the autumn of 1980, a twenty-four-year-old Bill Gates sat across from executives at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, New York, and executed a maneuver that would redefine the mechanics of the modern economy. IBM was racing to launch its first personal computer, the 5150, and they needed an operating system. Gates didn't have one. Instead of building a proprietary system from the ground up—a task that would have taken months of engineering—he purchased the rights to a system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for roughly $50,000. He renamed it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM. Crucially, he insisted on a non-exclusive contract. This allowed Microsoft to license the same software to every other hardware manufacturer on the planet.

The technical merits of MS-DOS were, by most contemporary accounts, unremarkable. It was a functional, utilitarian tool that lacked the elegance of the systems being developed at Xerox PARC or the nascent Apple Computer. However, by hitching his wagon to IBM’s global sales force and supply chain, Gates ensured his software would be pre-installed on the most trusted hardware in the world. By 1990, Microsoft’s operating system was running on 90% of the world’s personal computers. The lesson for the modern creator is stark: the product was the variable, but the distribution was the constant.