The commercial success of the IBM PC, first sold in 1981, marked a major shift in the industry by downsizing the computer and its cost and making it available for individual use at home and at work. Technological advances in user-friendly software and powerful micro-processing semiconductor chips also made the PC efficient in creating files, documents, and databases and its use spread rapidly among professionals, office workers, and students who had relied on the typewriter. Microsoft became the main beneficiary of this transition even though it did not develop but instead purchased the technology for the operating system (OS) software that IBM leased for its PC. In the partnership, Microsoft’s management, unlike its counterpart at IBM, understood that software controlled the computer, and the PC with applications programs like word processing would commercially supplant the bigger mainframe machine. The mainframe was also a stand-alone machine that did not share its processing power with other computers. This changed with the spread of the desktop computer especially at research and development (R&D) firms where work on technical projects was conducted simultaneously by engineering teams. Such efforts could be accelerated if the machines were networked allowing information and work to be shared among members of the team. To advance the time-sharing of computing power, Sun Microsystems introduced the first networked work station − a more powerful PC − in 1982 adding to the flexibility and utility of desktop computers (Southwick, 1999). These attributes resulted in a major shift of marketing power from hardware manufacturers of large computers like IBM and DEC to software developers like Microsoft and assemblers of PCs like Compaq which acquired DEC and its Alta Vista search engine in 1998 (Steinmuller, 1996).