Apple Computer
Nearly a hundred years later, a similar situation played itself out on the desktop battlefield between rival computer operating systems made by Microsoft and Apple Computer. In the early 90's, Apple's elegant Macintosh operating system enjoyed a clear technological lead over Microsoft's early Windows 3.0 PC product, which was at best a feeble copy of the Macintosh OS. With such a clear difference between them, Macintosh supporters expected consumers to embrace the new devices wholeheartedly, leaving clunky PC's behind. However, against the objections of some within the company, Apple priced their computers at a premium, pricing no offerings at the level of their PC counterparts. Rather than growing their market share by making inexpensive machines or licensing their operating system to clone manufacturers (which they eventually did too late), Apple executives gleefully followed slogans such as "fifty-five or die", referring to the demand for a 55 percent profit margin by then Apple-France president Jean-Louis Gassee.

In the long term, this strategy would prove shortsighted, as the lower price of PC's helped solidify their dominance in the market, allowing history to repeat itself. In the same way the Model T helped drive innovation in internal combustion engines, the dominance of the PC helped drive and fund development of PC-specific peripherals, software, and even the operating system itself. As a result, PC's and Windows have steadily improved in the years since, to the point that technological superiority on either side is an arguable point, something unthinkable just a decade earlier. Today, while Apple still maintains a small loyal following, it now has no reasonable hope of unseating PC's running Windows, and the once real hope of capturing the dominant position in the desktop computer market has long since faded.

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