IBM made a monumental miscalculation by publishing the entire schematic, the BIOS listing and other technical documentation to the personal computer, thinking manufacturers would use this to make peripheral cards to support the PC. Instead, a number of companies used this information to make PC clones.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Maybe, but would everyone have a PC now, if they hadn't done that?
IBM clones only took off because they were cheap. At the time and for a good 10 or so years, they were well behind most other platforms and were generally poor value for money.
The clones had a lots of issues. One being the ISA bus timing specs which they could not really meet because the limits were not properly defined. All users could hope for was "100% IBM Compatible" in the clone advertisements, and even then there were sometimes problems.
Most of the early clone motherboards Hong Kong and Taiwan lacked signal quality testing in design, ICT, safe ESD practices and used poor quality components. So IBM did very well for quality until around the mid 90's when Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers in particular had improved greatly to the point where IBM started sourcing their Aptiva motherboards from these vendors. Also, Dell, HP, Compaq and Gateway were looming as strong competitors.
I actually developed and implemented the electronics testing hardware and software for the first PC plant in China, as part of an IBM-China joint venture in Tianjin in 1989 through to 1991. At this time, I felt it was the beginning of the end for PC's being manufactured in the West.
FOOTNOTE: I had to give the US ambassador James Lilley a tour of the Tianjin production line but the GPIB driven hipot tester had failed about two hours before his visit. I quickly put a jump in my code written in 8086 assembly language to ignore the error and act as if it were passing. As he did the tour, I told him the machine is designed to put 1760 VDC between active/neutral tied together and earth, to test for earth leakage. As I was "testing" it, he asked me "Is that what this is doing now?" Sweating like a pig, I answered, "That is what it is
designed to do." As I said this, he was looking at the needle on the hipot tester meter that had not moved. I suspect he knew.
