THE MAN WHO BEAT IBM

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

How do you kill a monopoly? Give away your secrets to competitors. When IBM tried to reclaim PC control with proprietary technology in 1988, Compaq's Rod Canion turned down exclusive access to IBM's next-gen tech and instead shared Compaq's "clean room" BIOS reverse-engineering method with eight rivals, creating the open standard that broke Big Blue's stranglehold on personal computing.