So what? Consumers preferred 1-2-3 to VisiCalc, that's how markets works. Society doesn't have to guarantee anybody a market share if their products are inferior.
It could be argued that without VisiCalc, 1-2-3 might never have existed. After all, besides the development work, VisiCalc had also done all the hard work of creating and validating a new market. If somebody does all that work only to be displaced by someone else who has the benefit of hindsight, what is the incentive for taking big risks?
> Society doesn't have to guarantee anybody a market share if their products are inferior.
Of course not. But it remains true that your original argument doesn't work here.
I imagine you're generally against software patents. So am I. But don't hold up VisiCalc as a poster child for software development without patents, because in the long run it was very much a failure as a product, and the company that sold it went broke, while this might not have happened had they patented it.
