That's what happens when your primary business model is selling to the military. They had to pay what IBM charged them (within a small bit of reason) and it was incredibly difficult for them to pivot away from any path they chose in the 80's once they had chosen it.
However, that same logic doesn't apply to consumers, and since they continued to fail to learn that lesson now IBM doesn't even target the consumer market given that they never learned how to be competitive and could only ever effectively function when they had a monopoly or at least a vendor lock-in.
