The first home computers in the early eighties were all about home programming.
There were many games also for children but it was all about home programming and they all used basic in one form or another - simple language, resembles plain English.
MS jumped into the game sometime in 1985 with microsoft basic, the grand father of vb6.
At the same time the Russians, still under communism, were frowning over all this. Computers outside our glorious Soviet intitutes ? People doing what they like ? You do know of course that if you were a student and you wanted to photocopy some notes it needed a permit from the party. The ideas of the Soviets failed of course and the collapse of their system was not far.

Now microsoft after the turn of the century they changed their mind:

Why home computing ?
Why stable products when we can kill them and buy new ones ?
Who cares about the programmers if their pressure of work does not allow them to learn all the ms new tools ?
Who cares about the clients of those programmers if their software becomes icompatible ?

Remember Vista ? Bugs-incompatibilities allover the shop (but thankfully vista died soon).

The new idea is to make everything fee based.
You don't buy a program noww and it's yours.
You need to pay annual fee and of course microsoft are not the only ones who do that.
Office for example. You no longer buy it and that's it. I have killed it of course in favour of open office.

In short the computer market slowly transformed into microsoft market and affiliates.
Everything is to be dictated from above, consumer needs - everything.
Why should you, as a medium sized computer firm sell the machine and the os for 500 buks and your particular business software product for 1500 ? That's criminal and big mamma knows it !