Many software companies started out on his products, and may not exist today if not for him. The problem the UK had, was there was so many clever people making many different computers, that were incompatible with each other, (the Japonise recognised this and had a standard - MSX I believe, but too little too late).
Lack of standards wasn't a UK thing - in the US, there were Apples, TRS-80s, Ohio Scientific, PETs/C64/VICs and later Amiga (even though those four were all from Commodore they weren't compatible) and dozens more.... and I think that, at that stage of the technology, it was a
good thing to have all that diversity and see all of those different avenues explored. Would machines like the ZX81 and Spectrum have
existed if they'd had to meet standards? Would we have got (say) BBC BASIC (by far the best BASIC implementation of its day, with more structured programming features at one end, and low-level pointers and a built-in assembler at the other) if the standard required MS BASIC compatibility? The downside of standards is that everything gets written for the lowest common denominator.
...and in the 8 bit era, computers
really didn't have processing power to spare on high-level languages and hardware abstraction - anything speed critical had to be done in machine code on bare metal for speed, so an 8-bit standard would basically mean lots of implementations of exactly the same hardware.
What did for the first wave of home/personal computers in the UK was a boom & bust leading to massive over-estimation of demand for the Christmas 1984 sales, leaving a mountain of unsold stock. That wiped out a lot of the also-rans and left Sinclair and Acorn struggling, and needing bail-outs which destroyed their autonomy. Another big 20:20 hindsight "tragedy" was probably that Sinclair tried to produce a higher-end Serious Stuff machine (the QL - a.k.a. "Quite Late") rather than focussing on their strength in the home/games market while Acorn tried to build a lower-end home/games machine (the Electron, a.k.a. "a BBC Micro with all the good bits taken out") rather than beef up the BBC Micro as a Serious Stuff machine (the BBC was already pretty much the UK equivalent of the Apple II).
...I mean, they'd all probably have been bulldozed by the cheap PC clone boom of the late 80s/early 90s (which even Apple only survived by the skin of their teeth) but people weren't buying PCs for home use so much in 1984.
Another hitch was the difficulty of exporting to the US. First, the prices were skewed (US computer makers selling their wares in the always UK crossed off the '$' and wrote a '£' - and this was when the £ was higher
and UK computer prices weren't quoted including 20% VAT) - of course, that doesn't work the other way around so a BBC Micro that is a bit over half the price of an Apple II in the UK is suddenly nudging into the same price bracket in the US. Then, computers of this era all depended on TV output (or TV frequency composite/RGB monitors) and, of course, UK computers were designed for 625 line PAL - so for the US they had to be converted to 525 line NTSC. Now, sell a US computer in the UK and, basic math, 525 lines fits into 625 lines. Go the other way and you're losing the bottom 1/6 of the vertical space on the display... which, for 80s era hard-coded software, often breaks compatibility. Finally, in those days, nobody in the UK had got round to setting rules for radio interference from home computers (changed now) whereas the rotten folk at the US FCC thought you ought to be able to listen to a FM radio in the same house as a home computer (well, certainly any nasty foreign one imported from the limeys!) - so the whole casing of things like the BBC micro or Spectrum had to be re-designed to incorporate shielding. So the US version of that Great British Computer was (a) more expensive to produce, (b) more expensive to buy and (c) not fully compatible with UK software...
NB: there
was a standard for "business computing" - CP/M. Mostly too expensive for home use, and software needed hardware-specific patches for things like graphics (it was really designed with a serial terminal in mind). The IBM PC was nothing more than a "me too" implementation of a 16 bit CP/M (of which DOS was a clone) system with its own
proprietary firmware and graphics systems. Today it gets described as an "open" system but that didn't mean then what it means now: IBM published details so that anybody could write software or produce expansion cards - which was a major concession for IBM c.f. their restrictive mainframe practices, but already
de facto true of most existing personal computers. (CP/M systems had the S100 bus, PET had the IEE488 bus, Apple had a proprietary bus but there were plenty of 3rd party products... and
nobody in microcomputing tried to claim you needed permission to write software for their products).
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