Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, sure. But there's nothing exotic about Hercules (thus the endless clones of it) that prevented IBM from implementing something like it in 1981 except a) cost and b) possibly some vague worry that graphics/color = games = non-serious computer. For 40 years people have said that IBM made a mistake by only implementing the garish CGA 4-color palette on RGB monitors. But given that that was also done for a) and proba…
Interesting; I was not aware CGA was also 1981. With that in mind, it's indeed weird that they shipped MDA the way it was.
IBM seems to have thought that customers would either want super high-quality text, or lower-resolution graphics, and that the few who wanted both would buy both MDA and CGA adapters (which some people actually did). I'm pretty sure MDA was the first priority given that IBM didn't sell a CGA monitor at launch. (I'll get back to this.) And, in fact, MDA greatly outsold CGA at first.
The PC design team had many Apple II owners. The II's influence on the PC's design is obvious. Regarding video, IBM probably thought that those who wanted color would use a TV or composite monitor, on which CGA can do 16-color graphics. Those who wanted high-quality text of course would want to use a monitor, to which IBM catered with an IBM-branded monochrome model. From IBM's perspective, offering both options would be superior to the II, which in 1981 did not offer RGB output, only composite (and CGA is an improvement over Apple II's composite color video), and no Apple-branded 80-column output or way to use a monitor for MDA-like super high-quality text output.
IBM did not foresee that very few people would use TVs or composite monitors for CGA; had it done so it surely would have offered its own CGA monitor at launch. Most people instead bought a third-party RGB monitor, resulting in sharper text but the horrible 4-color palette.