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To the best of my knowledge, it was because Gary Kildall (head of Digital Research, formerly Intergalatic Digital Research) wouldn't sign a non-disclosure agreement with IBM saying he wouldn't repeat what they discussed in the meeting. IBM goes back to Gates, Gates buys a crummy obscure OS called QDOS ridiculously cheap, and turns it into an empire.
Don't get me wrong, he's a fantastic businessman, but man - talk about right place, right time. And for anyone who thinks that Gates was some kind of genius hardcore supercoder,
this is an amusing story on that topic.
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Kildall was flying his plane. His wife, who was a manager in the business, and their lawyer, balked at IBM's NDA, which was supposedly 60 pages long and very intimidating. The DR folks were legitimately concerned they might be signing their lives away. After a long day of arguing with them, the IBM guys left and called Gates. He freaked out, thinking he was going to lose IBM as a client, and quickly found them a replacement.
I don't think anyone ever claimed Bill was a genius programmer, just a genius businessman. As an example of this, when IBM had gave Bill the same NDA, he signed it without reading it. He knew that IBM was the best thing that could ever happen to the PC business and knew if Microsoft didn't get their language business it might be the worst decision ever.
Another example of his vision. When he saw a picture of the MITS Altair on Popular Science in 1974 or so, he freaked out to Paul Allen, fearing it was already to late to get into PC software and he immediately quit Harvard (their first slogan was "A computer on every desk and Microsoft software on every computer, in 1979!). They wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair but didn't have one to test it on, so they wrote an emulator on a mainframe for a computer they'd never seen. I think Paul Allen did most of the work but Bill deserves some credit. Paul then went to MITS and gave a demo, crossing his fingers that it would actually work.