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Bill Gates Reveals Secret of Microsoft's Success
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:05 PM
from the polishing-the-legacy dept.
from the polishing-the-legacy dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Gates, in a interview with the BBC, revealed the secret of Microsoft's success: 'Most of our competitors were very poorly run. They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together,' said Gates. 'They did not think about software in this broad way. They did not think about tools or efficiency. They would therefore do one product, but would not renew it to get it to the next generation.' Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation, has a different view: 'Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving. I'd like to smoke what he's smoking.' Gates also said that he took a 'conservative balance sheet approach' to running Microsoft explaining that he wanted 'great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do.'"
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So it's not... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So it's not... (Score:5, Funny)
In TFA (sorry, yeah, I know) Bill mentions how he and Paul Allen pulled the source code of an operating system out of a trash can. Of course, this has long been suspected of Vista.
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Open source (Score:5, Interesting)
I watched TFV in TFA too, and what he seemed to be saying was that a key to their success was having access to the source code for the operating system they were using. Oh the irony.
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Re:Open source (Score:5, Insightful)
I especially liked the part where he describes the unlocked heavy machinery that he and Paul 'played' with. I see that he adopted the exact same security model for Windows. Even after the tenth time they broke into the machinery, the company set up a security guard rather than lock the machines. How did that get translated into Windows: ports open, but the anti-virus is running!
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Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"out flying a plane" is just urban legend. Go find some of Gary's intervies for the truth on the subject.
But i agree, there was a lot of luck involved, and a but of underhanded backroom deals.
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Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly on the OS for their new PC "toy".
Bill Gates & Co then hired people who knew how to exploit that monopoly.
Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft Blackbird.
Etc.
The difference being that Microsoft had their monopoly to fall back on when their other attempts failed. Their competitors did not.
Bill is going for the "humble" bit now. But that's not how it happened.
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Informative)
That only got them DOS but it got them into the monopoly position with DOS. From there, it was anti-competitive business moves by Balmer which took them to where they are today. The fact that they had the power to destroy companies by just putting names up on computer conference display boards( see book "StartUp" ) shows how powerful they were in the DOS days.
Couple that control of the market with billions in cash and you've got a company that no only is willing to destroy any competitor they feel is a treat, but they have the power and will to do so.
There was only a sliver in time where Microsoft could have missed the position they where handed by IBM. That was after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the IBM BIOS and clone manufacturers were asking Microsoft for versions of MS DOS for it. Even then, who else were the cloners going to ask for and OS since IBM already had the PC market for business computers? Back to CPM-86 and Digital Research?
Microsoft was gifted a monopoly by IBM and they chose to protect and leverage that monopoly position with anti-competitive business methods and crappy software.
Because we already know that Digital Research was run by someone who was competing on technical merit, it would likely be a far far better computing landscape today had Microsoft stuck with BASIC and DR gained the market position of dominant OS vendor in the 80s. Think about it. the 386 and 486 were 80s era CPUs but where 32bit. Microsoft released Windows 95 in late 1995 as a crappy 16/32bit OS which still relied on DOS under it for much of it code. 1995! There were UNIX version for the 386 and 486 doing full 32bit computing and real multi-tasking. There was OS/2 doing pre-emptive multi-tasking on those CPUs. Microsoft to this day differentiates between a client OS and a server OS and that is ridiculous. What year/millennium was it that the powerhouse that is Microsoft had a proper operating system for the masses? When did Windows 2000 ship? It took Microsoft almost 10 years later to get a moderately capable 32bit OS into the general populations computing systems.
Surely you give Microsoft too much credit for their position in the market. IMO
LoB
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right that most companies don't choose to engage in those ruthless tactics.
However, the most powerful companies do. And we reward them. And we get what we deserve.
Look around you. This is how powerful companies are built. In every industry, right from food and power on to music and movies on to automobiles and military hardware and anything else you can think of, they are all run this way.
That's not an apology for any behavior. But, you need to recognize, for things to change, you can't just hate the player, and you can't just hate the game. You have to hate them both, and you have to hate them enough to set your own safety and comfort aside and put a stop to it by whatever means are necessary. They've always relied in you being too scared and or lazy to take the necessary steps, and they've always been right.
And we get what we deserve.
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Informative)
We didn't used to. We used to break monopolies like ATT up. No longer. But then, we didn't used to have a global marketplace in most things; we didn't have the WTO, we didn't have jobs exported to other parts of the world, we didn't have Clinton and we didn't have Bush. It didn't seem that CEOs were psychopathic sociopaths like today's CEOs, and we didn't reward those CEOs for failure like we do now, and those CEOs didn't starve our lowest paid workers.
Wow! Such naivete is stunning. Simply stunning. Do a little history reading, for the love of Pete. Look into why unions were created, anything on the industrial revolution, or even one book on coal mines. Read about Pinkerton from someplace other than their corporate brochures. Sheeesh! The good ol' days weren't all that great.
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow.
I am just amazed at the amount of idiocy that is emanating in some of the posts. And then, you see that ONE post - the one, magnificent post that takes the cheese cake. Surreal, really.
I think money is *great*. It is one of the greatest economic inventions of man, and pardon the pun, but provides us with a common currency to trade our skills for our wants, whatever those may be. It is the new measure of your competitiveness.
When you give someone money, you give them the freedom to use it the way they see it. I do not want to be paid in something which imposes restrictions on how I use it as it conforms to my world view. That very action signifies a moral high ground and arrogance that you know what's best for the people, rather than letting people make their choices.
And what economic elite? You can become an economic elite if you want. Hell, this country is full of rags to riches stories. It's always amazing, but people make excuses. I tell you - you could become a millionaire today if you truly wanted to. At the end of the day, it breaks down to exactly what YOU want, and how far you are willing to go to achieve that. If you want something else more than the desire to make money, then you do not want money badly enough, and that is YOUR choice. Don't go around blaming the "economic elite" or some such vague term to signify a nebulous tyranny (that probably exists in your head).
Apart from your obvious logical fallacies that make no sense whatsoever, your last statement (like the rest of your comment) is a load of horse dung. To quote, "The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that's how you bet." There's nothing wrong in trying to be the strongest and the fastest the way society sees it. It's unfortunate if it happens at the expense of others, but then, that's competition for you. If others are not willing to play to win, then they shouldn't be playing at all.To me, money is a great motivator. It is an enabler, and gives me the means to do fantastic things. And quite honestly, it is not someone else's problem whether or not the way I spend MY money is in fitting with their morals or their world view. I work my ass off and make sacrifices to give ME the freedom to shape my world the way I like it - if someone else wants to one-up me, more power to them.
Money is also a fantastic equalizer. You can be rich, poor, black, white, short, disabled, lanky, religious or whatever else, and nobody will refuse to pay you if you are good enough, and nobody will refuse a trade for money.
Your post, and rant, is nothing but unfiltered nonsense.
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Here's your history lesson. (Score:4, Insightful)
Other people also saw that selling an OS without selling the hardware could be a viable business. Yet those other companies did NOT survive.
Again, Microsoft BOUGHT their OS from someone who wrote it because HE saw that the OS did not have to be sold with the machine BEFORE Bill Gates saw that (as you claim).
Again, Bill Gates BOUGHT the OS from someone else.By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
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Re:Here's your history lesson. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting point on this:
Edison made quite a bit of money off the lightbulb -- but he didn't invent it. It's actually a pretty good analogy; even to the point where nowadays, most people believe Edison invented the lightbulb. Similarly, most people think Microsoft invented the desktop PC interface.
Both Edison and Gates were unique in that they knew how to combine other people's hard work, a bit of their own engineering, and some good marketing strategy to gain major traction in a quickly developing new market.
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"in EVERY case." (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's another history lesson for you.
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/dos.htm [fortunecity.com]
Looks like people (and companies) were writing Operating Systems (and apps) without selling hardware for YEARS before that.
Also, in the English language, "every" and "most" are not synonyms.
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Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:5, Informative)
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And what the Geek forgets... (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1979 Microsoft 8080 BASIC was the first microcomputer product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award.
No one - no one - had to tell IBM in 1980 how far and how fast Microsoft had risen in the world of the eight bit micro.
.
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Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is - that's still recursive logic. When the IBM PC debuted, IBM didn't have a monopoly on that market. No one did, as the market largely didn't exist. (To the extent it did, the monopoly on the PC belonged to Apple!)
Nor did IBM's 'monopoly' of the PC market last long, as more than a few companies were quick off the mark to get their entries to market. So quickly and so successfully that IBM was all but knocked out of the ring within a couple of years.
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Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and CP/M and p-system were more expensive, and thus DOS became the dominant system. They gained a monopoly through a bit of luck and a bit of business acumen. Then they exploited that monopoly.
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Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:5, Funny)
Offering a product people want to buy, at a cheaper price than their competitors. Those bastards.
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Let me see if I get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and CP/M and p-system were more expensive, and thus DOS became the dominant system. They gained a monopoly through a bit of luck and a bit of business acumen. Then they exploited that monopoly.
In the big money sector... business IT... Microsoft was still a bit player until the 90's, and they had to get their foot in the door by marketing Microsoft operating systems as "playing nice with others"... meaning, yes, you can run Windows as a workstation on your existing (and expensive) Unix and Novell servers.
Microsoft did become a monopoly, I grant you, but they were nowhere near one in the time frame you mention. They were, while profitable, still small fry in the early 80's, and made much of their money writing software for other platforms. Excel was a Macintosh product long before it was a Windows product.
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Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:5, Informative)
The headstart and the fact that 100% of PCs were running PC DOS by the time CP/M 86 and the UCSD P-System were released produced a natural result.
Of course, CP/M 86 was always a poor imitation of a 16 bit O/S pasted on top of an 8 bit system as was the UCSD P-System. So was PC-DOS, but it evolved over time. The UCSD P-System was limited to 64k even on m68k, so it never got over its limitations. Not that it matters. They never had a chance.
Disclaimer: I used to write UCSD P-System device drivers for pay.
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Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft Blackbird.
Etc.
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But i agree, there was a lot of luck involved, and a but of underhanded backroom deals.
Right, luck in terms of timing, but this quote really bothers me:
"Most of our competitors were very poorly run"
The initial competitors were IBM and Apple, both are alive and well. Remember, that Microsoft got their start by buying some crap inhouse developed OS called DOS, and convinced IBM to put it on their PCs (before they even bought the software). Round two was when IBM had a deal with MS with the OS/2 project, and Microsoft completely backstabbed them with Windows 95.
Those were the two biggest "successes" of MS.
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to provide engineering consulting services for a specialty repair contractor. Since there were a lot of "big boys" who were already well-established doing what he did, he opted (with my help) to take on more "risky" jobs that the established contractors wouldn't touch because they were, well, "too risky."
He soon got a reputation for being, not just a good contractor who got the work done on time and on budget, but a "go-to guy" who would succeed where others wouldn't even try. And soon, he was getting even the "bread-and-butter" jobs instead of the established firms because of "brand familiarity."
In the end, you gotta deliver. Microsoft might be the Great Satan, but they have a lot of satisfied customers you don't hear from, who got stuck on their stuff, and swore by it.
Like Harry Beckwith says in his book "Selling The Invisible": Your main competition isn't a company or a salesman or a technology, it's the "status quo."
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Interesting)
This I think is a good example of where a better SALES organization wins out.
The problem with software is that there are exit barriers. Once you've bought
a system you are somewhat commited to it. This is what leads to grannies to
think that they need msoffice for their old word documents.
That sort of thing doesn't NEED innovation. All you really need to do is to
not eggregiously piss off your captive audience. That is a much lower bar.
He points to Lotus and whines about lack of innovation. I'd really like to
know exactly what innovations that microsoft have made that are relevant
to their customers and Lotus product.
I really don't see it.
I might as well be running a pre-hegemony copy of smartsuite for all the
actual "innovation" that goes on with this stuff.
Ultimately, he's trying to frame non-technical successes in technical
terms to deflect from the fact that his stuff really isn't all that
great from a technology point of view.
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me fix that for you: Apple was so far behind Microsoft in the application business in the late 80s and early 90s that they just limped along while Microsoft snagged the desktop. People buy PCs to run applications, not operating systems.
Most of you don't even remember how hard they had to fight to convince companies to write software for their newfangled windowing system when everyone was perfectly happy with DOS. Gates is being disingenuous when he says his competitors were "poorly run", the real reason is that his competitors (including IBM who saw the PC as a toy) didn't have his vision and drive to (as he said back in the 80s) place a computer in every home. People like Mitch Kapor didn't see any value whatsoever in graphical environments - after all he was selling 1-2-3 hand over fist to companies still running DOS. He paid dearly for that. And once Microsoft controlled the desktop, they could do anything they wanted, which eventually would get them into trouble.
The reality is that no one saw it, except Gates. One could argue that Apple saw it (or wanted it), but they were too busy trying to dick around with the hardware and their OS was always an afterthought. The first "real" PC I ever had was a souped-up Zeos Pantera 486 with 16MB of RAM, a Diamond Stealth64 sporting an amazing 4MB of VRAM, a SCSI card with a 105MB HDD on top and - get this - a gynormous 17-inch monitor. I paid close to $6K back then for that. Today I can put together something that is for all purposes a super computer compared to that, for about $600. The reason for that is and always has been Microsoft Windows.
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not implying that it couldn't have happened some other way, just that in this case, that's the way it happened.
Think for a second how the PC hardware world would look like today if Apple had gotten a hold on the desktop before Microsoft. That PC you're running Linux on would probably cost three times as much, or more likely wouldn't even exist.
The widespread use of Windows was what ended up commoditizing PC hardware.
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Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that folks forget when condemning Microsoft as a Big Bad Monopoly is that technology industries - and PC hardware and software in particular - change constantly and by massive increments. What that implicitly means is that a great deal of innovation is required just to hold a fixed position in the market. In other industries where technology changes slowly, if at all, monopolies really do mean something quite different. De Beer's monopoly on diamonds or the Coke/Pepsi oligopoly on cola or a monopoly on pencils or whatever else are in fact a good deal more sinister than Microsoft's dominance of the OS and office productivity software markets.
If you're a soft drink manufacturer, you have absolutely no hope of kick Coke's ass in the next adoption cycle, no hope of snatching some market share as users upgrade to 512MB carbonation accelerator cards or anything like that. A real monopoly is also a company that genuinely stagnates, that stifles innovation and change, that rests completely on its laurels and whose only merit is size - a company that could literally change nothing for years and still beat everyone else financially. Like it or not, those characteristics just don't describe Microsoft.
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Secret was scamming, stealing, working hard (Score:5, Insightful)
It was all three.
Microsoft repeatedly used this tactic.
1) Pretend to work with another company
2) Steal the good ideas from that company
3) For bonus points, if possible make the next product from that company suck.
4) Profit!
---
Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
---
However, they worked like demons on their own stuff too. Microsoft worked hard- very hard. It competed very hard (frequently on the edge of legality and sometimes past it). It cheated, scammed, lied, stole.
But it also polished better than ANYONE. Microsoft made things that were arcane and difficult into automatic and easy things.
And it supported (and supports) its customers extremely well. The two times that I called for customer support, they pulled out all stops to support me (a sound card problem with 5 senior engineers, a level 1 and level 2 support on the line- and by god they figured it out after 3-4 hours on the phone). When my business went through the recent DST thing, we had multiple microsoft people on site verifying everything- holding regular meetings. None of our other vendors did that.
---
I've compared M$ to an evil parent that wants the best for you as long as you stay home and never go out on your own.
Multiple Factors (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Microsoft had the luck to work in an exploding market while it was still in its infancy.
2. Microsoft had the shrewdness (or ruthlessness, perhaps) to continue leveraging the advantage conferred by secret 1 for the decades to follow.
The real secret which he will never admit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything else is just Gates' PR people trying to make history be kind to Gates, in spite of the fact that he raped the personal computer industry of profits and innovation during his tenure.
Notes user here... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd be afraid to smoke what they apparently put in the crack pipes at Lotus, at least in the Notes division.
Software company (Score:5, Interesting)
Like Steve Jobs said at D5 (http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/):
"Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry..."
So there are two important things, they were focused on software only, and they adapted the correct business model to be focused on software (able to make quick, temporary alliances with many factions).
Basically, it can be summed down to being an agile, nimble competitor. Which has no resemblance to what they've become.
McDonald's (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft succeded the same way McDonald's did---sell a bland, familiar, mediocre product in huge volumes at a low-ish but profitable price (this worked for PCs because it's bundled; home users would not have actually paid for Windows). Really, there's no big secret here. The same model works very well for Wal-Mart and Ikea too. It's hard to get those obnoxiously-high volumes if you try to sell on quality and overall value.
I think this is part of Vista's problem. It's still low to mediocre quality, but no longer bland and familiar. It's like McDonald's suddenly trying to get people to buy $12 steaks.
ctually what MS does is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
First and foremost MS is a marketing company. A company that realized early on, quantity is better then quality as it get you onto the consumers/businesses systems.
Second they are a legal firm that applies a chess strategy of sacrifice the pawn to more the knight forward.
Or in other words, what is the risk vs. payoff of breaking teh law?
Third they are, by the court decisions of court around the world, a trust breaking law breaker, a company run in part with anti-trust law breaking tactics.
Fourth, what development they do, it is with intent to dumb down the users and always leave them coming back for improvements but never really doing a complete job.
"The way to be successful is to make people need you" which is achieved by consumer entrapment abuse.
The reason for concern MS has had over open source and its halloween documents evidence is because Open Source, though not a freeing of the consumers is in fact a big step in that direction.
The secret is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Moore's law helped hide how inefficient MSFT coding had become. The marginally legal and outright illegal activities of the business/sales units would not have had this much of success if the vendor lock had not been achieved.
But deep at the core, the dominance of MSFT is because the ignorance of the user base rather than any brilliance of MSFT products.
The view from Lotus (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a consultant at Lotus at the time Microsoft started winning in desktop applications.
Bill Gates is essentially correct:
1. Lotus did a much worse job of hiring in professional management and bridging the gap between software development and business.
2. Lotus complicated their tools-set and architecture unnecessarily. This is one factor that killed 1-2-3. Lotus went straight from assembly code speedy to bloated and slow. Ironically, as this was happening, Jon Sachs wrote 1-2-3 C, a simple, fast, and very portable reference implementation.
3. Lotus did a bad job with follow up products. Instead of launching and improving, they would launch, get disappointed, give up, do something else. Or, in the case of 1-2-3, they would overcomplicate. They had very innovative products - ones that could have changed spreadsheets in fundamental ways, and that would still be innovative today. But they did not know how to nurture these products.
Microsoft faces a lot of the same problems now. Microsoft can't seem to make regular incremental improvements to key products, for example. But business isn't about being perfect. It is about being less bad than the other guy.
Microsoft's Success (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's success came from a complete lack of ethics.
While companies tried to compete on a level and ethical playing field, Microsoft was dirty dealing them. Stealing their work, poisoning business relationships, intentionally disrupting their businesses, etc.
I can't think of one, that's right, not one product of theirs that won on its own merit. Their whole office suite wouldn't be anything if they didn't create back doors in Windows and DOS for them. Windows wouldn't be anything if they did not poison relations between the likes of Xerox and DRI. DOS would have had competition from DRI if they didn't embed bogus warning messages in their applications. FUD is the modus operandi of Microsoft and how they "succeed."
They took illegal and unethical advantage of every piece of software they ever sold. Every last piece of their software works against every other software ISV.
Those they couldn't beat, they put out of business by dumping "free" versions on the market. Netscape anyone?
Success through relentless mediocrity (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft leadership wisely understood that the vast majority of business owners and other people at the time had no clue what would be good or bad in computing equipment generally, or software or operating software or application design and features specifically.
The key was to get something out there fast, market it as if it was good, and make sure it was what was installed by default on all of
the cheapest computers available.
Only the 0.01% computer or software experts out there would be lamenting for the substantially greater quality and simplicity that could have
been, if only there had been a sophisticated market to begin with.
The effect continues. I mean, for example,
it's now clear to absolutely anyone with a
clue that macs and osx are far superior to
windows xp or vista pcs, but the market share
is still the exact opposite of what it would/
should be if quality were the deciding factor,
and price and lock-in wasn't.
I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr Kapor claims that Microsoft "took advantage" of its position in controlling the operating system to make life hard for independent software developers like Lotus.
When these criticisms are put to Mr Gates, he says he finds it "ironic" that he could be accused of such a thing when Microsoft had "evangelised" its software to other companies, begging them "please write software for our platform".
I was at Lotus from '83 to '93, and I distinctly remember Microsoft visits, begging us to target our apps for their next OS: OS/2. While Excel for Windows was almost certainly already in development.
Gates is more right than he realizes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's look at some of Microsoft's early competitors and the dumb decisions they made. Ironically, though, for each and every point I list, you can see that Microsoft has learned all the dumb answers of its competitors.
1. CP/M, ultimately crushed by DOS. Microsoft basically gave DOS away to every OEM there was, while CP/M stuck to its higher priced format. Now, Linux is making inroads on Microsoft because its free, whereas Microsoft is increasingly a stickler for Windows licensing.
2. Borland vs Microsoft. Borland struck an early lead in Microsoft in tools by making a Pascal that was better than DOS BASIC, and then, by making a C++ that was better than Microsoft's. But, Microsoft came up with VB, whose scripting style made it easier to work with than Borland's Pascal, and negated the advantages of Borland C++, and then, for C++, Microsoft's Visual C++'s 2.0 was hands down a better IDE than Borland's C++ IDE was.
Now, Microsoft is losing tools mindshare to Linux, because, interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl / PHP are easier to do quick and dirty RAD style web apps with, while Microsoft's own offerings are getting increasingly complicated... and Microsoft's letting their own C++ product languish while the GNU compiler keeps getting better and better, and Linux IDE's such as KDevelop actually now surpass Visual Studio for C++ development. Microsoft needs to realize that the .NET one platform fits all approach is ultimately a loser, but, we Linux fans hope they don't realize it until it is too late!
3. Borland vs Microsoft Round 2. Borland's Quattro Pro was an early favorite over Excel, but Excel wound up carrying the day just through a sheer weight of features. But the really telling battle came when Borland bought Ashton Tate, and Microsoft bought a tiny company that made an Ashton Tate clone called FoxPro. FoxPro was, way, way faster than dBASE and Borland was late with its dBASE anyway. Microsoft would later seal the deal with MS Access, which was easier for quick and dirty database projects than either xBASE product.
Now, Microsoft's own office products are late, and Open Office continues to make inroads. Nobody has really answered Access yet, but... MySQL has quietly dominated the enterprise for quick and dirty databases in the same sort of way Access snuck into the desktop.
4. Microsoft vs IBM. Oh, let's see, how did IBM screw up OS/2, let me count the ways. IBM wanted to tie OS/2 to PS/2 offerings... IBM's OS/2 marketing was hamfisted whereas Microsoft basically let everyone copy Windows like the plague... whereas Microsoft wanted Windows to run on all sorts of PCs... Windows wasn't "as good", but it did have a better message queue than OS/2 and didn't require users to throw away DOS completely at a time when that mattered...
Nowadays, Microsoft is the company that ties Windows to specific hardware, whereas Linux runs on just about everything. While Microsoft still has a stranglehold on PCs, in every other kind of computer out there, from cell phones to digital control devices to routers and set top boxes, Linux actually has a growing presence. And, ironically, if you want to write for POWER Linux, IBM will be more than happy to set you up with an account at an IBM data center... what will Microsoft do, hmmmm?
4. Microsoft vs Apple, round 1. Windows color, Macintosh, black and white. Woops... but even today, we can see Linux rolling out with better and better eye candy and graphic effects. When Vista first threatened integrated 3d graphics ala OS/X, Linux people could have almost panicked, yet, they rolled up their sleeves and by the time Vista arrived, Compviz was here and many Linux desktops actually look better than Windows. Can you say Ubuntu?
5. Openness. Microsoft came to being in a day when Microsoft's level of documentation gave it a more open feel over what software bundled by hardware makers would give. While we think of Microsoft as being hard nosed and closed today, 20 years ago, they were
*yawn* (Score:5, Funny)
Rich CEO says success of his company is due to his own smarts and foresight. News at 11:15 (we need the other 15 minutes for the dupe).
Microsoft success = Gary Kildall's wife Dorothy (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's success can be pinpointed to one day in time when all of IBM's lawyers were at Gary Kildall's house. Gary was out screwing around in his Cessna that day and Dorothy basically freaked out during the negotiations for DOS. When Digital Research punted the IBM deal, that's when the phenominal $50,000 investment in Tim Patterson's DOS became Microsoft Legend.
I'm not sure that Gates knew that IBM was going to pull parts off the shelf to slam together a PC, and I doubt he knew that clever reverse engineering of the ROM BIOS that Compaq would do would cause the Attack of The PC Clones to occur and the money bags to fall from the sky at Microsoft.
If you ever read any Gates biography, documentaries etc, almost all literature dedicates a large amount to that particular point in time.
Bob Cringley's PBS Triumph of the Nerds spends about 30 minutes of the documentary on this decision.
Stephen Manes' Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America -- dedicates an entire chapter to this event.
Even Noah Wiley's Pirates of Silicon Valley does a silly bullet time effect on this one moment.
Re:May the Microsoft Bashing Begin... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes to that specific case and I agree with what you are saying, but the general process repeats itself over and over in business and technology.
Facebook? Give me a break -- look at the prior art of Friendster and even Myspace. When Facebook was being started at Harvard I thought it would not take off because of the current dominant players.
Google? Anybody old enough to remember when Altavista was the king of search? We used to always use that engine in college.
AIM? Remember ICQ? Ntalk? Otalk?
Original ideas are few, and even Gates admits he was not very original with his ideas in many, many interviews, but he did implement them well, er... market them well, and protected his monopoly with a vengeance.
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Re:It's not a business model (Score:5, Informative)
Amiga, ATARI, DecView, GEM, Lisa, MacOS, OS/2, PARC, SunView, X11
Microsoft didn't "bring about" the GUI, they stole the most basic aspects of it and wedged it on top of DOS, which BTW they also stole.
You just couldn't be more wrong.
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Re:It's not a business model (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's not a business model (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, Xerox had a working demo and many ideas. Apple paid Xerox for rights to use the technology. However Apple designed the Macintosh from the group up based on the ideas that Xerox had developed. They did not have access to the APIs or code that Xerox had.
Microsoft on the other hand had access to many internal APIs that Apple supplied them because MS said they needed them to develop MS products. Microsoft developed Windows based on these APIs. Slight difference.
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Re:Microsoft succeeded because they were smart... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you may very well be the only person I have ever seen state that Microsoft Windows "just works," or that Mac is unfriendly.
Windows 9x was a piece of crap. 2000/XP are quite nice, though I am glad I don't administer them professionally.
MacOS confused the shit out of me because it lacked a CLI of any note prior to OSX, but I wouldn't say that it was "unfriendly."
But all the time I spent as a kid trying to get games to work on Windows 95, when they were made for Windows 95, "Just Works" is not something that I would use to label it then.
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