Bill Gates Reveals Secret of Microsoft's Success 584
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.'"
Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:4, Insightful)
May the Microsoft Bashing Begin... (Score:2, Insightful)
while(true)
{
//Begin Microsoft Bashing ad-infinitum
}
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.
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.
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.
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."
Re:Blame the MBAs and accountants? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Mr. Gates, please explain what the hell happened w/r/t Vista. Are you saying it flopped because you didn't have enough MBAs and bean counters on the team?
It flopped because it's now difficult to improve the OS enough for people to care. Win95 over Win3.1x was pretty much revolutionary and 2000/XP was even a leap from 9x but because the OS isn't crashing anymore and it does what people need it to do on a regular basis, they just don't have an urge to upgrade.
Vista was basically more of the same and with the mass media and corporations pretty much panning it (much like WindowsME I suppose) why would anyone be interested in running it at home unless it was forced upon them. I don't see it changing much with whatever the next rushed version of Windows is because whatever they come up with, it won't be worth the upgrade like it was in the past.
Good luck to Microsoft.
Nothing new here (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, people remember what they want to remember. He most likely thinks that's how it was... Not really it just sort of a happened, they lucked out and when they did they kept running with it. Most people won't admit that their success was luck based, or due to family money, or family/friend connections. They want to think its all because of their own hard work that they've got that nice house and car or richie rich fortune, and they also want others to think that as well.
Nothing to see here. Rich guy got richer, and it now rewriting his history to fit his view point. It's a plot type that's happened lots in the past and will happen lots in the future.
Re:It's not a business model (Score:3, Insightful)
What? You have no idea what you're talking about. There were plenty of operating systems with guis way before Windows. And the rest of your comment is pure nonsense.
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.
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.
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus the "handed" portion (Score:3, Insightful)
No but they can be handed a monopoly (by another near monopoly).
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?
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.
Re:The real secret which he will never admit.... (Score:2, Insightful)
They built the monopoly in the first place, you know. Saying otherwise is just anti-MS zealotry trying to be unkind to Gates, in spite of the fact that essentially grew the personal computing industry into what it is today based on moxie and business sense.
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.
Microsoft succeeded because they were smart... (Score:3, Insightful)
When I saw smart I mean it literally. Bill Gates saw the business world. The giants and players who could easily throw you around. The only way to truly compete is to offer something noone else had.
Sure, he ganked the GUI from Steve Jobs, but understand that he ganked the concept... not the code. Bill Gates and his company had a TERRIFIC understanding of what the average user would want in an experience. They also understood what a company would want when making technical decisions at the time
1) Will it do what we need it to do?
2) Can we easily maintain it?
3) Can our users learn to use it quickly and easily?
4) Is it cost efficient?
5) Does it "just work"?
The answers to all of these ONLY Microsoft could say yes to. Apple lost in #3 and #4. Every single apple I used growing up was completely non-user friendly. Microsoft spent millions upon millions understanding what users want to be able to do and made multiple ways to do it to allow a user to choose how they like doing things.
I hear a LOT of people complain about windows software but every single Office App, I've ever used has lived up to my expectations. In my 15 years in the IT industry I still feel that 90% of the problems are user error when it came to basic installs.
The other 10% was comprised of plethora of wierd setups, odd configurations, and *gasp* bad coding.
Don't get me wrong... Microsoft has written a lot of seriously wacked out code that has no business in production. But lets compare... to Lotus Notes. That thing is about as friendly as a porcupine with a machete. It's almost as bad as Groupwise. These people spend $1.99 at Big Lots on a book for "User Friendly" and "Tech Support Friendly".
You might hate microsoft, but they took what every software company was lacking and built that into their business model. Bill Gates is a genius... a low down dirty scoundrel genius... but a genius none-the-less.
Re:English not your first language? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
A lot of confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people seem confused or misinformed about the history of Microsoft. I believe that Microsoft is a monopoly because they made a deal with IBM whereby when IBM sold a PC, Microsoft received royalties for MS-DOS. This contract, I hear, was an invention of Bill Gates Sr., a lawyer. The royalties were paid regardless of whether MS-DOS was actually on the machine, thus IBM could not sensibly sell PC's with alternative operating systems (i.e. PC-DOS, etc.).
Thereafter they wielded this contractual monopoly over PC operating systems skillfully, a shining contrast when compared to their essentially bland programming output, and were responsible for a variety of anti-competitive practices over the years. I lament not having documented my observations of these practices, but embrace, extend, extinguish has been honed on many, many occasions from more brutal and subversive tactics such as looking for and intentionally breaking other companies' software (viz. Corel).
Make no mistake, Microsoft's business strategies have been diligently locking in customers through proprietary formats and libraries, as diligently as they have been snuffing out any actual competition with the same. Their contributions to research, development, and technology are essentially non-existent, and virtually unheard of when compared to their revenue.
They are not a development shop; I recall some absurd (but probably accurate) statistic that the cost to the economy due to lost productivity from things such as blue screens of death and the untenable Word interface amounting to the same cost as the September 11th, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, every hour. (This is not to mention the lost productivity to Solitaire) That's a false dichotomy, since who's to say that perfect (or at least working) software would result in ideal output, and it's much the same as saying the millions of songs downloaded each year amounts to trillions in lost revenue to the record companies. Nevertheless, I know that I prefer to waste my time on Slashdot, as opposed to rebooting my machine, or restarting a mangled list in a Word document.
Re:Here's your history lesson. (Score:3, Insightful)
By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
If he made a ridiculously enormous pile of money thereby, he sure would be.
Engineering genius, while great, isn't the only kind of genius in the world.
Re:May the Microsoft Bashing Begin... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think OS/2 could probably run MS-DOS programs at least as well as Windows 3.x (or 95). But at the time, IBM tried to use OS/2 to regain its hardware monopoly from the clone market. So PS/2-OS/2 ended up being much pricier than a clone with Win3.x. That's what made it the better DOS program switcher.
And by the time OS/2 opened up to generic hardware, the windows API was well established as the de-facto standard. To late for the better system to win.
Of course, it was sheer ruthlessness that allowed Microsoft to lead IBM to believe that OS/2 could eventually become the standard. Microsoft was supposed to be involved in OS/2. Who knew they were also working to undermine it...
Kind of like Intel and the OLPC project. Or Microsoft and OASIS. Or, truth be told, IBM and Unixware.
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.
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:3, Insightful)
No but they can be handed a monopoly (by another near monopoly).
And what monopoly were they "handed" ?
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right, dammit! What we should have are antibiotics made by the guy down the street, in his basement. Automotive airbags made in Ye Olde Saddle Stitchery across town. Why, if it weren't for Teh Eevil Corporations, we'd be comfortably back to better times. You know, when the guy with the big mustache and the mule-pulled wagon delivered a block to your icebox. That was quaint! And we liked it that way, dad-gummit. Who wants a $20 pre-paid mobile phone with which you can call Portugal while in your underwear out in the woods? Too corporate! It was better when it took 20 weeks for the telegraph guys to finally string up your town, and the guy on the bicycle brought you the wire telling you that your cousin died 20 hours ago... of Polio.
Or do you mean that the government should do all of the R&D and complex manufacturing? That way we could completely avoid the influence of a powerful monopoly, for sure.
Re:Secret was scamming, stealing, working hard (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
What ? Microsoft v Stac was about patents (and software patents are bad, remember ?). Further, Stac went on for several years afterwards (and were eventually killed - like all the similarly fragile "whole disk in a compressed volume" products - by plummeting hard disk prices.
office 97 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right that most companies don't choose to engage in those ruthless tactics. However, the most powerful companies do
They didn't used to.
And we reward them.
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.
We didn't use to worship the almighty dollar. Rather, we saw and used it as a tool.
This is how powerful companies are built.
That's not how they used to be built.
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.
Hating the psychopaths and their games will change neither the psychopaths nor their games. Pray tell what are the necessary steps? I can see nothing whatever that I, a middle class drone, can do to change the way the rich people run their world.
And it IS theirs. There's nothing whatever I can do about it. I can't even shame them, because they have no shame.
Re:Microsoft succeeded because they were smart... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, Mac OSX is user-unfriendly. Whoever gushes about its ease of use probably does three things with it, ever. It feels like it was designed by hippies smoking pot all day. It has almost driven me to tears at times.
-Plug in iPod. Why aren't you charging. You charged just two minutes ago! I want to fill it up, and it's less than half-charged! No help in Help. Eventually have to reset.
-Okay iPod, I'm plugging you into a different computer, but *just to charge*, I don't want you to wipe the library on this one, wait, WAIT, STOP, NO, NO, DON'T SYNC, STOP, STOP, STOP, phew!!! glad I caught it in time!
-Why do I have to go through sync in iTunes to get mp3s on my iPod? not necessary elsewhere on every single other mp3 player on the market.
-Why the hell did it let a sub-window of Mail open so big as to cover the dock and not be closable without hiding the dock?
-Why do I have to add a clip to my movies in iMovie to extract stills? Why do I have to re-chase down the directory and retype the prefix each time?
-Why is iPhoto in general so damn inscrutable?
-Why is it so hard to upload stuff held captive by iPhoto, to photobucket?
-Why does the help feature so rarely help me find basic features I want to do?
-Why does iMovie make me wait through the clip-making process RIGHT AFTER every time I record something, usually taking over 15 seconds?
-Why discrimination against people who don't have two hands to conviently use at all times.
Hey Steve: right-clicking and alt-commands. Learn it.
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm...Excel?
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, if you go through my comment history you'll see that I'm not just "not a Microsoft apologist" but that I hate their software and wish I wasn't forced to use it at work.
But Lotus is a really bad example. I'm forced to use it, too, because somebody in the Chicago office sends us Lotus spreadsheets that I have to use to generate reports with.
The default on install is to have have the suite auto-run fullscreen on machine startup. Google found the answer for that, and I managed to shut it off. But it loads up my system tray (the one on the right with the crap that's always running, what we used to call TSRs in the DOS days) with a ton of icons, and I haven't found out how to stop it from loading them but instead have to tell it "exit" every single day. This despite the fact that I only use Lotus four times a year.
When I do use it, the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't work.
I hate Excel, but damn, I hate Lotus a whole lot more. That's an incredibly bad example; Microsoft writes some really, really bad software but it's nowhere near as bad as Lotus.
What to do about it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't buy what they're selling.
Don't buy MSWindows, of course.
But, also, don't buy "netbook" class PCs with iNTEL chips.
Huh? Why? Isn't AMD just as bad?
Actually, I was thinking of VIA, of course. Or wishing that someone would build a netbook with a low-power PPC or an ARM or (why not?) ColdFire. The more, different CPUs, the merrier.
Supporting the underdog is actually an act of self-preservation. Keep the dogs busy fighting each other and they have to treat us with some sort of respect.
Don't buy what they're selling, but especially when they're selling the "Everybody's doing it!" excuse.
Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:3, Insightful)
And this, folks, is why cooperatives never work on the large scale. They're simply too detached from reality.
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: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.
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:3, Insightful)
OLE, Office, and getting the dammed things to market on time and more-or-less functional.
Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:3, Insightful)
I recall 2. I had the choice of shelling out $175 for DR's CPM/86 or accepting PC-DOS which came with the machine for free. The other one you referred to I'm sure wasn't free. Now if that doesn't constitute a monopoly for MS, it's because you're playing with the meaning of words.
No, it's because I'm not silly enough to use logic that dictates basically every single company in the world is a "monopoly", and any company choosing to sell their product cheaper is "abusing their monopoly".
Re:May the Microsoft Bashing Begin... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only advantage Windows 3.x and 95 had over their contemporary competitors -- Mac OS and OS/2 -- was that it could run MS-DOS applications better than anything else out there.
For an Operating System, running the applications people want to use is pretty much the single most important feature.
You also forgot the price aspect. A PC running Windows was a lot less than a PC running OS/2 or MacOS (the former due to higher hardware requirements and software cost, the latter due to Apple).
Re:May the Microsoft Bashing Begin... (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone much wiser than me once said (and I don't know who, perhaps someone could fill that part in) "it's impossible to turn ten dollars into twenty dollars, but it's inevitable to turn ten million dollars into twenty million dollars".
Although dozens of people who have won hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in lotteries, but are bankrupt only a few years later, would suggest that comment is less than 100% accurate.
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.
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.
Re:Thus the "handed" portion (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether customers prefer something has no inherent relation to the financial success of the company making a product or its success in the market. Whether the other factors that prevent a product from becoming a success are "fair" or "unfair" is a conversation that has to touch on economics, psychology, politics, etc. But there's no logical or economic basis by which you can claim the success of a product is proof of its market quality (or that a failure of a product is proof that customers didn't/wouldn't prefer it, or that it wasn't superior).
The most famous example was probably Tucker Motors, which was ahead of all competitors in virtually every area but was destroyed precisely because it was such a significant competitive threat to a massively influential industry.
Gates is certainly correct that what MS brought to the personal computer industry was an unprecedented level of business acumen -- understanding how the use of exclusive contracts, marketing alliances, and technical measures could cut off avenues of distribution and exposure for other products in a market, even ones many customers would have preferred to use at a price premium.
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Supplying the OS for PC's probably helped ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you miss the whole point of the parents post. Instead of being a Steve Job's fanboi... actually read what he stated.
Bill got it right. It was "about the software" not about the hardware. The commercial demand of the software drove and is still driving hardware today. Bill's foresight made Microsoft what it is. Apple scraped by just because fanboi's like you didn't let it die. Then Jobs got smart and started doing other things like iPod's and then was smart enough to jump hard on the notebook wave.
Either way... computers would be a decade behind where we are now if it was not for Gates.
Microsoft succeeded for many reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly the blunders of their competitors were a huge help; Bill Gates is correct and if you look, Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes but they've never stopped improving the products. Very rarely is a Microsoft product discontinued at 1.0 or 2.0; granted, it might not exceed the competition until version 6.0, but it always improves.
Another has been simplicity, and one that Microsoft is getting away from. NT domains were fairly simple to understand and setup. Exchange 2000 was easy to get running (Exchange 2007 is a beast by comparison, much much harder to use).
Another is their developer tools, and this one still applies. You can install Windows, SQL Server, and Visual Studio and have an easy to use complete development environment. They always provide a lot of information and samples for integrating with other products like Exchange, Sharepoint, IIS, etc. This becomes a self-sustaining user community. If I want to know how to hook up to some random USB sensor device from company XYZ, I know the fastest and easiest way is to search for "deviceXYZ USB C#". On the first google page someone will have posted example code detailing how to do it.
I don't have to pick from 13 different IDEs, 5 different app servers, 18 different packages/JARs, or whatever else. I don't have to spend time thinking about "the platform" if I go with Microsoft. I don't have to figure out exactly what JVM version is installed or what version of what kernel/.SO needs to be installed. All those decisions have been made for me and I can get on with the business of writing code that I can actually hang sales on - that will actually pay my mortgage. No time spent on any of that other crap will ever make me a single dollar, and everyone already has Windows boxes anyway so requiring Windows isn't a barrier to entry anywhere except maybe at Sun.
Manufacturers aren't blind to this (part of the self-sustaining community/critical mass. Why do all other auction sites fail? Because buyers want a lot of sellers and sellers want a lot of buyers, hence eBay is the monopoly. The same thing applies here). They write drivers for windows, provide code samples for VB or C#, etc.
Is the Microsoft platform the best way to accomplish things? Maybe, maybe not. Can I get it to perform well and be reliable without having to spend a lot of time messing with it? Absolutely. Do I have to worry about supporting the platform itself? Nope. I just spec Windows 2003 SP1, SQL 2005, CLR 3.5 and that's it. That is all that I and the client need to know to be absolutely certain that the app is going to work on their system. I know where events will be logged. I know where files will be installed. I know what libraries are present and I know there probably won't be any bugs due to incompatible versions.
Re:Bill was handed a monopoly ... and he learned. (Score:3, Insightful)