See "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman.
P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against Microsoft in programming languages.
But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in their day.
Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary patches.
And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them in xml tags!"
Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if linux worked great with it: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...
So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to. But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way to make my life worse, over and over again.
And back in the early 80's, MS-DOS sold for $40. Digital Research's CPM/86 sold for $186. They were on the shelf at Egghead next to each other. There's no surprise that people bought MS-DOS. Wouldn't you? I did. Kildall thought people would pay a large premium for CPM/86. He made a huge mistake (especially since nobody at the time could explain to me why CPM/86 was better, and after later trying it out, I couldn't see anything better about it, either).
As for incompatible file formats, just about every last software company tried that. Read about the legendary battles over the zip file format. WordStar didn't use a standard file format. Neither did Wordperfect. Every printer had a different, proprietary command language. Every graphics card had a different interface. I once was paid to spend a lovely 3 weeks in Japan getting some graphics software to work with the various Japanese graphics cards. I could go on for hours :-)
That reminds me of governments too. Administration is .. well, known synonym for latency, resistance etc etc, yet when it's in the interest of the government/state (finding bad taxpayers) all of a sudden everything is lean, fast, beautifully smart.[1]
It's a survival effect crossing through the layers.
[1] A friend told me how he received a letter explaining the state found his job and relationship status through cross relating pieces of data between two families that indicates the 'couple' shouldn't benefit some 'student loans' anymore.
It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.
The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.
DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring special floppy disks), with the same results.
For me it was frustration with Windows, until I gave it up back, in 2004. I used to rage at it's instability and difficult reinstallation process when various device drivers were involved.
I would never have imagined I will have such a positive view on Bill Gates a decade later. He's smart because, after spending half his life amassing a fortune, he is now spending the other half of his life spending it. Money is just numbers sitting in an account if you don't do anything with it.
So it does not matter how the fortune was amassed in the first place? As long as you spend some of it and polish your PR image later on ?
People forget/forgive pretty fast, for me that's the only thing I retain from this story.
But I think it's silly to put an asterisk on the good he's actually doing.
edit: B, not M. Thanks.
That would be a pretty shocking spending spree. A 70% increase just can't make up for a 99.9% decrease beforehand.
You meant billion, not million.
On the other hand, his business choices still frustrate me as an engineer, but I understand we just had opposing goals. I don't agree with a lot of what he and his company did.
Disregarding opinions as envy is more often than not a case of not putting yourself in other's shoes. Oversimplification is always wrong.
No.