The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995) | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995)

lettersofnote.com

55 pointscromulent10 comments

1) I had heard Bill Gates was long winded in written correspondence, but wow.

2) I've often been impressed by his intelligence and grasp of a wide variety of topics in interviews, but this letter really makes him look like Nostradamus...

Definitely worth a full read, really enjoyed it.

'the Microsoft boss later grumbling that after 10 hours of browsing the Internet, he "had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format," then adding, "I did see a great number of Quicktime files"; and his determination to "match or beat" the services offered by Netscape, a "competitor 'born' on the Internet" who then boasted "70% usage share" in the browser market.'

This seems to confirm my biggest problem with Microsoft. Why do they need to have their own version of everything? What do they get from this? How come they don't try to innovate as much as open source does, instead?

> This seems to confirm my biggest problem with Microsoft. Why do they need to have their own version of everything? What do they get from this?

Microsoft is a business hooked on vendor lock in. Once they've got an organization using Windows, boom, they've got a money pipe that could feed them for over a decade. Which then means they can sell them Office, and boom, another stream of cash. As time goes on, network effects bloom in the form of users locked into file formats and encourage further growth.

It's almost a viral strategy, aimed at corporate IT. It's what they know how to do. It also illuminates why every product must be "Windows This," "Windows That." They want to increase the surface area of their flagship so it can continue to own large volumes of users.

Worth a complete read - amazingly accurate assessment of what actually came to be.

Also insight into MSFTS current problems - Gates' genius mind was able to coordinate across many different biz divisions from consumer to enterprise.

Not many other candidates in the world with that bandwidth or visionary insight.

To be fair, it can't have been long before that memo that he wrote The Road Ahead, which infamously made very little mention of the internet at its first release, necessitating a whole bunch of additions for subsequent printings. I don't find it as amazingly visionary as all that - for example, he barely mentions the importance of search which his company would later end up sinking huge amounts of money into.

> he barely mentions the importance of search

To be fair, he mentioned 7 critical steps. Search engines are No. 5.

Huh, my PDF viewer seems to be failing to display a couple of pages towards the end. That's annoying.

It was Steven Sinofsky that convinced him, with his infamous "Cornell is WIRED" email in '94.

And that makes you think, if this guy knew it is coming and was heading the most influential and powerful software company at that time, why did Microsoft fail to build on this vision?

Have they really failed?

I reason they have not. Bing, the .NET framework, the OOP languages and IDE, Interet Explorer, XBOX, etc. are all mentioned in that memo, and are succesful divisions/products.

I don't know of any other company with such track record (if there is, please mention it).

Not a fanboy, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com