The 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much.
Microsoft was "lucky" that:
1. JVM was too slow to run desktop apps on machines even in the early 2000s
2. Web and Javascript became so important that it reduced the impact of losing out on Java
3. Linux killed Sun Microsystems.
Still, so much server infrastructure runs on Linux+JVM stacks that you could argue that it was a major reason Microsoft failed to gain dominance outside their desktop stronghold. Years later, their biggest existential threat in the form of Android was basically a modified Linux+JVM stack.
People may think Bill was over-pessimistic, but looking back, their failure to kill off potential competitors like Java was one of the reasons Microsoft stagnated post-2000s.
I think it is a certain personality type that has more than $50 million* in assets and still has this level of competitive edge.
I think most people have a number that would drive them to relax a bit and just do whatever they wanted. I think for some people whatever they want though is to engage in cutthroat competition.
* arbitrary number likely different for everyone
I kind of disagree with this line of reasoning. I think very successful people sometimes overestimate possible threats, and it may be one of the reasons for their success. I had this realization when watching the most dominant Age of Empires player stream once. I once struck by how paranoid he was about what the opponent might be doing, but it meant he was constantly prepared for worst-case scenarios. He seemed genuinely worried most of the game, rather than confident like I expected given his first-rank status.
"It is a new and uncomfortable feeling to be the incumbent rather than the challenger in one of these battles. However, we must not panic. The current perceptual battle is a long way distant from actual business and revenue issues, and we can't let perceptual issues cloud our thinking too much."
The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today.
Wdym? TS?
As for tooling, maybe. VS has always had a decent amount of mind-share. Even then though, I can see Jetbrains + Eclipse + Sublime + Emacs + Vim + others capturing at least 50% combined...
"TS is just fancy JS" is like saying "Java is just fancy machine code" or something like that. It's a major software project with a much larger scope than simply slapping a few types on top of common JS constructs. More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide. I think it's likely to be the most successful language that Microsoft has ever produced in the long run.
Terrible analogy. TS doesn't compile to WASM or anything, it compiles to human-readable JS. Java doesn't compile to C++ or C. The JVM is an entire platform.
> More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide.
MS has always been decent when it comes to tooling but there's nothing particularly innovative about TS.
Claiming there's no Microsoft on the web seems far fetched when Microsoft de facto controls extremely large parts of producing modern web applications, deploying them and serving the tools necessary for businesses to coordinate.
It may have lost share to competing applications or it missed the train exactly, but I cannot think of any other single company you can lock in your organization from management, production to deployment and even consumption on Microsoft own devices from Surfaces to Xbox.
The only big part which is different is the former developer division. I do not think they earn the money themselves but are more a cost center to everyone else. But considering that everyone else is a giant company with a diverse set of developer needs, maybe that is just okay. Which again is interesting because the rest of the industry is also relying on this part of Microsoft.
MS used to call Linux cancer, and now they're running Linux servers for people. MS used to spread FUD that it's irresponsible and amateurish to expose source code of programs, and later they had to acquire GitHub and npm to stay relevant.
Microsoft had to adapt, because the old Microsoft has lost. Remember MS was selling very expensive per-CPU licenses for servers to run IIS, ASP.Net, and SqlServer. Admin tasks that we use webapps for were supposed to be a combination of Office, Access, VBA, native Windows applications, and a dash of ActiveX.
I've worked (as a consultant) on a number of 'boring' B2B web applications targeting 'boring' industries and one thing they all had in common was that they where all in on the Microsoft stack.
Gates seemed to go through a bit of a transition sometime after this (perhaps after the antitrust case), where he seemingly lost his uber competitiveness and then stepped down from CEO position.
Their stock exploded once Nadella came in, killed off DOA products like Windows RT and Windows Phone, and shifted the focus to Office 365 and Azure cloud where they had a deep enterprise advantage.
Does anyone really think Microsoft has as much influence on tech today than they did in 1996? They've clearly been pushed out by Google, Apple, etc, which is exactly what Gates was fearing would happen (although in this instance, the threat he feared was from Java/Sun).
I'm sure a lot of billionaires would actually consider that drop to be something worth losing sleep over, as messed up as it is.