I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me that people must have.
But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon coming for your software - though that may just be a difference between the internet now and what I've seen of the internet in the past.
At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says anything embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).
the 'dos isn't done until lotus won't run' rumor was 80s
The Halloween Documents were only the start of Microsoft's attacks on Open Source in general and Linux in specific; it arguably funded SCO during that company's lawsuit against Linux, IBM's support for Linux, and basic common sense, by buying Linux and Unix licenses from SCO and introducing SCO to BayStar Capital. That isn't so much at arm's length as at finger's length. Around the same time, Ballmer said the Linux kernel was Communism, said it infringed Microsoft's intellectual property, and a bit later called Linux cancer. He also used the "viral license" insult, proving that big companies are sufficiently stymied by the GPL to dislike it. You kinda lose plausible deniability when you call something cancer and then give money to the company trying to sue it out of existence.
But that's Ballmer. Gates all by himself was seen, at least by people who didn't just view him as a Funny Rich Nerd, as a sharp operator at the very least who did nasty things to competitors and had no scruples about doing questionably legal things to win. Jobs without the Cult Of Mac, in other words.
They could have dominated, but instead they all but gave away the personal computing space to Apple and Google, and had to pivot the company to cloud computing instead.
https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
Of course, it ultimately wouldn't matter that much, with IE6 destroying Netscape and what MSN eventually became turning into an important portal.
I'd love to have some tell-all book about what the heck was happening inside Microsoft which prevented them from doing a good phone OS.
Instead, I found this:
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsofts-terry-myerson-and-...
1. Bad base OS from Windows CE.
2. Industry moved too fast.
3. Damn Android treating carriers and hardware makers better than us.
It's a blatant Microsoft booster site, sure.
Another view is from here:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16452162/windows-phone-h...
Which posits that Google did unto Microsoft what Microsoft did unto Digital Research: Locked it out of important apps, like a YouTube app. Plus, Android already had a more vibrant ecosystem in general. Again, Microsoft was a bit slow, but this time, it cost them.
Linux IS communism. Excellent developers are humans too, they want a beach mansion in Naples and West Palm Beach, with a 45ft boat and the whole 9.
Linux offers them a mod role in some obscure online forum and a pat on their back. That formula doesn't work regardless of what Ballmer said or the legal actions.
You make it sound like Linux failed to be on 95% of desktops because of what Ballmer said, which is the same as thinking that the USSR/DDR collapsed because Reagan said "Tear down this wall!"
Microsoft signed off incredible amounts of quality of life for the consumer and minted many thoudands of millionaires among its employees, whereas they destroyed the ambitions of many other paper millionaires who should have known better, they should have understood that software is a winner take all business and should have cashed out when they could. Unless you are one of them, then I cannot possibly see how people can see Microsoft and claim that it's cancerous.
Microsoft is the most consumer friendly company ever. They know billions of people are pirating their OS+Office and let them rob them blind while they recoup such lost revenues by increasing the bill on sales to Fortune500 companies and governments. Which is something extremely elegant that goes to mimic the organization of society in the West : free market Capitalism with redistributive features.