Ask yourself: what would Bill Gates do?
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Really? I thought people took objection to Microsoft but generally thought of him as an intelligent, charismatic and, more recently, very generous man.
Bill, however, I greatly admire. He took no prisoners. :-) I've got his book on my shelf somewhere. It's 20 years old now. I should go back and read it.
I think Microsoft did a lot of things we value: disrupt and grow. Looking back, I think we see it through a different lens, but modern startups (or those who have eclipsed that label to be "big") can be Microsoft (or at least little Microsofts). Probably the only thing separating Microsoft from many companies is the presence of a moral compass at the company level.
IE5 was actually better than Netscape at the time which got bogged down in a rewrite. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
With more nimble competitors like Intuit with Quicken, Microsoft didn't make too much headway with Money. Same with Adobe.
To see an example of this playing out now, look at the Xbox versus Playstation. Sony(and Nintentdo) has been scoring a lot of self goals lately.
Since his departure from MS though I personally see him as a much kinder, gentler, and even more brilliant man than ever before. It's strange because there was a time when I loved to hate the guy but now that he's gone and seeing what Microsoft is doing these days I almost feel like "damn, I wish Bill Gates would come back, that guy was smart". Maybe this is a totally crazy thing to say but I'll say it: I feel like it's the same feeling people who followed politics in the 90's feel about Bill Clinton. They may have been pissed at him for reasons XYZ at the time but now many have a much different memory of him and kind of yearn for him to come back (if it were possible). Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
I love my Mac and hate Windows(though MS is credited with many others to put computer in the hands of many people).
I can't stand anything written/said by GrubIgler but that doesn't make them &&&& and morons. They have a huge following, they must be good.
This is how it works.
I am sure all are(were) good.
| They have a huge following, they must be good.
Good at whatever the people following them liked in them or found worth the attention. It can be anything - good voice, other skills or just the looks. Anything. It depends on the person following what good was in the guy he/she follows.
Where did all his generous cash donations come from? Just being good at selling software?
Isn't it a bit of a contradiction?
He ran a company that engaged in actions that harmed society. Doesn't he deserve some credit?
(I realize that there are plenty of nuanced arguments to be had here.)
Bill Gates used to be a Congressional page, and his father was a lawyer. So I'm surprised he had such a naive viewpoint of the justice system. He ought to have known that it was more political than that.
The irony is that Bill Gates, a staunch Democrat, was hounded by the Clinton DOJ. It ended up being the Bush administration that rescued his company by terminating the lawsuit and signing that consent decree.
They had market power, not a government granted right to a market (aka a monopoly). There's no historical evidence to suggest Microsoft was unbeatable. Rather, there's a lot of evidence to suggest very few companies tried to compete with Windows once it achieved scale. Neither Sun nor Oracle ever launched a full fledged Windows competitor in the consumer space, neither did AOL or Netscape. And Apple lost due to its own mistakes, more than admitted by Jobs after the fact; ditto IBM.
And if you want to talk market power. Microsoft beat Apple, who was ten times its size. And they beat IBM, which was 100+ times its size. How? The same way Android has beaten iOS in smart phones when it comes to market share: distribution across the widest selection of hardware vendors.
Re inflating prices. Actually Microsoft lowered prices substantially.
You should look up how much productivity software cost before Microsoft created Office, and how much easier it was to buy and sell their software. They undercut everybody at the time. Microsoft also was instrumental in vastly bringing down the cost of personal computing by leveraging a standard across consistent hardware. They also made it extremely easy to distribute software, courtesy of a standard, bringing down the cost for software by providing economies of scale. Meanwhile, competing platforms were far more expensive (including Apple's solutions). Also, Microsoft has always charged half or less for Windows than what Intel does for its good consumer processors.
The DOJ got involved because competitors who either screwed up and failed to compete (eg Netscape), or were simply scared (Sun), complained.
Wired's The Truth The Whole Truth article about the case more than spells out how much of a witch hunt it was.
The DOJ tries to control any wildly successful company with market power. For the government, it's all about power over the economy and bringing companies to heel. Anti-trust has little to do with monopolies (if it did, Verizon and AT&T would be broken up).
By releasing a free browser when Netscape used to charge people for access to the World Wide Web (however when Google does the same thing with Android using their search profits and killing RIM/Nokia by dumping a free product, it's a good thing). And by releasing a better browser than Netscape during the 4.0 era.
Or something, I don't know. Linus says it best though: http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...
I've usually find it unproductive to argue facts with people with such an affliction.
No. Compaq, like many other PC makers of the time, made PCs that were compatible with IBM's because they reverse engineered the BIOS. BTW, the first company to do it was Columbia Data Products. Microsoft only licensed an OS, much like Digital Research licensed CP/M, to every computer manufacturer that wanted to distribute it. Their advantage was that PC-DOS was bundled with every PC and that was enough to create critical mass.
On the other hand, the dominance of the PC ecosystem also prevented other architectures from gaining a significant foothold and restricted the kind of computers people could get. If you enjoyed an inferior hardware standard encumbered by processors with convoluted instruction sets, having to set jumpers on expansion boards to resolve hardware conflicts and things like destroying monitor power supplies by setting wrong timings on the CRTC (6854 on MDA), you can thank them for that. I had an Apple II clone (yes, 1977 technology) and never had to set jumpers on an expansion board until I moved to a PC clone in the late 80's.
> leading to lower prices and massive uptake of PCs
I'd credit Commodore for that
> I've usually found it unproductive to argue facts with people with such an affliction.
I don't know why we bother.
You say "only" as if the OS weren't a critical part of running a computer and that Microsoft specially included a clause in their agreement with IBM to be able to license to other manufacturers.
>Their advantage was that PC-DOS was bundled with every PC and that was enough to create critical mass.
You say as if that was a chance happening and not a deliberate and very insightful strategy to acquire that advantage compared to, say Apple. Just like how Google made Android free and open to counter Apple.
>I had an Apple II clone (yes, 1977 technology) and never had to set jumpers on an expansion board until I moved to a PC clone in the late 80's.
That's a nice comparison. If Apple had won instead of Microsoft, computer uptake would've been hampered by higher prices because of the lack of commoditization, having only a single vendor that's known to charge exorbitant margins. If you think Apple computers were expensive, imagine what their prices would've been without competition from PCs.
I'd take much cheaper prices and mutiple PC vendors that encouraged PC adoption in the third world over not having to set a few jumpers. Not to mention that Linux was first developed on x86 machines.
An OS is a critical piece of software, but the PC was also offered with CP/M-86 (IIRC, for a price DR considered suicidal)
> You say as if that was a chance happening and not a deliberate and very insightful strategy
Demanding non-exclusive contract was, in fact, brilliant. That single move turned Microsoft from a small niche software company to the powerhouse it was in the 90's. Had IBM said "no" (as they should), Bill Gates would still be filthy rich and a lot more popular.
> If Apple had won instead of Microsoft (...) having only a single vendor that's known to charge exorbitant margins.
I believe Commodore would have taken care of that. Or Atari. Or VTech, maybe Franklin. Or anyone else. Apple never had the dominance PC cloners have.
Or perhaps you think that a system not backed by IBM would have found success. In other words, multiple companies duking it out with incompatible OSes. How often does that work out?
I submit that the most likely scenario would've been a duopoly -- Apple with the home and education market, IBM with the business market.
Why would a single company take its place?
> DR was charing $240 for CP/M 86 -- the same amount it charged for CP/M on other platforms.
I remember the price was for the IBM-PC bundle and that DR was uncomfortable with it. I also remember CP/M came bundled with many Z-80-based computers of the time - there was not enough hardware standardization to allow shrink-wrapped cross-platform operating systems to exist.
> The other option on the IBM PC was UCSD p-system, which was fatally crippled by the overhead of the interpretation layer
UCSD p-system was cross-platform, at least.
> -- we didn't yet have JIT.
Or maybe we would have one by the late 80's
> multiple companies duking it out with incompatible OSes. How often does that work out?
We don't have enough data to make any accurate predictions. I suppose we may have arrived at a set of basic compatible APIs, much like POSIX, that allowed software designed for it to run on many different computers.
> I submit that the most likely scenario would've been a duopoly -- Apple with the home and education market, IBM with the business market.
And Commodore and Atari sharing the home/gaming market in the US, Acorn and Sinclair in the UK. Commodore would possibly own TV and special effects. 68K (or ARM) based 32-bit boxes would be considered basic home machines and the average person would have access to preemptive multitasking in the mid 80's.
That's a very interesting read, especially with Microsoft's recent adoption of Git in its development tools. (Visual Studio and Team Foundation)
After all, Git was started by Linus, and even LibGit2 (which Microsoft is using) includes some of his original code. So in effect, Microsoft is now shipping code written by Linus. But then, Linus is also shipping code written by Microsoft. So they're even.
When you ignore the ideology and concentrate on engineering, good things can happen.
Er, Bill Gates is definitely a smart guy, but he's never been known as charismatic, or even nice. His reputation at MS was pretty nasty. [I'm talking about his "inside" reputation, to employees; his "outside" reputation tended to be conflated with that of MS (this is very different, for instance, than Steve Jobs, who left a pretty strong impression even on the general public).]
Of course, he's doubtless mellowed with age and with his new post-business role.
They just knew that they couldn't let that opportunity pass away.
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/persistence_pay_1.h...
We all love the oh so charitable landlord who by day evicts his tenants and by night donates cardboard boxes to them for shelter now that they're homeless.
Isn't it so wonderful that the man that's taken more of a share of the world's wealth than any human in history gives some of it back? It should be obvious that if you want to change the world, don't vote or organize, buy more copies of Windows!!
In other words, if you have world-changing vision, and want to succeed on a truly massive scale, you probably have to Think Like A Supervillain (http://dirtsimple.org/2009/02/everything-i-needed-to-know-ab..., http://lesswrong.com/lw/gp7/think_like_a_supervillain/).
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan...
Hell, anyone doing a startup needs to read it anyway.
I can't believe people like those exist that want to learn and reprocure what Gates did to apple and the rest of the world.
In a way I'm glad ballmer is the ceo now, you reap what you sow microshit
All great people have a track record of good and bad decisions. And you cannot take only the ones you like.
Also I had this pretending to be done project once ... one year later we were still struggling, the customer was losing money daily and I was happy watching my management being roasted on a slow fire for not listening to us lowly techies.
This "hack" was super useful for me for identifying what habits and activities really improve my quality of life. May be of help to others as well.