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Bill Gates Reveals Secret of Microsoft's Success
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Gates, in a interview with the BBC, revealed the secret of Microsoft's success: 'Most of our competitors were very poorly run. They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together,' said Gates. 'They did not think about software in this broad way. They did not think about tools or efficiency. They would therefore do one product, but would not renew it to get it to the next generation.' Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation, has a different view: 'Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving. I'd like to smoke what he's smoking.' Gates also said that he took a 'conservative balance sheet approach' to running Microsoft explaining that he wanted 'great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do.'"
..."Jolt" Cola after all.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
While I think Gates' point about merging people with business and engineering experience is valid, there's always an element of luck involved - good thing for Microsoft that Gary Kildall was out flying his airplane when IBM came by.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
with the right mindset...
I have no problem with Microsoft, or Bill Gates. As long as his billions actually end up doing something besides pillaging my wallet with every broken version of windows I'm forced to upgrade to (cough VISTA cough)! But I do have a problem with someone saying "Here's how we got rich..." because their actions are usually not repeatable. After all, we can't start an operating system revolution by stealing someone else's GUI because it's already been done. Many times over.
while(true)
{
//Begin Microsoft Bashing ad-infinitum
}
Now that Microsoft is starting to tumble... NOW you give us your secret key.
Would that be tbe MONOPOLY way?
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
It was all three.
Microsoft repeatedly used this tactic.
1) Pretend to work with another company
2) Steal the good ideas from that company
3) For bonus points, if possible make the next product from that company suck.
4) Profit!
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Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
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However, they worked like demons on their own stuff too. Microsoft worked hard- very hard. It competed very hard (frequently on the edge of legality and sometimes past it). It cheated, scammed, lied, stole.
But it also polished better than ANYONE. Microsoft made things that were arcane and difficult into automatic and easy things.
And it supported (and supports) its customers extremely well. The two times that I called for customer support, they pulled out all stops to support me (a sound card problem with 5 senior engineers, a level 1 and level 2 support on the line- and by god they figured it out after 3-4 hours on the phone). When my business went through the recent DST thing, we had multiple microsoft people on site verifying everything- holding regular meetings. None of our other vendors did that.
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I've compared M$ to an evil parent that wants the best for you as long as you stay home and never go out on your own.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are two "secrets" to Microsoft's success:
1. Microsoft had the luck to work in an exploding market while it was still in its infancy.
2. Microsoft had the shrewdness (or ruthlessness, perhaps) to continue leveraging the advantage conferred by secret 1 for the decades to follow.
This interview is going to be shown on BBC 2 at 7:00PM(UK time) (i.e. in about 50 mins)
He's smoking G-13, dude. $2,000 an eighth (~3.5g, you furiners). It's genetically engineered by the U.S. Government. It's extremely potent, but a completely mellow high. No paranoia.
Everything else is just Gates' PR people trying to make history be kind to Gates, in spite of the fact that he raped the personal computer industry of profits and innovation during his tenure.
I'd be afraid to smoke what they apparently put in the crack pipes at Lotus, at least in the Notes division.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly on the OS for their new PC "toy".
Bill Gates & Co then hired people who knew how to exploit that monopoly.
Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft Blackbird.
Etc.
The difference being that Microsoft had their monopoly to fall back on when their other attempts failed. Their competitors did not.
Bill is going for the "humble" bit now. But that's not how it happened.
Back when OS 2 was being born, MS, Intel, and others funded Citrix, whose head came from the leadership role in the IBM OS/2 group, who when forming Citrix took 14 people with him to Citrix (they were not marketing folks). Ever wonder what 14 missing OS coders that went to Citrix from IBM might have caused, delay-wise, to the whole IBM OS/2 development efforts... yep - that delay then allowed MS Windows to be the choice of the 3rd party applications coders and they, unlike Microsoft would not have had the budget to do both MS Windows and IBM OS/2 apps at the same tiem. Windows was first, and so then Windows was last... It is good that we have the GPL so that the same games can't be played by MS in that space.
microsoft was succesful because they care for *selling* a product rather than selling a *product*. that's why they wanted to sell their toy of an OS while IBM wanted to continue development.
first to market
first to resell their own product with a different paintjob.
microsoft is succesful because that is what they targeted. selling. if they wanted to make great programs they would harvest every cutting edge algorithm relative to computing known to mankind .
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Microsoft was dominant before Windows; only Apple had any chance of challenging them (OS/2 was DOA).
Balance is the key.
Vista is was an over ambitius project. The OS X for the Non-Mac user, with everything that Apple decided not to put in OS X, They listen to their customers and tried to combine all the ideas into one product...
Part of a reqired MBA Class for Information Technology states the larger the project the higher chance of failure. If they had more MBAs they may have known that, and broke it down much earlier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All Bill Gates did was bring a GUI about when every other operating system was still command line based. This then enabled non-technical users to use a computer the way that we do today. He also gave people the tools to develop for the system. It wasn't the way he "went around the world" it was supply and demand. The same can be said for Apple too, as they also brought about a GUI, it just wasn't embraced by many people from the start like Windows was.
Son, you need to go back and study your history a bit. The claim above is on par with Mr. Blutarski's memories of Pearl Harbor.
So, Mr. Gates, please explain what the hell happened w/r/t Vista. Are you saying it flopped because you didn't have enough MBAs and bean counters on the team?
It flopped because it's now difficult to improve the OS enough for people to care. Win95 over Win3.1x was pretty much revolutionary and 2000/XP was even a leap from 9x but because the OS isn't crashing anymore and it does what people need it to do on a regular basis, they just don't have an urge to upgrade.
Vista was basically more of the same and with the mass media and corporations pretty much panning it (much like WindowsME I suppose) why would anyone be interested in running it at home unless it was forced upon them. I don't see it changing much with whatever the next rushed version of Windows is because whatever they come up with, it won't be worth the upgrade like it was in the past.
Good luck to Microsoft.
Correction:
All Bill Gates did was [steal the idea for] a GUI [from Apple, who stole it from Xerox] when every other operating system was still command line based.
Heck, people remember what they want to remember. He most likely thinks that's how it was... Not really it just sort of a happened, they lucked out and when they did they kept running with it. Most people won't admit that their success was luck based, or due to family money, or family/friend connections. They want to think its all because of their own hard work that they've got that nice house and car or richie rich fortune, and they also want others to think that as well.
Nothing to see here. Rich guy got richer, and it now rewriting his history to fit his view point. It's a plot type that's happened lots in the past and will happen lots in the future.
What? You have no idea what you're talking about. There were plenty of operating systems with guis way before Windows. And the rest of your comment is pure nonsense.
Like Steve Jobs said at D5 (http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/):
"Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry..."
So there are two important things, they were focused on software only, and they adapted the correct business model to be focused on software (able to make quick, temporary alliances with many factions).
Basically, it can be summed down to being an agile, nimble competitor. Which has no resemblance to what they've become.
Not in the least. The Chicago GUI was a mentally retarded variant of the OS/2 Workplace Shell. It looked like OS/2 2.x/3.x, but had very little of its functionality, and was significantly less stable than either OS/2 or Win3.1.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wikipedia can be your friend.
Microsoft didn't invent X.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft succeded the same way McDonald's did---sell a bland, familiar, mediocre product in huge volumes at a low-ish but profitable price (this worked for PCs because it's bundled; home users would not have actually paid for Windows). Really, there's no big secret here. The same model works very well for Wal-Mart and Ikea too. It's hard to get those obnoxiously-high volumes if you try to sell on quality and overall value.
I think this is part of Vista's problem. It's still low to mediocre quality, but no longer bland and familiar. It's like McDonald's suddenly trying to get people to buy $12 steaks.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
First and foremost MS is a marketing company. A company that realized early on, quantity is better then quality as it get you onto the consumers/businesses systems.
Second they are a legal firm that applies a chess strategy of sacrifice the pawn to more the knight forward.
Or in other words, what is the risk vs. payoff of breaking teh law?
Third they are, by the court decisions of court around the world, a trust breaking law breaker, a company run in part with anti-trust law breaking tactics.
Fourth, what development they do, it is with intent to dumb down the users and always leave them coming back for improvements but never really doing a complete job.
"The way to be successful is to make people need you" which is achieved by consumer entrapment abuse.
The reason for concern MS has had over open source and its halloween documents evidence is because Open Source, though not a freeing of the consumers is in fact a big step in that direction.
Dumb luck and shady business practices.
They had nothing of any technical merit until NT 4 came out, and haven't had anything since.
Apple and Commodore had GUI-based operating systems before Microsoft developed theirs. Well, that might actually be slightly inaccurate, though no one really counts the Presentation Manager or Windows 1 or Windows 2.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
>great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do
Then why, with the "great financial strength" and the freedom and time and flexibility to innovate that it gave M$, did they (do they) produce so many products that were (and many still are) junk?
Moore's law helped hide how inefficient MSFT coding had become. The marginally legal and outright illegal activities of the business/sales units would not have had this much of success if the vendor lock had not been achieved.
But deep at the core, the dominance of MSFT is because the ignorance of the user base rather than any brilliance of MSFT products.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I was a consultant at Lotus at the time Microsoft started winning in desktop applications.
Bill Gates is essentially correct:
1. Lotus did a much worse job of hiring in professional management and bridging the gap between software development and business.
2. Lotus complicated their tools-set and architecture unnecessarily. This is one factor that killed 1-2-3. Lotus went straight from assembly code speedy to bloated and slow. Ironically, as this was happening, Jon Sachs wrote 1-2-3 C, a simple, fast, and very portable reference implementation.
3. Lotus did a bad job with follow up products. Instead of launching and improving, they would launch, get disappointed, give up, do something else. Or, in the case of 1-2-3, they would overcomplicate. They had very innovative products - ones that could have changed spreadsheets in fundamental ways, and that would still be innovative today. But they did not know how to nurture these products.
Microsoft faces a lot of the same problems now. Microsoft can't seem to make regular incremental improvements to key products, for example. But business isn't about being perfect. It is about being less bad than the other guy.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Apple actually licensed the GUI patents from Xerox. They didn't steal anything.
How do you "do" software?
The AntiJoey
Amiga, ATARI, DecView, GEM, Lisa, MacOS, OS/2, PARC, SunView, X11
Microsoft didn't "bring about" the GUI, they stole the most basic aspects of it and wedged it on top of DOS, which BTW they also stole.
You just couldn't be more wrong.
No but they can be handed a monopoly (by another near monopoly).
Microsoft's success came from a complete lack of ethics.
While companies tried to compete on a level and ethical playing field, Microsoft was dirty dealing them. Stealing their work, poisoning business relationships, intentionally disrupting their businesses, etc.
I can't think of one, that's right, not one product of theirs that won on its own merit. Their whole office suite wouldn't be anything if they didn't create back doors in Windows and DOS for them. Windows wouldn't be anything if they did not poison relations between the likes of Xerox and DRI. DOS would have had competition from DRI if they didn't embed bogus warning messages in their applications. FUD is the modus operandi of Microsoft and how they "succeed."
They took illegal and unethical advantage of every piece of software they ever sold. Every last piece of their software works against every other software ISV.
Those they couldn't beat, they put out of business by dumping "free" versions on the market. Netscape anyone?
"Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving."
I didn't know anyone intentionally bought M$ products. I thought they got shoved down everyones throat when they bought a new PC.
Gates is a lousy programmer and a marketing genius.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
So very much could be said about this statement I don't even know where to begin... I'll simply offer that with regard to "do software in a new way" and "do whatever we wanted to do", there has been less of the former and more of the latter.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Case in point, Bill Gates did NOT write MS-DOS. He BOUGHT it from someone who DID write it. And only then because Bill Gates had already been approached by IBM for licensing of such.
So that alone disproves your theory.
And I always thought it involved this monkey's paw...
. . . I had a sudden vision of millions of Microsoft customers' and users' heads-exploding like mine just did.
What?
When I saw smart I mean it literally. Bill Gates saw the business world. The giants and players who could easily throw you around. The only way to truly compete is to offer something noone else had.
Sure, he ganked the GUI from Steve Jobs, but understand that he ganked the concept... not the code. Bill Gates and his company had a TERRIFIC understanding of what the average user would want in an experience. They also understood what a company would want when making technical decisions at the time
1) Will it do what we need it to do?
2) Can we easily maintain it?
3) Can our users learn to use it quickly and easily?
4) Is it cost efficient?
5) Does it "just work"?
The answers to all of these ONLY Microsoft could say yes to. Apple lost in #3 and #4. Every single apple I used growing up was completely non-user friendly. Microsoft spent millions upon millions understanding what users want to be able to do and made multiple ways to do it to allow a user to choose how they like doing things.
I hear a LOT of people complain about windows software but every single Office App, I've ever used has lived up to my expectations. In my 15 years in the IT industry I still feel that 90% of the problems are user error when it came to basic installs.
The other 10% was comprised of plethora of wierd setups, odd configurations, and *gasp* bad coding.
Don't get me wrong... Microsoft has written a lot of seriously wacked out code that has no business in production. But lets compare... to Lotus Notes. That thing is about as friendly as a porcupine with a machete. It's almost as bad as Groupwise. These people spend $1.99 at Big Lots on a book for "User Friendly" and "Tech Support Friendly".
You might hate microsoft, but they took what every software company was lacking and built that into their business model. Bill Gates is a genius... a low down dirty scoundrel genius... but a genius none-the-less.
I agree with the competitor CEO... Microsoft has had great financial successes over the years, but basing those successes on the quality of the product is laughable. Well, I suppose you could say their financial success IS based on the mediocre quality of the product, because they made lots of profit by lowering development costs (by making average software instead of great software). They met the 70% solution that most businesses are looking for.
Microsoft leadership wisely understood that the vast majority of business owners and other people at the time had no clue what would be good or bad in computing equipment generally, or software or operating software or application design and features specifically.
The key was to get something out there fast, market it as if it was good, and make sure it was what was installed by default on all of
the cheapest computers available.
Only the 0.01% computer or software experts out there would be lamenting for the substantially greater quality and simplicity that could have
been, if only there had been a sophisticated market to begin with.
The effect continues. I mean, for example,
it's now clear to absolutely anyone with a
clue that macs and osx are far superior to
windows xp or vista pcs, but the market share
is still the exact opposite of what it would/
should be if quality were the deciding factor,
and price and lock-in wasn't.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Son, you need to go back and study your history a bit. The claim above is on par with Mr. Blutarski's memories of Pearl Harbor.
Son, you need to learn how to close off italics in html.
Let me tell you what the hell happened with Vista. Development on it started WELL AFTER XP SP2 (which should have been done as a full OS release with a refreshed UI) and it didn't get enough time to get it polished. Microsoft decided to focus on security, sacrificing compatibility and performance. But with SP1 sharing its core with Windows 2008 Server, Vista has already gone through server-class testing. There was a lot of pain with Vista adoption early on, but I am currently running Vista SP1 x64 with Windows Search 4.0 on all of my machines and don't have any compatibility or performance issues. From their statements, it appears that Windows 7 will be focused around compatibility and performance, so hopefully it will be easier to migrate to it.
Other people also saw that selling an OS without selling the hardware could be a viable business. Yet those other companies did NOT survive.
Again, Microsoft BOUGHT their OS from someone who wrote it because HE saw that the OS did not have to be sold with the machine BEFORE Bill Gates saw that (as you claim).
Again, Bill Gates BOUGHT the OS from someone else.By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
....They did not have one successful product to prop up all their other products they brought to the market late as well as cover all of their failures.
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My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
First of all, Xerox had a working demo and many ideas. Apple paid Xerox for rights to use the technology. However Apple designed the Macintosh from the group up based on the ideas that Xerox had developed. They did not have access to the APIs or code that Xerox had.
Microsoft on the other hand had access to many internal APIs that Apple supplied them because MS said they needed them to develop MS products. Microsoft developed Windows based on these APIs. Slight difference.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Here's another history lesson for you.
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/dos.htm
Looks like people (and companies) were writing Operating Systems (and apps) without selling hardware for YEARS before that.
Also, in the English language, "every" and "most" are not synonyms.
Microsoft was one of the first (maybe the first?) company of that era who grew HUGE and simply refused to pay dividends to stockholders. The company grew so well, and shareholder value grew so well, that it worked out ok for everyone, making many a millionaire out of many a stockholder. But the fiscal conservative part is true and interesting. They hoarded cash and they didn't (until recently) spend it on acquisitions. Instead they more or less bullied their way to higher market share, with plenty of cash to pay plenty of lawyers as they went along.
I'm finding I don't have many options for choosing a laptop that doesn't come with Windows... I guess I'll have to hold out for the Linux abacus port.
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cake or death?
A lot of people seem confused or misinformed about the history of Microsoft. I believe that Microsoft is a monopoly because they made a deal with IBM whereby when IBM sold a PC, Microsoft received royalties for MS-DOS. This contract, I hear, was an invention of Bill Gates Sr., a lawyer. The royalties were paid regardless of whether MS-DOS was actually on the machine, thus IBM could not sensibly sell PC's with alternative operating systems (i.e. PC-DOS, etc.).
Thereafter they wielded this contractual monopoly over PC operating systems skillfully, a shining contrast when compared to their essentially bland programming output, and were responsible for a variety of anti-competitive practices over the years. I lament not having documented my observations of these practices, but embrace, extend, extinguish has been honed on many, many occasions from more brutal and subversive tactics such as looking for and intentionally breaking other companies' software (viz. Corel).
Make no mistake, Microsoft's business strategies have been diligently locking in customers through proprietary formats and libraries, as diligently as they have been snuffing out any actual competition with the same. Their contributions to research, development, and technology are essentially non-existent, and virtually unheard of when compared to their revenue.
They are not a development shop; I recall some absurd (but probably accurate) statistic that the cost to the economy due to lost productivity from things such as blue screens of death and the untenable Word interface amounting to the same cost as the September 11th, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, every hour. (This is not to mention the lost productivity to Solitaire) That's a false dichotomy, since who's to say that perfect (or at least working) software would result in ideal output, and it's much the same as saying the millions of songs downloaded each year amounts to trillions in lost revenue to the record companies. Nevertheless, I know that I prefer to waste my time on Slashdot, as opposed to rebooting my machine, or restarting a mangled list in a Word document.
Don't forget about the Andrew Window Manager. It had a process monitor, clock, email alert box and shell that took up the left 1/3 of the screen. Plus gui apps for word processing, email, usenet reader and even a dedicated note-taking application.
I loved it...
While true, that's pretty much the Lotus pot calling the Microsoft kettle black.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
...as I type, the full programme from which the interview is sourced is on BBC Two until 8pm. It's hosted by Fiona Bruce and is called How a Geek Changed the World. It'll shortly be available on the BBC iPlayer, alternatively I'm sure some kind Beastmaster-lover (or hater) with a TV capture card will upload it to YouTube in good time.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Preloading MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows didn't help the competition. Matter of fact, other DOS vendors were excluded if hardware vendors wanted Windows. That's been their strategy. Next thing you knew it, IE was bundled with the OS. Why would someone go out and buy another OS (OS/2), when the PC already came pre-installed. Along came Linux, and now Microsoft has to compete with free. Turn around is fair play.
crock of shit. Bill Gates, et al., were in the right place, at the right time. They got lucky. They got lucky with (IBM) DOS, they got lucky with early versions of windows, they got lucky with Word/Excel under Windows because Lotus and WordPerfect completely fscked up their first versions for windoze. They got lucky with Win95 over OS/2, they got lucky with XP because linux/gnu/gnome/kde weren't ready to take them on. They weren't so lucky with vista.
Salut,
Jacques
"Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation, has a different view: 'Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving. I'd like to smoke what he's smoking."
Anybody used Microsoft Outlook? Anybody used Lotus Notes? Maybe if old Mitch was smoking some of what old Billie boy was smoking, he could have written a email client that was complete ass!
I was a Lotus SmartSuite user. I used to go out of my way to get anyone to switch to it I could vs. Word Perfect or that Microsoft "Word" thing. Having only used Lotus SmartSuite and word perfect for DOS, I was convinced it Lotus could only improve and maintain dominance of the spreadsheet.
In the first weeks of an internship in 1996 I was forced to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint and that was it.
Office 97 sealed the deal. Lotus had been left in the dust. Not smoke.
So for once Bill Gates has said something of significant importance for everybody -- everybody, that is, who is smart enough to recognize the wisdom here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not in the least. The Chicago GUI was a mentally retarded variant of the OS/2 Workplace Shell. It looked like OS/2 2.x/3.x, but had very little of its functionality, and was significantly less stable than either OS/2 or Win3.1.
What ? Windows 95 was streets ahead of Windows 3.1 in stability, especially if it was running 32 bit across the board (drivers and software).
OS/2 vs Windows 95 was basically even, because while OS/2 had less legacy crap to cause problems, it did have the infamous SIQ regularly causing problems.
Mr Kapor claims that Microsoft "took advantage" of its position in controlling the operating system to make life hard for independent software developers like Lotus.
When these criticisms are put to Mr Gates, he says he finds it "ironic" that he could be accused of such a thing when Microsoft had "evangelised" its software to other companies, begging them "please write software for our platform".
I was at Lotus from '83 to '93, and I distinctly remember Microsoft visits, begging us to target our apps for their next OS: OS/2. While Excel for Windows was almost certainly already in development.
Take a look at what's new in Vista.
Aero ==> See through windows and some useless 3d effects..mehGadgets ==> The only useful one is the one that shows your processor and memory usage
Internet connection is easier==> good feature
Media Center ==> nice having a DVR..good feature
And that's it. I honestly can't think of anything else in there. It's not a case of Marketing asking for too much. It's a case of Engineering being incompetent and not delivering. 6 years for just those crappy feature? lol
Selling office 97 pro for $99 to the consumer, and licensing it to universities for $1 a copy is reaping HUGE benefits right now. An entire generation of people, college educated people, grew up with office 97 and now demand it at home and in the workplace.
Bill Gate's account is obviously self serving. But, maybe msft competitors did make some big mistakes.
For a while, OS/2 really was much better than windows. But IBM did not even include OS/2 on their own PCs. And IBM kept the price of OS/2 high. I kept wondering why IBM was letting msft take the whole market. IBM should have sold their machines with OS/2 installed by default, and boxed OS/2 should have cost no more than $10 a copy.
In early 1990s, when window 3.x and the cheap clones came out, Apple should have reduced the cost of the Mac dramatically. Instead, Apple kept their profit margins high, while msft ate their lunch.
Msft put out some bad products. But, msft fundamentally understood the business better than msft's competitors. Msft's basic philosophy was/is: control the standard, and the money will follow. Apple and IBM did not fully understand the importance of controlling the standard, at least not soon enough.
JMHO.
Microsoft didn't "bring about" the GUI, they stole the most basic aspects of it and wedged it on top of DOS, which BTW they also stole.
Next time someone "steals" from me, I hope they also leave a big pile of money behind !
End of.
People seem to forget that when DOS was dying and it was time to move to an OS with a graphical shell there was a choice. There was OS/2 and there was Mac. OS/2 seemed certain to win but it turned out to be utter crud. Mac was a niche at the time only really appealing to the creatives. Windows 3.1 was not good, but it was better than the rest. And Windows for Workgroups with decent networking clinched the deal.
As the manager of a small ISV I know for sure that our success would not have been possible without the existence of a universal de facto standard, namely the Windows desktop. We haven't had to port our app for 10 years because of the stability of the Win32 API. Compare this to the hell of Mac development over those 10 years. And as for Linux? All rather academic since none of our potential clients have expressed any interest in running on Linux.
They won because they were better than the competition at the key points in the battle. Excel beat 1-2-3 because it was better. Word beat Word Perfect because it was better. Outlook beat Notes because it was better. And Windows beat Mac because it was better. Not that the MS products were universally wonderful. Sometimes they won because average is better than rubbish. But they were still better when it counted.
End of.
and then proceeded to give away office apps until the they were entrenched.
You mean there are MBAs that ain't yes-men?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Any company with a sufficiently large legal budget can ignore the law, ethics, and morality with impunity. By the time you've been convicted, your competitors will already be out of business, leaving you a monopoly.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
The secret is in the past:
Interviewer: Mr. Gates, what is best in business?
Gates: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.
Because, it seems the rest of the world believes it's the polar opposite -- too many accountants and business managers making the decisions, and not enough technical solutions.
Who believes that? Vista is pretty well engineered compared to previous versions and that's the problem. They had to consciously break backwards compatibility, Windows's main reason for dominance, to fix fundamental architecture problems.
So, suddenly Windows has lots of broken applications in record percentages and worse driver support than Linux, and people don't want it. They want compatibility and security, but given that they can't have both they'll be short-sighted and take compatibility.
The 'Are you Sure?, Are you Sure?, Are You Sure?' GUI stuff is just salt in the wound.
But given a Windows to run in VMWare when I really need to access something that WINE can't handle, Vista is much easier to use and more reliable. However, it doesn't meet the majority of customers' requirements. No self-respecting engineer builds a solution that doesn't solve the proper problem.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And all this time, I thought it had something to do with occult rituals and human sacrifice.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
The guys who report to the MBA's are usually the Yes Men. Not enough credentials to think they are smarter then them and not enough corage to say there is a problem. The MBA program espectially in information Technology is about pinpointing and fixing problems as early as possible. however Yes Men make that harder because they are afraid of pointing out problems, thus MBA think everything is doing good thus keep on the track to disaster.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, there's an entertaining book called In Search of Stupidity that makes the same claim as Bill Gates.
Tech Companies succeed not by maximizing excellence (the book is a response to In Search of Excellence) but by minimizing stupidity.
Actually, he (with IBM's help) made a Personal Computer for businesses where other at the time for enthusiast machines. Businesses used to use mainframe type things (I recall my work experience days, where I went ot a local boiler-maker's IT department and was not allowed near The Computer. I was given this beige PC in a side room that they were evaluating).
Suddenly any busines could afford to buy a PC and run Lotus 1-2-3 on it to do their accounts. It was a paradigm change, about as innovative as putting a search form on the internet.
The software was just a side effect.
For the brazillionth time, Apple didn't steal anything from Xerox. Please stop repeating this to justify what Microsoft has done. Steve Jobs arranged with Xerox for his engineers to visit PARC to see the Xerox Alto and Smalltalk in exchange for Apple stock options.
Gates is quite right; I remember history exactly as he recounts it in TFA. Except for one irony: Lotus, WordPerfect and others did not write for Windows early because they wanted to avoid being dependent on Microsoft after having been shafted in their plans to use Expanded Memory (LIM-4.0) for their DOS programs while Microsoft was preparing an incompatible extended memory management for Windows, locking out their previous development and meaning their codebase would have to be completely rewritten for Windows.
They hated MS and tried to bolt from its control.
They lost. Partly because MS' listened to business users' needs and was first to market with Windows business apps.
Don't buy what they're selling.
Don't buy MSWindows, of course.
But, also, don't buy "netbook" class PCs with iNTEL chips.
Huh? Why? Isn't AMD just as bad?
Actually, I was thinking of VIA, of course. Or wishing that someone would build a netbook with a low-power PPC or an ARM or (why not?) ColdFire. The more, different CPUs, the merrier.
Supporting the underdog is actually an act of self-preservation. Keep the dogs busy fighting each other and they have to treat us with some sort of respect.
Don't buy what they're selling, but especially when they're selling the "Everybody's doing it!" excuse.
Software makes a stupid business model specifically because the road to mediocrity is paved by the temptation of lock-in. (Low expectations? There you are.)
Think twice about the philosophy you spout, sometimes.
Gates also said that he took a 'conservative balance sheet approach' to running Microsoft explaining that he wanted 'great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do.'
So, explain why the Microsoft BOD has avoided listing on the NYSE. There is often a premium in valuation that goes with the listing. But there's also more stringent reporting and governance required by that exchange. The way I see it, Microsoft has forgone a significant amount of value (on behalf of their shareholders) in exchange for less balance sheet scrutiny.
Microsoft isn't stupid (business wise, that is). They compared the potential valuation gain of an NYSE listing against the value that some of their more questionable tactics were producing and went with the latter.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, there it is again...(sigh)
"fucking" "RUTHLESS" "Cut-throats" "gangsters".. etc..
What, in goodness sakes did MS ever do to you? And, oops- You forgot to include the obligatory M$ in your diatribe.
You must be real fun to talk to in a bar after a few beers, hmmm?
.
- aqk
F U
Let's look at some of Microsoft's early competitors and the dumb decisions they made. Ironically, though, for each and every point I list, you can see that Microsoft has learned all the dumb answers of its competitors.
1. CP/M, ultimately crushed by DOS. Microsoft basically gave DOS away to every OEM there was, while CP/M stuck to its higher priced format. Now, Linux is making inroads on Microsoft because its free, whereas Microsoft is increasingly a stickler for Windows licensing.
2. Borland vs Microsoft. Borland struck an early lead in Microsoft in tools by making a Pascal that was better than DOS BASIC, and then, by making a C++ that was better than Microsoft's. But, Microsoft came up with VB, whose scripting style made it easier to work with than Borland's Pascal, and negated the advantages of Borland C++, and then, for C++, Microsoft's Visual C++'s 2.0 was hands down a better IDE than Borland's C++ IDE was.
Now, Microsoft is losing tools mindshare to Linux, because, interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl / PHP are easier to do quick and dirty RAD style web apps with, while Microsoft's own offerings are getting increasingly complicated... and Microsoft's letting their own C++ product languish while the GNU compiler keeps getting better and better, and Linux IDE's such as KDevelop actually now surpass Visual Studio for C++ development. Microsoft needs to realize that the .NET one platform fits all approach is ultimately a loser, but, we Linux fans hope they don't realize it until it is too late!
3. Borland vs Microsoft Round 2. Borland's Quattro Pro was an early favorite over Excel, but Excel wound up carrying the day just through a sheer weight of features. But the really telling battle came when Borland bought Ashton Tate, and Microsoft bought a tiny company that made an Ashton Tate clone called FoxPro. FoxPro was, way, way faster than dBASE and Borland was late with its dBASE anyway. Microsoft would later seal the deal with MS Access, which was easier for quick and dirty database projects than either xBASE product.
Now, Microsoft's own office products are late, and Open Office continues to make inroads. Nobody has really answered Access yet, but... MySQL has quietly dominated the enterprise for quick and dirty databases in the same sort of way Access snuck into the desktop.
4. Microsoft vs IBM. Oh, let's see, how did IBM screw up OS/2, let me count the ways. IBM wanted to tie OS/2 to PS/2 offerings... IBM's OS/2 marketing was hamfisted whereas Microsoft basically let everyone copy Windows like the plague... whereas Microsoft wanted Windows to run on all sorts of PCs... Windows wasn't "as good", but it did have a better message queue than OS/2 and didn't require users to throw away DOS completely at a time when that mattered...
Nowadays, Microsoft is the company that ties Windows to specific hardware, whereas Linux runs on just about everything. While Microsoft still has a stranglehold on PCs, in every other kind of computer out there, from cell phones to digital control devices to routers and set top boxes, Linux actually has a growing presence. And, ironically, if you want to write for POWER Linux, IBM will be more than happy to set you up with an account at an IBM data center... what will Microsoft do, hmmmm?
4. Microsoft vs Apple, round 1. Windows color, Macintosh, black and white. Woops... but even today, we can see Linux rolling out with better and better eye candy and graphic effects. When Vista first threatened integrated 3d graphics ala OS/X, Linux people could have almost panicked, yet, they rolled up their sleeves and by the time Vista arrived, Compviz was here and many Linux desktops actually look better than Windows. Can you say Ubuntu?
5. Openness. Microsoft came to being in a day when Microsoft's level of documentation gave it a more open feel over what software bundled by hardware makers would give. While we think of Microsoft as being hard nosed and closed today, 20 years ago, they were
This is my sig.
when i first read the title, i thought he was going to say "Pot".
Developers developers developers developers.
And keeping the chairs locked down. Once they started throwing chairs around Google started eating their lunch.
Everyone was selling Cesspools, one per house.
Microsoft had the luck to be offered a contract to pipe up a street.
Microsoft then had the vision to extend that piping to a town. They made sure they owned the pipes and controlled the connections. And if anyone invented a better pump or connector, they bought them out.
Now we're at a stage where we all use the system, but unfortunately Microsoft has the patent on making 3" pipes, and only those will fit into the system.
The sewage system, like interchangable data on PCs, is a natural monopoly. Should we allow only one company to make 3" pipes?
If Gates hired a programmer, gave him the goal, DOS 1.0, and the guy wrote it, then Microsoft developed DOS. But if Microsoft finds someone who wrote something basic as a hobby, offers him money, then sells it, he bought DOS?
Gates would have bought DOS regardless of if they cut the guy a check for the software or paid him out on a W-2, so who cares?
Why is it that war in the marketplace is more acceptable than war on the streets?
I suppose people die more immediately from bombs and bullets, but putting people out of jobs is not a nice thing to do, either.
And monopolies cannot employ as many people as a collection of competing companies, and they cannot provide as many solutions.
Why is it that people can't see that the end goal of competition is not just one single winner?
The heads of record companies are geniuses.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Rich CEO says success of his company is due to his own smarts and foresight. News at 11:15 (we need the other 15 minutes for the dupe).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Win32s was used in so few apps that I don't really consider it serious. Windows 95 was quite a bit less stable than Win3.1 in my experience. It wasn't until Windows 98SE that they really ironed out the substantial issues with the Win9x system?
The message queue was a problem in OS/2, but I can only assume that you never used WPS if you think Win95's GUI was comparable. The amount of configurability in the folders, the fact that everything on the desktop was an object (heck, I could set files to open by a specific program without even having to rely on a specific extension). I used WPS for about a year before Win95 came out, and I thought Win95 was absolute crap, ripping off the folders on the desktop idea, but none of the configuration options.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have Vista (now SP1) on my laptop and it runs perfectly well.
Of course one of the first things I did was remove all that sickly blue marshmellow eye-candy, and reverted to the Classic "Win2k" GUI.
If you didn't know any better, you'd think it was W2K.
It NEVER crashes. It boots quickly, and oh yes- I even have Linux on the PC.
But guess which OS I have defaulted my GRUB to boot into?
.
- aqk
F U
I just had a vision of this... I like Apple products, but this is scary. I'll take Microsoft dominance over software than Apple's over hardware any day.
how could he have stolen something that he paid for?
no one says that KDE "stole" ideas form windows. But if windows have some resemblance with some older platform or OS ever /.er says he "sole" from the older one.
Gates described his failing competitors as Microsoft today, what with loads of techs working for MS saying Vista sucks, while management says push it anyway.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You admire Gates for what he did?
But, yeah. Recursive is the way you build a monopoly. You go around to all the suits and you _sell_ them on the idea that you have the only product that does what they want.
All the other products, you tell them, are out of their market for some reason -- too artistic, too technical, too much of a toy, too easy to use, too hard to use, too hard to keep the serfs from using in some unplanned way, too something they are scared of.
It's a sell job. And it is recursive. You have to get the customers to believe you already, for all practical purposes, have the monopoly. (And you define all practical purposes as being whatever your product already does. Recursive, get it?)
And that is precisely what Gates did. I remember reading the trade magazines back in the mid-eighties and thinking things like, "What is that guy smoking? Is anyone really going to believe that?" And then being surprised when they did believe it.
People bought Microsoft's argument that their stuff did things the right way because it was them doing it. No one else's attempts to solve the difficult computing problems got any respect because Microsoft said they already had it solved in any way that mattered. (And any way that they didn't have it solved, by definition, didn't matter.)
And I remember having the wool pulled over my eyes, as well. One of the reasons I gave up on trying to build a PC-class machine to compete with IBM's PC is that IBM was selling the idea that anybody building and selling computers had to be able to properly support them, had to have the business resources to guarantee being able to provide service to the customer five years down the road, etc. Nobody, least of all IBM, was doing that.
But IBM handed that image to the Bill and Steve act, and they took it and ran with it. IBM gave them the one thing they could bootstrap their recursive sales arguments with, and they were "smart" enough to take it and run.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
How buying a product from another company is stealing ? Yes they didn't wrote the code but they BOUGHT it not stolen ...
Now going to another company, lets call them XEROX, see what they had develop and then copy EVERY aspect of it without giving back any compensation whatsoever and then sell that product, lets call it .. hmmm ... Mac OS ...
Now THAT is stealing ... see the difference ?
Microsoft's success can be pinpointed to one day in time when all of IBM's lawyers were at Gary Kildall's house. Gary was out screwing around in his Cessna that day and Dorothy basically freaked out during the negotiations for DOS. When Digital Research punted the IBM deal, that's when the phenominal $50,000 investment in Tim Patterson's DOS became Microsoft Legend.
I'm not sure that Gates knew that IBM was going to pull parts off the shelf to slam together a PC, and I doubt he knew that clever reverse engineering of the ROM BIOS that Compaq would do would cause the Attack of The PC Clones to occur and the money bags to fall from the sky at Microsoft.
If you ever read any Gates biography, documentaries etc, almost all literature dedicates a large amount to that particular point in time.
Bob Cringley's PBS Triumph of the Nerds spends about 30 minutes of the documentary on this decision.
Stephen Manes' Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America -- dedicates an entire chapter to this event.
Even Noah Wiley's Pirates of Silicon Valley does a silly bullet time effect on this one moment.
Son, you need to go back and study your history a bit. The claim above is on par with Mr. Blutarski's memories of Pearl Harbor.
Son, you need to learn how to close off italics in html.
Strange. It looked good in preview, but posted as italics. I went back to see if I had muffed the slash in the original close. It was OK. Somehow the next paragraph autoitalicized.shady backroom deals that goes 'rub my back, ill rub yours'. you played the 'good, agreeable kid' to big buck corps since you started business bill. you have been their lapdog. excuse me, but anyone would succeed after getting big boys behind you by playing their yes man.
Read radical news here
IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly on the OS for their new PC "toy".
Microsoft already had a monopoly on DOS—they owned it. Gates was clever enough to (a) to not give the monopoly away to IBM, (b) to publish the APIs, so anyone could code for it, and (c) to license it at a reasonable price to anyone who wanted it (a Microsoft operating system still costs a little less than a decent bicycle—just as it did in 1981).
Gates wasn't alone; Borland had the same strategy, but then they got greedy and lost their focus.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
The religion of worshipping it just because it's big?
Let me turn your arguments around --
Do you want antibiotics built by a company that's too big to give you anything but antibiotics, when all you really needed was a cough drop?
You are an individual. You don't need a big company to tell you what medicine you need.
Your argument that only big companies could do all the things that supposedly make the modern world better are specious and self-referential. Personally, I could have waited a few more years for the internet, if waiting might have meant more CPU choices, more OS choices, more browser choices, etc.
And, no, I don't think it's a tragedy that there are (still) people dying of diseases that might be cured if we could only throw enough money at the big companies fast enough.
In part because I know the big companies have not been the ones actually solving the real problems.
And in part because I've lived long enough to know that many of the present solutions will turn out to be as bad as or worse than the original problems.
An if you ask me if I'd still say this if it were my cousin? It was.
(What use religion? Well, because I believe that death isn't the end, I can have patience while we work out real solutions. I don't feel compelled to buy the fastest answer, whether it's right or not.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
http://developer.apple.com/
There is one reason, and one reason only that Microsoft is the size they are today: The MS-DOS deal with IBM. It was a pretty good, inexpensive operating system; easy to develop for; and businesses were clamoring for PC's. The extreme popularity of the combination of an IBM PC (or compatible); MS-DOS; and Lotus-123 put Microsoft in the position to become the behemoth it is today.
All this talk about innovation or bringing business and engineering together is just absolute bullshit.
Proverbs 21:19
Let us not forget that they used a government funded PDP-10 at Harvard to develop MSBASIC, anyone else who did that, their software wound up being owned by Harvard and the government, but BillG managed to con TPTB into letting him keep it.
In other words their whole business is based on something they stole from all of us.
Win32s was used in so few apps that I don't really consider it serious.
Win32s != Win32. Windows 95 was the latter (although it also supported the former).
Windows 95 was quite a bit less stable than Win3.1 in my experience.
Then you were - depending on your perspective - either very luck or very unlucky.
The message queue was a problem in OS/2, but I can only assume that you never used WPS if you think Win95's GUI was comparable.
I used WPS quite a lot. I considered Windows 95's GUI comparable because I - like most people - never used any of the WPS's more advanced functionality for anything more than "playing".
The amount of configurability in the folders, the fact that everything on the desktop was an object (heck, I could set files to open by a specific program without even having to rely on a specific extension). I used WPS for about a year before Win95 came out, and I thought Win95 was absolute crap, ripping off the folders on the desktop idea, but none of the configuration options.
I'm not going to argue the WPS wasn't technically impressive (although there were some utterly braindead ideas, like the standard keyboard shortcuts), I'm just going to make the point that most of that cool stuff was never really leveraged out in the real world, and because of this - *practically speaking* - Windows 95's UI was comparable.
Nothing I love more than a goalpost shift.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... but they pushed too hard. They tried to control the standard harder than Microsoft did, and they lost because of it.
OS/2 didn't stand by itself. It was part of IBM's PS/2 strategy, which was to make the PC a proprietary architecture and kill off the clone vendors. The PS/2 architecture was patent encumbered, so that nobody could make it but IBM. They were trying to close off the world so that everyone would have to come to them.
Microsoft set people free - from that. But they locked people in to Windows. But, since the software was a lot cheaper than the hardware, and this made for cheaper hardware, it was a big win.
So, unbelievably, Microsoft wound up (at this point) winning the market by being LESS controlling and restrictive.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Is fleenbat Dutch for flamebait?
Both Apple and Microsoft "stole" the GUI from Xerox PARC so that one is the only original GUI. The other GUIs you mention are all newer mac clones. No sane person would ever sugggest cloning X11 because that person would be fired on the spot, hopefully executed.
"Why!? Look, it can run multiple virtual terminals in white rectangles. And we have an B&W analog clock too! Nooooo!!!" *BANG*
Their products were a hell of a lot better than Apple's at the time.
So says random geek on slashdot...hardly unbiased commentary there.Apparently I hit a nerve.
I stand by my comment. If you pick a laptop for the hardware, you often have no choice in the accessories. It's the same thing with many products. Just because I buy a GM vehicle doesn't mean I chose it for the brand of stereo.
I thought Bill followed the Conan way of doing business. You know "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women".
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
But it also polished better than ANYONE.
What's my secret to successful slashdot posting? Why, getting the FIRST POST!!!!! of course. It's made me, Anonymous Coward, the pinnacle of internet personalities and I am, for one, quite proud of all my many, many accomplishments. Off to troll Fark.com now!
Microsoft has people skills - it's good at dealing with people! What the hell is wrong with you, people??
Microsoft's business model, as we all know, has been to sell second-rate software to unsophisticated customers. But why did this succeed?
I'm at an age when I can begin touting my age as a factor in making arguments, so here is my take on this. Some of us remember the "mainframe" days. My particular experience was working at Motorola's government electronics group during a time when there was a need to upgrade the (that's right, "the") engineering computer. Bids were taken, executives were wined and dined, and a Sperry Univac was bought (replacing a much-loved but very tired Honeywell model). The engineers were livid because the Univac sucked. I actually sat in a small, packed conference room with Sperry bigshots while we berated them on the problems with their computer. Not two years later, the Univac was dumped for---drum roll--an IBM. Engineers were pleased with the new machine.
It was during this period that I first heard the mantra: "You can't be fired for buying IBM." Everyone knew it. It always remained a mystery what influence Sperry was able to exert, but there was always a suspicion of foul play in the decision to get the Univac.
This period was approximately 1982-1984. An IBM PC showed up in my lab. Other small lab computers were showing up, such as HP and an excellent machine from Three Rivers Computer, which engineers were using for suspicious activities such as writing reports. Management became petrified, and a moratorium against the purchase of new personal computers was put into place. (i'm not kidding--I was on a committee to decide what to do about the "problem." One of the subjects we confronted was networking and Ethernet. The consensus of the committee was, Who the hell would ever need 10 Mbps?)
The decision was made (around the time I left the company to return to graduate school). IBM PCs were the official choice of Motorola's government electronic group.
This might sound like a trite explanation, but I have thought about it for many years. I truly believe that such a reasoning was behind much of the success of the IBM PC (and by IBM's decision to farm out the OS, Microsoft).
"You can't be fired for buying IBM."
Yes, and CP/M and p-system were more expensive, and thus DOS became the dominant system. They gained a monopoly through a bit of luck and a bit of business acumen. Then they exploited that monopoly.
So Microsoft offers the most desirable of three choices, based on multiple factors... cost among them... and they became, by customer choice, the overwhelming favorite. That makes them predatory at this point? And while MS was the favorite choice of PC users, PC's still weren't the goliath of the market yet.... until the mid-80's, the Apple II ruled the roost, and then the Macintosh arrived, and sold very respectably. The Amiga also provided a serious challenge. Microsoft had a technical monopoly of sorts, but it was on one platform... they had significant competition from other platforms all throughout the 80's. Microsoft didn't become truly dominant until the early 90's, when Windows 3.1 really began to popularize home computing, And they sealed it by knocking the ball out of the park with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.In the big money sector... business IT... Microsoft was still a bit player until the 90's, and they had to get their foot in the door by marketing Microsoft operating systems as "playing nice with others"... meaning, yes, you can run Windows as a workstation on your existing (and expensive) Unix and Novell servers.
Microsoft did become a monopoly, I grant you, but they were nowhere near one in the time frame you mention. They were, while profitable, still small fry in the early 80's, and made much of their money writing software for other platforms. Excel was a Macintosh product long before it was a Windows product.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
But we have to look at alternative costs.
Yes, Microsoft's influence did a lot to commoditize hardware. But at what price? Embrace, extend, extinguish, broken standards, stifling innovation and crushing competition? People are now writing applications that use a freaking WEB BROWSER as an application client to work around desktop monopoly. How screwed up is that? The most widely used operating system still doesn't have a proper software packaging nor automatic upgrade for installed packages.
For crying out loud, two main operating systems in use today is a rehash of Windows NT and a rehash of Unix which is 40 years old? Why isn't there something completely different? No radical changes. No disruptive technologies. No big breakthroughs. Microsoft monopoly is partially to blame.
Maybe if there was no Microsoft, we would have some working standards for operating systems, software and file formats. Maybe we would have a healthy marketplace for software. Maybe computers would be even more widespread and accessible. Maybe we would have innovations we cannot dream of right now, because they never happened. Because they were doomed in an environment with a hostile desktop monopoly and nobody even bothered.
--Coder
Don't break your wrist patting yourself on the back...
you fucking asshole.
Windows is unmitigated shit - and so is your company - and so are you.
Have a nice day.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Doesn't speak well for Microsoft that the shiny new version of their flagship software only works well when you change it to work like an 8 year old version.
"The initial competitors were IBM and Apple, both are alive and well"
First off, IBM wasn't a Microsoft competitor until OS2. Up to that point, Microsoft was a business partner... IBM supplied hardware, Microsoft supplied software. It wasn't until MS screwed IBM that the relationship turned bad. Remember, OS2 was jointly developed by both (but more by MS than IBM), and the agreement was for OS2 to replace Windows. MS then took what work they'd done on the project, poured it into a project that would become Windows NT, and essentially stabbed IBM in the back. So while IBM was hugely profitable at the time because of their hugely rich mainframe business, their PC sector was poorly run, very much so. The PC Jr in particular was a fiasco. And that's why the cloners came and destroyed IBM in that market so quickly.
Second, while Apple was also profitable at this time, it was because of the Apple II cash cow, which provided the majority of Apple revenues until 1986. We think the Mac as legendary today because of what it could do at the time, but sales were initially dissapointing. And pick up any of several books about Apple during the period and you'll find out just how horrible Apple's leadership was. Woz was basically a geek that didn't want any management responsibility, Mike Markula was a VC guy that had good business sense, but didn't know anything about technology, and so Steve Jobs basically ran the place on the strength of his personality. And the problem is that back then, Steve Jobs was a lousy manager. He was great at motivating people, but he couldn't manage for sh*t. He consistently ran over budget, over schedule, overworked and terrorized a very talented team, and basically acted like a spoiled, imperious rich kid. People put up with it because of the reality distortion field, but he was just an all around awful guy. On trip to Japan to inspect a Sony floppy drive factory, he made such an ass of himself that Markula pulled him aside and threatened to fly back to the US without him. All told, he was so bad at what he did, Apple fired him, remember? Jobs is a great business leader now, but he really didn't learn how to manage until his failure at NeXT, where suddenly, it was his money he was burning through, not someone else's. Before NeXT, Jobs always got what Jobs wanted, usually with someone else's dollars. He was at times more concerned about the ambience of his facilities than he was of the actual product. He learned hard lessons about business priorities. Read about his period at NeXT. Jobs will never be a humble man, but his years at NeXT really wised him up. Failure really is the best teacher.
Bottom line... at the time period Bill Gates is talking about, IBM and Apple were badly run in the personal computer market, and Microsoft just took advantage of it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I watched TFV in TFA too, and what he seemed to be saying was that a key to their success was having access to the source code for the operating system they were using. Oh the irony.
"Our Job Ain't Done Until Lotus Won't Run!"
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
It's the face of it. Migod redux.
;-)
I didn't change it to WORK, but to LOOK like an 8 year old version. I never DID like that crappy confusing Start menu of XP and Vista, those fade-in fade out menu items etc...
But hey- that's just me. I'm an old guy. I don't like sugar in my cornflakes.
WHAAAT! Next you'll be asking me why I got a new car with a standard transmission, instead those weenie automatics!
Grrrr....!
.
- aqk
F U
Microsoft launched in 1975.
In 1980 it was a powerhouse in the world of the eight bit micro - and very well positioned to enter the OS market. It was young, it was hungry, and it was moving up fast.
IBM's PC development team didn't just happen to drop on by - Microsoft's participation in the project was a given.
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking down and nothing much was coming out of Digital Research.
Microsoft promised nothing more than delivery of a serviceable DOS in time for launch - a DOS that would sell for the low, low price of $40.
> Well, that might actually be slightly inaccurate,
> though no one really counts the Presentation
> Manager or Windows 1 or Windows 2.
Yes, they do. They may not have enjoyed Windows 1 or 2, but they definitely counted when determining who was first, especially as MS used the mistakes of earlier Windows to improve the later versions, at least until Win2000.
The real reason Gary Kildall's OS failed to become the standard is that he charged $240 for it while MS-Dos was $40 (according to wikipedia). Both were available for the PC early enough, but that price difference did them in. Gates was a genius at marketing, pricing, and packaging. He balanced price versus long-term goals and knew what the market would bear. This, is Gate's real genius. Bundling of MS-Office was a similar clever strategy that dethroned Lotus, WordPerfect, and Paradox in one swipe. (Inside knowledge of its own OS may have also helped.)
Table-ized A.I.
In 1979 Microsoft 8080 BASIC was the first microcomputer product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award.
No one - no one - had to tell IBM in 1980 how far and how fast Microsoft had risen in the world of the eight bit micro.
.
The pre-3 versions of Windows were not big sellers, and neither was OS/2 with the Presentation Manager. Besides, the Mac was there first mainstream consumer GUI-based operating system, and the Amiga came out not too long afterwards. Until Windows 3.0, I think it's safe to say that Microsoft's GUI efforts were pretty half-hearted. I don't actually recall seeing any PCs or clones with Windows until Windows 3.1. Just about every business system I saw in the late 1980s was running DOS 3.x (mainly DOS 3.3, or PC-DOS). Back in those days, WordPerfect, DBase and Lotus were pretty much the kings, and none of the big accounting software vendors like Bedford (later Simply) or AccPac had Windows versions. I didn't see any OEM versions of Windows until somewhere around 1991 when the first 386 desktops started appearing in large numbers, and the place I was working at bought two 386SX 4mb workstations and a 386DX with 8mb for me.
Windows 1 and 2 don't get much mention in the history of GUIs mainly because they sucked and didn't really make any market penetration. OS/2 was pretty damned rare too, so you didn't see a lot of PM installs. Macs were the 1980s GUI king, and, for a while, Amigas were pretty common (particularly in schools, though PCs were all over the place when I was taking my office admin classes in the late 1980s, again running WordPerfect and DBase).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I happen to think Gates did contribute a business discipline to IT when none was present, but I often wonder if he's really starting to feel the heat from competition today, now (especially as he's stepping out from msft completely). He should.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
There were many other companies that would have provided better software. It took IBM 15 years to realize that non free software was a bad idea, but they know it now. IBM and Apple were not the only companies making good hardware as you might suspect from the hundreds of makers that exist today.
Political torture and murder is not funny http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=581079&cid=23757591
Firstly, Windows 95 - assuming no legacy drivers and software - relied on DOS for little more than a bootloader (much like Windows 3.1 and 3.11 before it). Secondly, Microsoft were developing and releasing 32 bit OSes well before Windows 95, including OS/2, Xenix and Windows NT. The point was that the OS Microsoft shipped as the desktop of the future was full of 16bit code and hardly used the capabilities of the CPUs at the time. Windows NT was a bloated pig and not only was it slow but required a massive increase in system resources. It was first stated to be the desktop of the future when OS/2 v2.0 was to ship but when it was finally shipped, they pulled back and claimed Chicago was the future desktop. It took almost 4 years for Chicago to ship as Windows 95 and it was pathetic compared to what IBM shipped many years earlier. Only by using false promises, bad press and other marketing tactics were they able to hold the market waiting for Windows 95. So while they had thier hands in 32bit OSs, they sucked at implementation. Microsoft to this day differentiates between a client OS and a server OS and that is ridiculous. It is a very common distinction, made by numerous OS vendors both past and present. There are not that many and it was Microsoft who purposefully disabled OS features and modified licensing to prevent users from using the OS for anything but a stand alone desktop PC with only client networking capabilities. Once again the naive public believes Microsoft's description of a desktop OS and accepts it. Ignorance is bliss. What year/millennium was it that the powerhouse that is Microsoft had a proper operating system for the masses? Without knowing what you mean by "proper OS" and "for the masses", a question impossible to answer. However, by any consistent definition of them, they were pretty much the first to do so. A kernel controlled multi tasking and memory managed system which didn't require 4x time the system resources of the current standard desktop PC. IIRC, Windows 2000 only require 2x the standard memory requirements and CPUs where quite capable at that time since it was a 32 bit design. But they did it almost 10 years after many others had already provided more robust 32bit OS's.
And while we are at it, by strong arming the marketing into their inferior technology, they all destroyed the software developement market for cross platform object oriented application frameworks. The 90s saw the elimination of nearly all object oriented application frameworks based on C++. They were replaced with a non compliant C++ compiler and non object oriented application framework called MFC and COM.
I find it very difficult to find any value in what Microsoft has done to the computing market over the last 20 years.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I think Mr. Gates should finally step off his self-raised piedestal of fame and grandeure.
Somehow it is so human and unfortunately, in my opinion, completely wrong, to assume a company is success because of one single reason, or a small set of key reasons, that a chairman consciously can express. There is a whole lot of history behind Microsoft, and some things that happened in the past, at the right time, and the right place, helped it to become what it is. No more no less. Granted Microsoft started a whole market of consumer computerism, but it quickly monopolized it like a big predator that just killed a big meaty prey. A wise person would not make hasty conclusions, and instead, tell Microsoft for what it is - an opportunist, a scavenger, a conman, yet with a charm and blessing of efficiency, modest competency and brains. Last being only the merit of smart geeks in search of a job. Many people would do anything for food. Why not sit in the office at Redmond and type away chunks of IE code? It's not peer reviewed anyway, and everyone around cheers you up telling you how good programmer you are and how you contribute to the better IT of the planet. Talk about sandbox-career.
The fact is, today, Microsoft is by no means the most innovative, successful, inspiring, and competent company. Multitude of recent facts related to them stand as proof. Things like OOXML vote rigging, Vista- disaster (and for people who actually took time to read Microsoft blogs years prior to the actual release, a disaster even worse), all their semi-tech talk about features, that end up vaporware. It has, and is a big circus. The sad fact is anyone can succeed, given enough programmers, and a aggressive strategy. It's business. And the rules of engagement in business allow and encourage such strategies. It does not mean products are any good. Given the absence of choice, they might be. But look at IE for instance. Self-crowned jewel of Internet Surfing for Average Joe, until some people decided to show the world how bad it really was - inventing Firefox.
Consumerism appreciates Microsoft. Awareness and modern market does not. A market where software is peer-reviewed, criticized, praised, compared to, dissected as source code, and what not. In the midst of it all, Microsoft tries to play it like it is still 80's. Where you buy a floppy disk worth 100$ of software, bring it home and plug it into your MS-DOS, typing away obscure stuff at command line, on which you read in a equally expensive "Learn Computers" book.
Sadly, now a whole lot of young aspiring managers heed to the Message of Gates, an aging billionaire with supposed infinite knowledge of IT. I doubt he is one. He is just one hell of a CEO.
True innovation, inspiration and science are whole another field. But then again, let us not confuse science with good old marketing, which Microsoft excels at. In fact it should have been called Marketsoft. What does Micro- stand for again??
And of course, i have no idea how to market stuff. But a better product needs less marketing. And I am talking about science.
Microsoft may not make the greatest of products, but they are damn good at business skills.
1. Bill Gates bought QDOS from that guy without telling him what they were going to use it for.
2. Bill Gates worked at Apple for a while and got ideas for their own Windows.
3. Microsoft secured their position by including Internet Explorer with Win95, which brought the Internet to non-geeks of all ages everywhere. They also got their OS into the schools and libraries, for charity slash advertising purposes.
4. Obviously, they're making lots of deals with nasty MPAA mobsters for DRM purposes.
Microsoft was never about good software - it was about their business skills. They have mostly cleaned up their act in terms of quality, but only when complaints were growing and Linux was starting to take off in business.
That's all. .::.
Although Microsoft has techincal talent, the business talent runs the show, charges the money...etc. The technical talent tries hard, releases poor products...etc...etc.
The real genuis and sucesss of microsoft is that the Marketing department is able to sell junk, and have the business talent to back it up. Too bad the technical talent again takes a back seat.
( They are very talented, they just dont get a chance to show it )
For instance: Excel 2003, latest update: ( Oh I didnt know they now longer supported it :( Nice business decision there..)
Math in the real world: 285,355.80+14,135.80=299,490.80
Math in Redmond Washington:
285,355.80+14,135.80=305,990.80 ( inflation of 10,600.00. ).
So, on a multi-million dollar contract bid, I now have a purhcase order for hard disks for the entire company, as well as a DVD burner to burn ISOs of open office. ( The sales guy at the local computer store quoted us the list price for Office Upgrades...)
But in nothing like the numbers you see with the introduction of the OEM system bundle.
In 2008 the typical webstat shows Linux with a 0.6% market share. I'll take that as a fair measure of how little things have changed in damn near thirty years.
The PC as a kit of parts is for the enthusiast or the IT pro. No one else will touch it.
Xerox was an investor in Apple at the time. The Apple engineers were brought in to discuss the technology with the folks at Parc who developed it. Read 'Dealers of Lightning' and you'll realize Apple came upon the technology legally and Xerox literally gave away one (among many, many others) incredible opportunity.
As Bill Gates was saying in so many words: the secret to Microsoft's success is lying.
You don't need an MBA to know that. Maybe that's when you learned about the correlation, but it's widely discussed in software engineering courses too. See the widely cited book The Mythical Man Month, which I read in my 3rd year of computer science undergraduate study, for one example.
my blog
First of all, Xerox had a working demo and many ideas.
The Xerox Star shipped as a commercial product in 1981, together with a full GUI, WYSIWYG word processing, and Ethernet networking.
They did not have access to the APIs or code that Xerox had.
Apple got the Smalltalk-80 system, plus full documentation. In addition, Apple hired away several key developers from Xerox (as did Microsoft).
Microsoft developed Windows based on these APIs. Slight difference.
No, not really. Almost everything we take for granted in modern GUIs was developed at Xerox; both Apple and Microsoft copied liberally and pilfered Xerox's employees. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have contributed much themselves.
Microsoft has two products, really, so I guess they're not a "one product wonder"... but Windows and Office are what Microsoft is built around, and they have routinely crippled their own products to keep them from even potentially competing with Windows.
Ask anyone who had one of the pre-Pocket-PC Windows-CE-based clamshells and tablets, a whole product line that was knocked down in favor of the Windows NT based "Tablet PC". Microsoft wouldn't have to fight Linux on the EeePC if they hadn't pulled that boner, because it would be competing against cheaper and yet more profitable micro-laptops running CE.
Meanwhile the Pocket PC had less capable software than the "Palmsize PC" CE-based handhelds, because people were talking about using THOSE as notebook replacements. The Pocket PC is much more clearly a tethered adjunct to the notebook or desktop, not a potential rival.
I just don't understand how you can write that. For example, the Wikipedia page on new features in Windows Vista got so large they had to split it into seven sub-pages. Of note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
The real reason Microsoft succeeded is piracy: they let everyone copy their operating systems (Windows 3.0/3.1, 95, NT 3.1/4.0). If they had been strict about piracy, they would never succeed. In fact, during the 90s, Microsoft O/Ses where circulating like open source software today: you could get a copy anywhere. People learned Windows and Office (also 'free'), and here we are, talking about Microsoft's domination...
Certainly the blunders of their competitors were a huge help; Bill Gates is correct and if you look, Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes but they've never stopped improving the products. Very rarely is a Microsoft product discontinued at 1.0 or 2.0; granted, it might not exceed the competition until version 6.0, but it always improves.
Another has been simplicity, and one that Microsoft is getting away from. NT domains were fairly simple to understand and setup. Exchange 2000 was easy to get running (Exchange 2007 is a beast by comparison, much much harder to use).
Another is their developer tools, and this one still applies. You can install Windows, SQL Server, and Visual Studio and have an easy to use complete development environment. They always provide a lot of information and samples for integrating with other products like Exchange, Sharepoint, IIS, etc. This becomes a self-sustaining user community. If I want to know how to hook up to some random USB sensor device from company XYZ, I know the fastest and easiest way is to search for "deviceXYZ USB C#". On the first google page someone will have posted example code detailing how to do it.
I don't have to pick from 13 different IDEs, 5 different app servers, 18 different packages/JARs, or whatever else. I don't have to spend time thinking about "the platform" if I go with Microsoft. I don't have to figure out exactly what JVM version is installed or what version of what kernel/.SO needs to be installed. All those decisions have been made for me and I can get on with the business of writing code that I can actually hang sales on - that will actually pay my mortgage. No time spent on any of that other crap will ever make me a single dollar, and everyone already has Windows boxes anyway so requiring Windows isn't a barrier to entry anywhere except maybe at Sun.
Manufacturers aren't blind to this (part of the self-sustaining community/critical mass. Why do all other auction sites fail? Because buyers want a lot of sellers and sellers want a lot of buyers, hence eBay is the monopoly. The same thing applies here). They write drivers for windows, provide code samples for VB or C#, etc.
Is the Microsoft platform the best way to accomplish things? Maybe, maybe not. Can I get it to perform well and be reliable without having to spend a lot of time messing with it? Absolutely. Do I have to worry about supporting the platform itself? Nope. I just spec Windows 2003 SP1, SQL 2005, CLR 3.5 and that's it. That is all that I and the client need to know to be absolutely certain that the app is going to work on their system. I know where events will be logged. I know where files will be installed. I know what libraries are present and I know there probably won't be any bugs due to incompatible versions.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Microsoft was able to parlay this first success into their success with DOS and then on to the current dual money makers of Windows and Office.
I personally dislike Microsoft software. I think it is unimaginative, poorly-written, bloated, slow, and responsible for holding back personal computer innovation for the last fifteen years. But don't say that Microsoft was handed everything. Give credit where it is due.
The point was that the OS Microsoft shipped as the desktop of the future was full of 16bit code and hardly used the capabilities of the CPUs at the time.
Windows 95 was shipped as an interim step towards Windows NT, not "the dektop of the future". It was (assuming you didn't have legacy hardware or software) 32 bit pretty much top to bottom, and made use of all the "capabilities" of "the CPUs at the time".
Windows NT was a bloated pig and not only was it slow but required a massive increase in system resources. It was first stated to be the desktop of the future when OS/2 v2.0 was to ship but when it was finally shipped, they pulled back and claimed Chicago was the future desktop.
In the early 90s, Windows NT was targeted as a replacement for Netware (server-side) and high-end workstations (client-side). It was not, at that time, aimed at regular desktops.
It took almost 4 years for Chicago to ship as Windows 95 and it was pathetic compared to what IBM shipped many years earlier.
Except for the things that mattered - better compatibility, performance, developer interest and a vendor that actually appeared to give a damn.
(I find it rather funny you're championing OS/2, an OS that Microsoft played a major part in developing.)
Only by using false promises, bad press and other marketing tactics were they able to hold the market waiting for Windows 95. So while they had thier hands in 32bit OSs, they sucked at implementation.
No, they were chained by customer requirements. In particular, compatibility and hardware capabilities.
A kernel controlled multi tasking and memory managed system which didn't require 4x time the system resources of the current standard desktop PC.
That would have been Windows 95. Or Windows NT4. Or Windows 2000. Or Windows XP.
Next closest candidate would have been OS/2, which had similar hardware requirements to Windows 95 and more than enough of its own problems (eg: SIQ, few native applications, lack of developer interest).
Next option would have been MacOS X 10.1, which arrived in 2001. Although given the atrocious relative performance and high hardware costs, that's hardly being fair to Windows XP.
But they did it almost 10 years after many others had already provided more robust 32bit OS's.
For example ?
And while we are at it, by strong arming the marketing into their inferior technology, they all destroyed the software developement market for cross platform object oriented application frameworks. The 90s saw the elimination of nearly all object oriented application frameworks based on C++. They were replaced with a non compliant C++ compiler and non object oriented application framework called MFC and COM.
Have you considered they might have died because they simply weren't in demand ? "Cross platform" would have to be one of the biggest boondoggles in computing history.
Round two was when IBM had a deal with MS with the OS/2 project, and Microsoft completely backstabbed them with Windows 95.
You almost got that right - just a few years off.
Microsoft had actually publicly committed to OS/2 and encouraged all the dominate application vendors at the time to write for that OS; meanwhile, they were continually improving Windows internally until 1989, when they released Windows 3.0 to much acclaim. Its success caught IBM and other software vendors completely off guard.
What people don't remember is that at the time is that OS/2 (version 1.3 and 2.x) was extremely resource intensive at the time - both require at least 2-4 megabytes of RAM and up to 10 megabytes (or more) of disk space and a 386 processor (for version 2.0). Windows 3.0, for all its flaws, can actually run and task switch DOS applications adequately on a 286 processor with 1 megabytes of RAM. Plus, it was cheaper than OS/2 (I remember buying a copy for about less than 100 dollars; OS/2, if I recall correctly). When you take that into consideration, it is easy to see why it did so well.
Microsoft follow up on the success of Windows 3.0 with generally well regarded versions of Microsoft Word and Excel. The rest of the software vendors that were committed to OS/2 (notably Lotus and Wordperfect) weren't able to release their first Windows versions until several years later - and when they were releases, they were fairly archaic and (in the case of Word Perfect), extremely buggy. Consequently, they never did recover from that mis-direction.
I can smell the BS from here...Show me a multi million dollar contract that switches a large company to open office and I will show you a CIO who will be looking for work in six months. Open office is not ready for prime time and your users will revolt. Any good CIO knows it's about the users and their productivity, You reduce their productivity and your gone.
Read: push out half baked buggy junk to make a quick buck and spend the next couple of years patching it before pushing out the next incomplete buggy version.
FAQs are evil.
And so perhaps you are still not understanding! It is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY! Read: http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-leaders-list-of-jewish-millionaires.html If you are more intelligent, you can get people to give you money. If you are more intelligent why would you NOT get people to give you money? What is it that you do not understand, non-jewish Slashdotters?
When - with WordPerfect - you were bought out by Novell, you didn't Microsoft to administer the kiss of death.
Windows 3.1 evolved from Windows 2 and Windows 1, when Microsoft got tired of working with IBM on OS/2. Windows 95 evolved from Windows 3.11, especially the GUI, but Windows 3.1 was already using the Win32 API.
Xenix is Unix, which Microsoft licensed from MIT.
Windows NT (and by extension, 2k, XP, 2k3 and Vitsa) was developed by a VMS guy from DEC.
There's nothing wrong with this. Apple did the same thing when they bought NeXT, and others have done so as well, like Novell's SuSE buy up.
Microsoft's true innovation remains business acumen and aggressive practices.
The really big problem with a monopoly is that the company can then charge what it wants to since there is no competition, and the fact that a monopoly will only really innovate when forced to (IE6 languished for some 6 years before Firefoy scared MS into making IE7)
Much simpler than Gates makes out. Buy or steal ideas and technology from other people. Then create a competitive product and incorporate it ideally into the OS. Similar approach some countries are now following. A sure winner. You save on R & D and improve on others mistakes. And undercut the competition. - DOS - from Seattle Computing for $80k; Windows and Mouse - Xerox Parc; Excel - Visicalc / Lotus; Word - Wordperfect and Wordstar; PowerPoint - Harvard Graphics; SQL - Sybase; IE - All the browsers before; VB - Gates bought concept from Alan Cooper; c# - Java wannabe; The list goes on and on. Except for MSBasic that Gates wrote it is difficult to think of anything significant the company has come up with. All with design philosophy - 'Never ever make a simple solution or follow published standards when a complex in house Microsoft approach is possible." I'm no fan of the EU, but in this case I think they should move the fine up to $10 billion.
Lie, cheat and steal! Those are the words that microsoft lives and breathes. Example of 1) "It is absolutely impossible to remove the code to Internet Exploder from the rest of the system" Example 2) "Doctor Dos is incompatible with this program" Example of 3) "No your honor, we did not steal our space-doubling software from Stac Electronics" ...3 tiny examples, never lonely as there are millions of items of company for each, and new friends joining each group on a daily basis.
when you can fall back on your
M O N O P O L Y
in the event that Bobâ or some other misguided product doesn't work out.
I take your point. Microsoft definitely stitched up the sales & distribution side better than the Apple Mac OS they tried to clone, just as Apple definitely stitched up the sales & distribution side better than the Xerox Star OS & office suite that they tried to clone.
The difference is that Microsoft wasn't selling hardware. They were selling a cheap & dirty operating system when better options were already available. (-: I for one blame IBM :-)
thx e
So? Why didn't your particular "hero" - "Steve"? "Linus"? Have HIS dear li'l mommy on the board that that you hate with so much passion?
In fact.. where was YOU "mommy"?
Out selling copies of CP/M?
Geez.. go give yer mommy a kick in the ass, Loser!
.
- aqk
F U
They paid money for DOS. Just because they then used DOS to make their billions, doesn't mean they "stole" it.
Right.
I have a laptop with Vista on it now. Works fine.
It basically does everthing that XP or W2000 does. (and I still use these two on other PCs at home.)
Vista is just the latest incantation of W2K.
And it is SUPPORTED. The most important point!
Think of it as W2k SP7, Win2007 or whatever.
And get on with your damn life, you weenie M$ hater/loser...
(Sorry- not you, but the previous poster somewhere)
.
- aqk
F U
I'm a veteran when it comes to hating and mistrusting Microsoft, but fair is fair, and what I hear him saying is not so much that their products were superior. He says that the others didn't think commercially - they didn't think of their SW as products and they didn't run their businesses well. I think it is hard to argue against that - after all, the constant complaint against Windows etc has always been that they prioritise raking in money over anything else, even to the extent that they engage in highly questionable practices.
I worked at Microsoft for a while and then moved to Utah to work at Novell. I have since worked at two or three other companies in Utah, all of which have a strong middle and upper management group that are either from Novell, WordPerfect, or both.
I can say without reservation that Microsoft's management methods are far superior to those employed by managers hailing from WordPerfect and Novell.
For one thing, Microsoft managers actually knew what they were talking about (at least those I worked with did). Managers from Novell rarely do. Trying to talk technology, or even logic for that matter, with a Novell manager was like talking technology with an antelope; pointless.
At Microsoft, managers managed with knowledge and experience. At Novell, managers managed by threatening your job if you didn't have a drop-in replacement for Windows that Novell could sell by the end of the week.
While I don't particularly like what Microsoft has done to the market as a company, I hate WordPerfect and Novell type managers and think that non-technical management is one of the biggest reason Novell and WordPerfect failed to remain on top.
Is a genius. In the true sense of the word. Plain and simple. No need for further analysis. That's the secret of Microsofts success. He's one in ten billion. And you want to know something else. Steve Jobs is also a genius. That's the secret to Apples success. And here's another news flash for you - Sergey Brin and Larry Page are also geniuses. Here's a stock tip for you. Put your money behind the people with the passion and the smarts and you'll clean up.
ogglelog
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".
It's really quite simple. The software field, more than most, attracts very clever people who are deeply interested in logic and programming. Nerds, in a word. While they would like to be rich and famous, they can't quite make themselves live for nothing else. They keep getting distracted by the desire to build great software, solve difficult problems, etc.
Ironically in view of his media reputation, Gates is the exact opposite of a nerd. He is a hard-headed, practical, calculating businessman who also happens to be extremely clever. Moreover, he thoroughly understands the multiplying power of setting up organizations that attract clever people with different kinds of ability. Microsoft has extreme nerds, lots of designers, marketing people, sales people, lawyers, etc., etc. Whatever their skills and opinions, they all conform to Gates' overall strategy.
Microsoft has even set up its own more or less closed mini-universe of customers who run Windows, work with Office, program with Visual Studio, read Microsoft-related newspapers, magazines, and MSDN, and frequent Microsoft-related blogs, newsgroups, and conferences.
But unlike almost all other pure software companies, Microsoft has never once failed to get its priorities right. They are: long-term profit first, last, and foremost. That is the end: everything else is a means. Some companies make their products too good for their own interests; others make them too bad. Microsoft makes them exactly good enough to maximize long-term profit.
Other competitors, like HP and IBM, are primarily hardware companies that do software as a sideline. That's a crippling handicap (although IBM has done pretty well, considering, mostly by well-judged acquisitions). Gates has always taken full advantage of IBM's hardware leg-irons.
Of course, all of this refers to the past when Gates was actively in charge. Now he is almost gone, we can expect to see gradual degradation of the empire that he built.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Duh.
HPUX et al had much the same application capability as windows 95. But the desktop apps on Windows/Dos were "modern" while the X11 apps (which were there before Windows 1.0, so no innovation there, MS) were at least five years behind.
And from the end user point of view, the applications sell the OS.
In a business where you have your computing solely the responsibility of the CTO/IT crowd, the OS drives the application choice.
Explosion of desktop PCs at work scattered the responsibility and the CTO/IT section had to take on OS's that served the users (ran the *applications* that looked right to them) rather than one that helped themselves.
The IT crowd either moved away (to other mainframe locations) or were replaced with kids who didn't know better. And a lot more of them, to boot (since the OS wasn't meant to make their job easier, it makes their job harder, and so you need more). The CTO saw their empire growing and liked it (they didn't have to actually service the user problems any more) and saw their role become more central (more willy-waving opportunity [no willy required, women can do that too]).
That's why Windows/Dos mushroomed.
And CSS enabled MS to leverage and keep a monopoly: you can't interoperate unless you know the API's and the code. CSS stops you finding out, so all you need is enough churn to keep reverse engineering behind. Even just AT&T copyright doesn't let you hide API's, which is why AT&T never got to manage their monopoly of copyright into a monopoly full stop.
MS did.
Reminds me of talking to a senior exec of a company which worked with MS on making their products work with MS software. I quote from memory a comment he made in a corporate meeting in response to my question about that relationship: "I know that MS have a bad reputation, as a kind of Darth Vader of the IT industry, but from our experience of working very closely with them, I can categorically state that his perception is entirely... true."
Mike Arnautov http://mipmip.org
with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.
Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market. ... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows ..." (timeline)
See MS Litigation page and Court TV Library for more details.
Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.
Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.
This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)
you had me at #!
The reason for Windoze success is because our government installed it as the OS they wanted. As far as I'm concerned Windoze stole everything from other OS's and the registry is nothing but spyware.
you could become a millionaire today if you truly wanted to. At the end of the day, it breaks down to exactly what YOU want, and how far you are willing to go to achieve that.
And *that's* the problem many of us have with Bill, Inc.: His greed has no ethical restraints.
(The Foundation is just reputation laundering.)
you had me at #!
To compliment you on your very cool user id. :)
you had me at #!
Every single apple I used growing up was completely non-user friendly.
I didn't like the Apple II either. But then came the Mac. :)
So there have been superior mainstream alternatives to Microsoft for at least 23 years - despite MS' best efforts to destroy the alternatives. I have no sympathy for people who use Windows "because that's what was on this cheap PC I bought". Exercise choice, or, as a brilliant post above can be paraphrased: Suck it up!
you had me at #!
I lament not having documented my observations of these practices
Some of the paper trail of these crimes is recorded here.
After skimming this list one wonders when they get time to "innovate". But nice to know that Windows/Office profits (from customers' pockets, ya know?) are being shared with plenty of needy lawyers.
you had me at #!
"I was a consultant at Lotus at the time Microsoft started winning in desktop applications"
.. ;)
.. We can't compete with Lotus and
Wordperfect/Novell without this"
Yea and I was a consultant at IBM and helped out the developers on VLSI architecture
"Bill Gates is essentially correct"
Other people remember it differently. MS wilfully acted to sabotage Lotus on winDOS and also withheld technical information.
"I believe that Microsoft application developers have been given earlier and more detailed access to OCX specifications than we have had here at Lotus"
"I have decided that we should not publish these extensions
"I'd be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral"
davecb5620@gmail.com
It was Columbia Data Products that suceeded first. MS owes its sucess to three fortutious events. Getting hold of 86-DOS, IBM not buying DOS outright and cheap third party clones of the IBM PC. It's ironic that they didn't pay the $50,000 until they got the first deal from IBM. So IBM even financed the deal that would ultimitly see them lose control of the IBM PC market.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"1. CP/M, ultimately crushed by DOS"
.... my proposal is to have bambi refuse to run on this alien OS, comments? "
No they crushed DR-DOS by ultimatly putting fake error messages in Windows 3.1, witholding technical information and intimidating DRIs own customers.
"Bradsi asked us to come up with a better message for when the MS-DOS detection doesn't find MS-DOS"
"hey, hey, hey
"DR-DOS. I doubt they will be able to clone Windows. It is very difficult to do technically. we have made it a moving target"
"DRI is agressing big time, in our accounts"
"After Debbie and I made clear to Sears DR-DOS and Windows compatibility would always be a major issue"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Say you're really poor and you've finally save up $600 to buy a computer for your whole family. What would you choose?
1- Apple -> Out of your price range
2- Unix based system -> That takes a lot of work to understand and modify
3- Microsoft -> You turn it on and it runs, and it is the predominant office environment (and you don't want your kids working your blue collar job you have dreams of them having a white collar job one day)
Any questions?
> would not renew it to get it to the next generation
Where "renew" is presumably defined as "add flashy graphics".
Also, Internet Explorer.
Nope, that's pretty much B.S.
WIndows 3.1 was far from familiar with most PC users -- getting people to switch to a GUI at all was a big feat. Was it an engineering success on par with the first MacOS? Hell no. But that's not what innovation is always about -- it's how the market perceives and changes due to the product.
Similarly, Windows 95 was a huge change for 90% of the computing populace. Yes, it was Mac '88, but most people didn't know or care about that. It changed their world to become much more productive.
One might be able to apply "bland and familiar" to Office suites, but again it's just not true. Most office suites in the 80's were text-based DOS affairs. So Microsoft built theirs on the Macintosh. And, eventually took it to Windows. The competition took quite a while to catch up (WordPerfect 6 for Windows was damn buggy, but it got better, but then Corel screwed it & Quattro Pro up...)
The rise of the GUI in the PC world is largely due to Microsoft, and is largely why they still have a monopoly on that area (and Office productivity).
-Stu
Maybe this had something to do with it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I agree - I worked for On Technology in 1988 when Mitch Kapor was going to radically transform software development - we were going to build a distributed object-oriented system based on Smalltalk; Kapor, the VP of Eng and the VP of Mktg flew to Redmond, explained what they were doing to Microsoft. MS's reply was "that's interesting; it's exactly what we're doing - we're going to eat your lunch".
They completely revamped the company on the flight back to Boston, turning it into an application vendor. On Technology was eventually bought by another company who basically took over the name and dumped everything else.
DR-DOS and CP/M are not even remotely the same product. CP/M was an operating system for personal computers that pre-dated DOS. IBM offered both operating systems for the IBM-PC, but DOS was a lot cheaper and while CP/M may have had some minor advantages, DOS was bundled with a good BASIC for it day and was much less expensive, so CP/M died.
DR-DOS came about much later. I think a product has a right to refuse to work with other products. I mean, building in interoperability with another product is a cost that someone has to pay, so, if Microsoft didn't want Windows to run on another verion of DOS, that's their perogative. Really, the failure to answer Windows in the marketplace was more the fault of companies like Lotus, who had the resource to develop a Windows product but never really did, and Visicorp, whose Visi-on product never materialized except for buggy and way too late. Even if IBM had made a graphical TopView for DOS, that could have given them a big lead... but they didn't. And why did Lotus let a rather remarkable Magellan product totally wither on the vine and die?
This is my sig.
It kind of brought a tear to my eye when I heard Mr. Gates talk with such enthusiasm about how he and Paul Allen went up to that big expensive computer and found the source code listings to the OS, and they were able to figure out how it worked and tinker around with it.
Now, thanks to the empire he built, the next generation will never be able to see the source.
Look and work are tied together when you're turning off the GUI effect garbage. BTW I'm fairly old (37) and I drive a manual car given that us Europeans don't much like autos.
honestly, when we were younger we've never had the money to buy any microsoft products, but we still got it somehow and gave it our friends. the fact that games flourished on the platform and were also easily copied helped the distribution exponentially. well... since then everyone was stuck with m$ and with age came money and responsibilty and the stuff still remaind standard, so it was bought... end of story.
Of course he knew - IBM went to him.
1980
March
At the West Coast Computer Faire, Microsoft announces its first hardware product, the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II. This card...gives the Apple II CP/M capability, contributing greatly to Apple Computer's success. The card includes CP/M and Microsoft's Disk BASIC, all for US$349. Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products had built several prototypes before Microsoft's Don Burdis took over the project.
April
Seattle Computer Products decides to make their own disk operating system (DOS), due to delays by Digital Research in releasing a CP/M-86 operating system.
August 21
IBM meets with Microsoft again, to talk in general terms about their planned personal computers. IBM asks if Microsoft will develop some programming language interpreters/compilers for it. Bill Gates agrees to supply BASIC and other software development tools. IBM also asks for CP/M, but Gates says Digital Research would have to supply that.
August 28
IBM representatives meet at Microsoft again. Bill Gates signs a consulting agreement for US$15,000 to develop the software specifications for IBM's personal computer. Jack Sams asks about alternatives to CP/M-86. Gates says he might find one.
September
Seattle Computer Products completes and begins shipping 86-QDOS 0.10 (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Even though it had been created in only two man-months, the DOS worked surprisingly well.
September 22
Paul Allen of Microsoft contacts Rod Black of Seattle Computer Products, asking to sub-license 86-DOS to a potential customer
September 30
Bill Gates, Bob O'Rear, and Steve Ballmer meet with IBM in Boca Raton, Florida, to deliver a report to IBM. They propose that Microsoft be put in charge of the entire software development process for IBM's new microcomputer, including providing the main operating system to run on the computer. Bill Gates insists on maintaining rights to the DOS, receiving royalty payments rather than a lump sum.
October
Microsoft's Paul Allen contacts Seattle Computer Products' Tim Patterson, asking for the rights to sell SCP's DOS to an unnamed client (IBM). Microsoft pays less than US$100,000 for the right
November 6
Microsoft and IBM sign a formal contract for Microsoft to develop certain software products for IBM's new microcomputer. Microsoft will receive US$200,000 to adapt the operating system to the IBM PC, and US$500,000 for DOS, BASIC, and compilers. Microsoft is to have an initial version of the operating system and BASIC working by mid-January...
Chronology of Personal Computer Software
and I doubt he knew that clever reverse engineering of the ROM BIOS that Compaq would do would cause the Attack of The PC Clones to occur and the money bags to fall from the sky
Gates didn't need to know any of this.
CP/M had been a success with only bare hardware compatibility among 3000 models.
The IBM PC meant instant credibility for the 8086 and MS-DOS platform - the driving force behind the reverse-engineering of the BIOS.
Microsoft had the programming languages and development tools needed. It had a toehold in applications for the MS-DOS - an embryonic spreadsheet in Multiplan.
You clearly don't live anything like this, or you wouldn't be posting on slashdot. There's no way your position can be as extreme as you make it out to be. Please clarify it for me.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
"the failure to answer Windows in the marketplace"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Okay, if we want to get picky, if the monopoly is run by people who behave morally, it can work as well as a free market full of competitors, because a morally functioning monopoly will allow competing internal functions.
But, if we get so picky, a morally functioning free market full of people is not inferior to the monopoly, because the competitors know when to refrain from cutthroat competition and how.
It's the non-ideal cases. Both models can wander into pathologically malfunctioning modes. The problem is the recovery process.
In the case of a monopoly, there are just a few people ultimately in charge, and when they become corrupted (historically a very common thing) the pathological behavior can't be corrected without either getting rid of them or convincing them to behave themselves.
In the free market case, it only takes a few brave people to behave morally to keep the system from destroying itself.
I think I like the odds on the latter more than on the former.
Most of your other points were valid until this stood out:
You were in a minority. Again, as evidenced by the facts.
IE did not take over the market share until after Windows 98 was released. IE4 was bundled with that. Many new users who did not know better had no idea Netscape existed. All popular polls taken in that time period proved that given the choice, most users preferred Netscape. If you preferred IE back then, fine, but you are the one who is in the minority here. The problem is, many people were not aware there was a choice.
These are facts. Your knowledge of the Netscape / IE war is severely warped and misguided. Internet Explorer 4 was an extremely buggy browser and never would have competed had it not been for the fact that it came bundled with Windows 98. Don't forget that Netscape was only free to some people previously (like colleges for instance.) Microsoft's bundling of IE for "free" ensured that Netscape would have to follow suit. Yes, Netscape had its flaws, but it was never as bad, unstable, and insecure as IE. Never.
It is like yin and yang, apple the good half and Microsoft the bad half.
if Microsoft wasn't there to sell crap with a ribbon round it,apple would become the evil corporation that would do the same.
and if apple wasn't there selling user friendly art with practical use only to people who like to create art, Microsoft would just release the same old crap instead of trying to flush apple out by stealing there ideas and then adding bugs (to MS'ify them).
i am just saying there is a balance.
bye the way i use both, but i only use a p.c. to game.