Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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!
---
Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
---
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.
---
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.
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.
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.
Yes to that specific case and I agree with what you are saying, but the general process repeats itself over and over in business and technology.
Facebook? Give me a break -- look at the prior art of Friendster and even Myspace. When Facebook was being started at Harvard I thought it would not take off because of the current dominant players.
Google? Anybody old enough to remember when Altavista was the king of search? We used to always use that engine in college.
AIM? Remember ICQ? Ntalk? Otalk?
Original ideas are few, and even Gates admits he was not very original with his ideas in many, many interviews, but he did implement them well, er... market them well, and protected his monopoly with a vengeance.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
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.
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
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?
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.
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'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.
The problem is - that's still recursive logic. When the IBM PC debuted, IBM didn't have a monopoly on that market. No one did, as the market largely didn't exist. (To the extent it did, the monopoly on the PC belonged to Apple!)
Nor did IBM's 'monopoly' of the PC market last long, as more than a few companies were quick off the mark to get their entries to market. So quickly and so successfully that IBM was all but knocked out of the ring within a couple of years.
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
I especially liked the part where he describes the unlocked heavy machinery that he and Paul 'played' with. I see that he adopted the exact same security model for Windows. Even after the tenth time they broke into the machinery, the company set up a security guard rather than lock the machines. How did that get translated into Windows: ports open, but the anti-virus is running!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.