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.'"
Now that Microsoft is starting to tumble... NOW you give us your secret key.
Your attitude of dismissing something you don't even have the first inkling of how to accomplish as mere luck floors me. If I wasn't aware that it's just sour grapes because you want to be Slashdot cool for the other anti-MS fudders around here, I'd wonder about your intelligence.
Actually, I suppose it is possible you honestly believe that to be true, but I'd prefer to give you the benefit of the doubt. After all, despite your awkward phrasing and down-with-rich-people horseshit, you don't seem like too much of an idiot.
Do you have some six figure contract with Microsoft? Are you their only contractor with tactical nuclear weapons? :)
They work with you only because it is safer and more profitable to do that way. Others are not that lucky. Office upgrades cost the same as full Office versions. Other software vendors make changes in their products that force people to buy more expensive Microsoft software even when existing software has all the features that are needed to run Autodesk Data Management Server 2009.
Interestingly enough, if you replace "Microsoft" with "Bill Clinton" you get the same outcome.
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 !
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.