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How Microsoft Has Changed Without Bill Gates
mightysquirrel writes "It's been a year since Bill Gates left Microsoft in his official capacity. At the time many speculated his departure would spark a significant shift in Redmond. But how much has really changed during Microsoft's first year without Gates?"
Under Gates, Microsoft grew to the empire that it is today. Gates strategic moves were critical to the success of the company:
1) The DOS deal with IBM.
2) The MS Office deal with Apple, and using that contract to gain GUI engineering knowledge from Apple.
3) Porting MS Office to DOS and using it to sell WIndows (ex: buy Excel and get Windows for free)
4) Outsmarting IBM in the OS/2 deal while continuing development of Windows/Promising Windows 95 vapourware to fend off OS/2 Warp, which was superior.
5) Pricing Windows MS Office ridiculously cheaply, pushing out Word Perfect, Lotus 123, etc that were trying to come up with Windows 95 versions.
6) Windows NT to push out Novell in the enterprise.
7) MS Exchange which is still the back-end collaboration framework of choice
8) The sneaky deal with Sun over licensing Java
9) InternetExplorer + ISS + ASP to gain a foothold on the internet despite starting late
Ballmer hasn't had nearly the same impact. So far MSN hasn't really gone anywhere, the high-end console wars are a draw with the Wii way on top at the low-end, Windows server hasn't unseated Linux, .NET has its niche but isn't unseating Java, Google is still dominating search, and Windows Mobile is losing ground.
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No, companies like Apple and Commodore did that since they actually manufactured cheap computers. VisiCalc (the first killer-app, and not from MS) ran on the Apple ][. MS-DOS was more-or-less a repacked CP/M that Bill was lucky enough to license to IBM. Windows stagnated for many years with the infamous Blue Screens of Death while *nix showed that you could have operating systems without crashes. Then it was Apple with the introduction of Mac OS X that forced MS to finally get off their asses and release Vista -- and we all know how that turned out.
MS retarded the entire computer industry by about a decade. Apple doesn't get a free pass here either since Mac OS 1-9 was crash-prone too. But MS, being the 800 lb gorilla, could have done so much more with their resources to propel the industry forward.
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Pretty much anyone in the UK my age had their first computing experience with a BBC Model B or similar. Anyone a few years younger is likely to have first come across the 32-bit Acorn RiscOS machines like the A3000, which were popular in schools. When I was growing up, I was the only person I knew with an IBM-compatible at home, and that was only because my father ran a software company and I got it when they were upgrading. Everyone else had Ataris or Amigas. Perhaps the grandparent meant 'anyone under 18'.
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Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
No, it did not. If IBM had opted for a different OS than DOS you would have never heard of Microsoft.
How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
I had a TS-1000, then a TRS-80. The IBM-PC was office-use only, as the damned things cost about five grand (and money was worth more then). There were many home computers before IBM's expensive dinasaur; the Commodore PET was out before 1980, the TS-1000 and many others were out before IBM decided to get into the PC business.
If Bill gates had never been born we would still have PCs, and it's possible they might even follow standards.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
Your ignorance is astounding.
Free Martian Whores!
Bill Gates was a champion of MS Flight Simulator - a franchise that ran for decades. The last version FSX was complete ass and took 3 goes to get right....which culuminated in the sacking of the entire programming staff at Aces Studios (the guys that wrote the sim).
FS2004 included a kiosk mode so any library or museum could demonstrate a flight simulation of an existing or historic plane. FSX killed that feature and tried to sell a monstrosity of a commerical system called ESP for big dollars to do the same. FSX also added activation and all it's headaches.
Bill Gates was a nasty piece of work but under his leadership there was some good stuff done. Now there's nothing.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Amazon Best Sellers in Software Updated hourly.
1 Win 7 Premium Upgrade
2 Win 7 Professional Upgrade
3 MS Office Home and Student 2007
5 MS Office Home and Student 2008 - Mac
12 Outlook 2007
17 Street & Trips 2009
18 Win 7 Ultimate Upgrade
30 XP Home Full Version
31 MS Office Standard 2007 Full Version
35 Street & Trips with GPS 2009
36 MS Office Small Business 2007 Upgrade
38 XP Pro SP3 System Builders
40 MS Office Small Business 2007 Full Version
41 MS Office Pro 2007 Full Version
45 MS Works 9.0
50 Windows Live One Care
56 Windows XP Pro SP2 Full Version
79 MS Vista Premium Full Version
95 XP Home SP2 Upgrade
97 Vista Home Premium Upgrade
98 Publisher 2007
99 Access 2007
At any given moment about 1 in 4 of the software bestsellers in software will be Microsoft products for the Windows market. Office 2007/8 has had an extraordinarily successful run.
OS Platform Statistics For June
XP 67%
Vista 18%
Mac 6%
Linux 4%
W2003 2%
Win 7 2%
W2K 1%
The OS stats are from a pro's development-oriented site that shows a 50% share for Firefox. It is not preposterous to imagine Win 7 overtaking Linux before its official launch in October.
Every month or so someone writes up a post like yours on the imminent failure of MS, and it never happens.
I dont see the 360 doing poorly, in fact, its cleaning the PS3s clock. Office 2007 isnt the failure you want it to be and as someone with an interest in UIs its a shame so many geeks are afraid of change. Imagine if Apple was still using OS9's UI today. Or if we were using Win3.11 UI in Vista. Ugh.
Vista, for all its faults, sells and is in used by millions. SP1 Vista is comparable to XP, at least to me. The complaints Im seeing nowadays are of 3rd party software like Zone Alarm and Trend Micro breaking things.
Conversely, we're seeing a lot of returns on linux netbooks because people simply dont understand what it means when a computer doesnt come with windows. We're seeing Firefox lag behind on splitting tabs into processes. We're seeing Chrome barely make a dent in the web. We're seeing stronger offerings from MS with Server 2008. etc etc. But we are also seeing more Linux in homes and embedded devices. We're seeing an acceptance of OSS in corporate that seems stronger than in the past.
The point here is that you cant just look at all these markets and niches and come to one conclusion. In some places MS is doing well and in other places its doing poorly. Its still damn profitable and geeks should really understand that despite the hype, MS is still a 800lbs gorilla we need to be careful around. If anything, all this competition is forcing MS to up its game, which is good for everyone.
I wouldn't go that far. He did write MS-BASIC, which became probably for near a decade the most prevalent development platform in the PC world.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That assumes that all cars are created equal. If it were the mid-1980s and I owned a toyota or honda, you're saying I'd have to pay to insure the repairs of faulty parts on Fords and GMs, or even a Chevy "unsafe at any speed" Corvair: you choose to buy a car that is completely unsafe and unreliable, and you're forcing me to help subsidize the cost of repair and accidents caused by faulty design, even though I myself am a very conscientious auto buyer.
One could make the argument that as long as unsafe cars are on the road, everyone must pay the extra price to insure themselves, but as far as I know, insurance companies do actually look at types of car when considering your insurance premium, and of course there's the "safe driver" discount, so I guess this effect is somewhat mitigated.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
This shouldn't remind anyone of Vista, or the promises of Windows 7 or the database driven file-system that doesn't exist yet, or what .NET represents. Not at all :-).
When people ask me why I dislike Microsoft, the above sums it up -- Microsoft took perfectly good innovations that were designed to work alongside their own products, and quashed them (often illegally or under false pretences). By the time the court system got around to proving this true (such in Caldera's case), it was way too late in this fast-moving industry.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I wasn't arguing that we'd have been better off if NeXT had ruled the world. I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
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