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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.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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.