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Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft?
theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"
With Buffett and a few others pitching in to help the Gates Foundation I hardly think the Foundation is reliant on MS. Also, I would hardly think Gates would be interesting in "saving" what is still a very profitable organisation - he's much more into pushing boundaries.
They are trying to make a new Steve Jobs? The one that comes back to save the day? WTF?
Bill Gates is not the answer for Microsoft, but changing leadership is. They have become sloth-like in their old age and have become a market follower rather than a market leader.
MS probably needs to remove one or two levels of management to allow things to speed up again. Ideas and progress are slowed by too many filters.
Honestly if companies like Microsoft and Apple can't do without their great leaders then they need to sink forever in to the abyss. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren't going to live forever no matter how much money they have to get human parts to replace things like Jobs did. You can't even stick their heads in jars like Futurama did. Although I would be highly be amused if they ever did manage that one for real.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
For me, Bill Gates is the symbol of the junk-microsoft: DOS, windows 3.1; 95; 98; Me. As far as I see the history of Microsoft, since Gates left the CEO chair, things are slightly better. And, finally, the problem isn't Ballmer, but the fact that a company can't be the only big player in the entire sector forever.
Its overly simplistic to put the blame on Ballmer since it was Bill Gates that got Microsoft under close scrutiny from monopoly enforcement agencies all over the world. Bill Gates was also the one that won Microsoft the biggest EU fine in history for Bills predatory practices.
What Ballmer has done is followed in Bill Gates footstep with so-so products sold by extremely hard marketing and very shoddy business practices. If anything Ballmer is just a bleaker version of Bill. The return of Bill Gates would just be about more pressure on OEMs, more underhanded deals and more of using the monopoly again.
Personally i would love it if Bill Gates took the helm as it would make Microsoft become irrelevant even faster than today. The mobile and computing industry at large is right now liquid mercury and the tighter Microsoft squeezes the sooner it will slip.
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I don't think you're getting what you think you are asking for.
These are large crude parallels being drawn here: "Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved it" is an interesting story, but Apple's story is certainly exceedingly unique.
Not many companies crawl back from hasbeens to dominance. Apple was a joke in the 1990s, a shell of its former '80s self. The natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen. This is Microsoft's fate. Google's. Facebook's. etc. Apple is the weird exception, not the rule, and I wouldn't let its experience try to teach us anything. It's like seeing someone hit the lottery and trying to figure out how they did and repeat that. No, Apple is a pretty unique story in technology and business. Microsoft can't find their Steve Jobs in Bill Gates.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, but if you own enough money to hire thousands of people your time is probably best spent looking for other people with good ideas. That will be more productive than pursuing any idea you can come up with yourself.
I completely agree here...
The problem with Microsoft is not something one person can solve. The problem with Microsoft is that it competes with every freaken tech company on the planet! You can't run a company where the entire world is your enemy. It is nearly impossible to focus on any particular solution since doing so is the lowest common denominator and that means crap...
Microsoft needs to split itself apart and then start attacking its competitors....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This was the man that should have taken the reigns of Microsoft by now. Instead he has left the company. He was a worthy successor to Gates in drive and vision.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Bing actually has a good market share in US now - 30%. And by market demographics those who use Bing tend to be richer, better educated people.
You mean the kind of people who could afford to buy a computer or laptop but could not afford the time to change from the default MS recommended one?
Bing has about 8% in the US and about 3% worldwide according to statcounter and most other sources. 30% is a dream number bing hasnt even been close to. I have never ever heard of seodesignsolutions before but as their numbers are very different from the established players i call bullshit on their statistics until correlated from more respected sources.
For all we know seodesignsolutions might just be a shell setup by Bing PHBs trying to get atleast one payment for good performance in their lifetime.
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Technology is becoming social graph driven...
What the fuck does that even mean? Stop reading blogs about startups. "inventing" a way for your friends to know you just stepped into a restaurant and ordered a taco, and that is was delicious... is a far cry from a flying car, new energy source, or cure for cancer.
All Microsoft has to do is be good at what it does. Be a good provider of video game consoles, search engine results, computer and cell phone operating systems. And now I guess, do something with Skype. But none of that has anything to do with the marketing spammers wet-dream that is social media. "Oh sorry Bill, I know you started the company and led it through its most profitable years, but you need more facebook friends."
The problem is that whatever Microsoft buys gets tainted by their bad rep amongst users and soon abandoned. Just look at how many jumped ship from Yahoo as soon as Bing took over their search results.
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I'd rather they just go out of business. It is long overdue.
From what I can tell, the successful entrepreneurs aren't the ones who can come up with good ideas. Lots of people can do that The skill is filtering them. It's hard to determine what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. You need to estimate the cost, estimate the return and the likelihood of getting that return and figure out if it's worth it.
I vote for Mark! He is an excellent and awesome technical fellow that has impressed me a number of times. It's time for Microsoft to learn from Google; let the engineers take control again.
Thank you for making our jobs easier by continuing to pursue bad products with bad management. When we saw your pitiful attempt at a search engine, we laughed until our sides split.
Sincerely,
Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin
I am officially gone from
MicroSoft sold Basic to all the computer companies you name and pretty much all others. MS was already a pretty significant software company before they released MS-DOS, in fact they had released OS's before MS-DOS. MS didn't get lucky by picking the right company; they picked all companies, including the right one.
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This is actually a pretty interesting point. Ballmer is clearly the business side, and you'd think from that he'd be socially adept. Gates is clearly all geek, and appears to be borderline Autistic on occasion, and you'd expect him to be socially inept. Yet as TFA points out, Gates has that something that makes you listen to him, makes you consider his words, makes him a leader. Ballmer doesn't and it's not something you can fake.
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to admire someone to admit their strengths, and Bill Gates clearly has an almost unsurpassed ability to judge the merits of an idea, and turn a vision into reality. It's the same kind of ability that Jobs, and even Linus and RMS have. None of them is perfect, none of them always picks right, but all of them have combination of vision, follow through, and a certain kind of charisma that gets other people nodding their heads and reaching for their wallets (Obviously with RMS and Linus it's more of a figurative wallet).
Unfortunately (or fortunately if you prefer) I don't think it's enough to "save" MS. For one thing, I'm not sure MS needs "saving" yet. They're increasingly irrelevant when it comes to new and innovative ideas, but they're still making money hand over fist, and that isn't likely to change for a decade or so. Until things get really bad (which will require that death or near death of the desktop and laptop as platforms, an event at least ten years away) no one person is going to be able to fix the corporate culture. Part of the reason Jobs was able to have the affect he did on Apple, was that Apple was at rock bottom when they brought him back. People that otherwise might have resisted him or tried to maintain the status quo knew that this was probably the company's very last chance. Microsoft just isn't there yet.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Actually Microsoft sold Basic to just about every company including Commodore. Yes Microsoft got lucky but they did make the most of it. They also kept with it. Windows was a failure in versions one and two. I remember Selling machines that had it bundled. People took it off to get more disk space.
It wasn't until Windows 386 and Windows 3 that it was actually really useful.Then you have Microsoft Office mainly Word and Excel. Some of those same computers also included Word 1.0 for DOS. I tired it out and though wow this is actually pretty cool if it wasn't so dog slow. Microsoft ported Word to the Mac and keep improving it until it became the standard for both MacOS and Windows. Excel started on the Mac and ended up as the spreadsheet.
While some of their business practices have been down right evil, and many of their products have been flops they have has some brilliant products as well. And the truth is that some of those brilliant products like Word started out as failures but Microsoft kept improving them until they became great products.
As far as Berkeley goes they didn't pick Commodore. They had a version of Geos for the PC as well and it was actually not bad. It just didn't have Microsoft behind it. Oh and Geos also ran on the Apple as well.
I don't know if Gates can fix Microsoft. I do not know if anyone can. It is still making money hand over fist and is doing very well. They have totally blown the online market and the mobile market but they are doing well in the Console market. They may not really be broken but just mature and settled in their markets. Nothing wrong with that. Boeing doesn't make light aircraft, or ultra lights. Peterbuilt doesn't make compact cars. Maybe those are just not markets that Microsoft can win at.
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I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.
Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team (commodore) and disappeared off the planet.
Had they chosen IBM PC instead, maybe we'd all be using Berkeley Windows instead of MS windows. And Bill Gates would be in the same camp as Nolan Bushnell or Jack Tramel.
Selling MS-DOS to IBM and riding it was indeed a streak of luck, of having a vision that could be worked, and having it at the right place and the right time. But to assume that such a streak of luck is the only thing that propelled MS to its position of dominance is as bad an oversimplification of things as one can make. Removing the typical moral overtones we at /. like to put on things, Gates did a hell of a lot more (as one of the few people that can be geek/technocrat and businessman at the same time) in driving MS's direction. Getting a streak of luck is great. Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
I'm not a fan of MS products, and I've always prefer to work in predominantly Unix/Linux systems and development environments (for practical and ideological reasons). But even I can find some objective neurons left to give credit where credit is due.
From what I understand, the Kin is an indicator of what's wrong with MS. MS bought Danger with the idea of making feature phones. Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks that was popular with teenagers. The initial plan was to launch new products 6 months after the purchase. It was ambitious but workable plan.
Then MS executives started making a series of decisions that doomed it. First of all Danger used Java. That was never going to be allowed at MS. Project Pink would have to use CE. This would seriously delay any launch plans.
At the same time, there were feudal wars. See MS already has a phone division. While Windows Mobile was more of a business phone than consumer model, they had their own ideas and strategy for a consumer model that would become WP7. Unfortunately the rumor is that the Mobile division denied programming resources to Project Pink so they had to make the migration from Java to CE by themselves. Remember most of the Project Pink members were former Danger employees.
Had the Kin came out in 6 months, it might been a successful product. The market was changing while Project Pink was stuck in development battles. While texting is still popular, the focus was shifting to twitter and FaceBook. These features were bolted onto the product adding further delay. Other features like Calendar and contacts were delayed.
By the time the Kin was launched 18 months late, it was noticeable that the product had no clear identity and was rushed out. It was not a smart phone because it did not really have apps, yet it was not a feature phone either especially at smart phone prices. It was buggy and lacked basic features.
MS cut their losses early on it. Six months later, Verizon relaunched it as a feature phone with numerous fixes. While sales figures are not cited, it is assumed Verizon sold off their inventory.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
-- Linux user #369862
"He can drag down MSFT the way John scully dragged down Apple."
Come on, now. Scully is in an elite group. His only peers in his industry are John Akers and maybe Jack Tramiel. At best, Ballamer will be a Carly Fiorina.
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time, but were well (and mainly) known for their BASIC interpreters. They bought the rights to Quick and Dirty DOS (aka 86-DOS), a CP/M clone, and then redirected a DEC lawsuit against them for infringement to Seattle Computer Products (the creator of QDOS) and DEC sued them out of existence for a product they no longer had rights to sell.
MS probably would have never won the OS battle without a little help, especially in the windows GUI age where their products were years behind the competition. They won by promising features to match or better competition years in advance of offering them (FUD), bundling agreements that bundled only MS products (a practice I think should not be legal, but Comcast and others still do it), and signing exclusivity agreements with manufacturers (e.g. if you only sell our products, we'll sell them to you for 20% of list price). MS Office proved the killer app - once they threw Office into the bundling/exclusivity mix, there was no way not to go MS only.
Peterbuilt doesn't make compact cars.
Peterbilt isn't even an independent company any more. They were bought out by PACCAR way back in the 50s, along with Kenworth. Compared to Freightliner (a division of Daimler), PACCAR hasn't done that well: PACCAR made only $15 billion in '07 (for both Peterbilt and Kenworth and all their other operations combined), compared with $32 billion for Freightliner all by itself in '06.
But this probably isn't the best comparison anyway: Peterbilt doesn't look like it was ever a dominant brand, unlike MS. I think history usually shows that companies don't go from large, dominant positions to 4th or 5th-place positions of stability very often; usually, they collapse and the pieces get sold off.
Boeing doesn't make light aircraft, or ultra lights.
No, but Boeing doesn't need to because it makes tons of money in the defense sector and in big commercial planes. With the commercial planes, it co-dominates that industry with Airbus, and doesn't appear to be in big trouble of being made obsolete. Not so with Microsoft: they keep trying to move into new markets, only having any real success with consoles, but their core market (OS and Office) is constantly being eroded by many factors: Free software (Linux and OpenOffice), Macs, and the general reluctance of customers to replace their computers or buy new ones these days as their current ones are "good enough" and they're buying more mobile devices now. Boeing isn't in any danger of being replaced by cheaper competitors, only Airbus (which is nothing new, and just as big and lumbering a company as them).
Gates could not control every aspect of the company. Remember his usability rants?
He knows what is needed, but there are too many project managers and fiefdoms and it's not a single company working towards a single goal. No Fortune 100 company could possibly be run by a single person. He gives up some control to people, they are expected to focus on that aspect.
In my mind, I would rather have the CEO finding problems with a product and complaining about it.
But that's not the point. The point is, so many things surprised Bill, and Steve is still stuck playing catch-up in so many different markets. They have lost their focus and now want to be everywhere, like Google. Except Google knows how to stay ahead of trends. Neither MS CEO knew how to drive that. The best thing for Microsoft is to hire a young guy, make the guy use everything Microsoft, from phones to cars (yes some run Windows), and give him the authority to call out problems. Bill is not the solution, just like Steve isn't.
I use a Mac and Linux but they are really only barley making a dent in the PC market. The question will be what is going to happen to laptops. Mobile devices are good but limited. You need a keyboard to do any real communication or content creation. So will the market go to tablets that dock to a keyboard like the ASUS Transformer? Will they mo6ve to mobile devices that dock with a notebook like frame like the AtrixII?
Microsoft will still be making money for a very long time and keep doing very well for a long time IMHO. I am not a Microsoft fanboy at all but they are well established and very solid.
Long term I would worry more about Intel than Microsoft. I can tell that for a fact in 1982 if you told people that Intel would make a PC faster than a CRAY and that someday the worlds fastest computer would use the x86 instruction set that people would have laughed in your face. Right up with telling them in 1986 that Compaq would someday buy the giant DEC or that Vaxes, PDP, and Eclipses would be replaced by X86 machines. What happened it the X86 just kept creeping up and up and economies of scale made them closer and closer to the leading edge of technology and speed. Now they have filled the entire ecosystem of computing from embedded devices to the biggest systems. At the top they only really have to compete with IBMs Power line and sort of with SPARC.
I see ARM doing the exact same thing. They are going to keep getting faster and faster and pushing into the X86 markets from the bottom up. Here Intel has a problem because they do not want to sell fewer high price CPUs just to fight ARM but ARM would love to push up market. A faster more expensive ARM will not reduce profits for ARM makers but a cheaper good enough X86 will hurt Intel's bottom line. In the end it will not matter if the X86 is faster as long as ARM is fast enough, cheap enough, and runs cool enough, and long enough on a battery, ARM will win.
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Gates got extremely lucky. Digital Research's salesman failed to show for an important meeting and IBM immediately walked down the road to Microsoft and exchanged contracts.
The word you are looking for isn't FUD it is vaporware and frankly one should give credit where credit is due as it turned out to be a bloody brilliant strategy. MSFT knew at the time they were years behind and had some serious trouble, so Bill had the occasional screenshot and mockup cooked up and through the sheer power of his giant brass balls and ability to bullshit got the press to believe it was real.
This managed in a one two punch to not only keep OEMs buying MSFT for fear that they would be left out when the "next new thing" hit, but also killed competitors who couldn't make their real products able to do the miraculous things Bill's non existent OS could do. Frankly it was bloody brilliant. If you had run BeOS or OS/2 at the time (I ran both) you'd know that Win pre 98 was like a joke compared to them, but Bill and his magical brass balls kept them both at bay with nothing but bullshit and some phony screencaps.
But as for why he won the OS battle I'd argue its the same reason you don't see Linux getting any traction on the desktop: The combination of ease of use and availability of programs. I know this shocks the shit out of Linux users, even have one moron here who can't read a sentence that put it as his sig, but as far as Windows users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI IN WINDOWS since they will never ever have to use it, ever. Windows has spent untold millions in research and work making sure every single thing is "clicky clicky" simple, whereas Linux is to this day more often than not a screen scraper on top of a CLI app and if you need to do anything more than the absolute basics (such as install a driver or change wireless settings) you will often have to drop to term.
The other reason for winning is why I gave up on OS/2 and BeOS around the Win98 era, the availability of programs There are literally millions of programs, from games and video editing to office software and every niche of business under the sun, both free and commercial and the one OS you can be assured it runs on is Windows thanks to its network effect and backwards compatibility. Hell Windows 7 seems to get several patches a month that are nothing but new shim settings for older programs, MSFT really does put in the work when it comes to backwards compatibility. While Linux too has plenty of apps, the simple fact is all the decent ones run on Windows while there is tons of specialized software that has no Linux equivalent and never will. Sure you have 50 million text editors and programmers tools, but what about medical transcription? CAD and engineering programs that will work with the big name software like SolidWorks?
In the end while Bill's ability to bullshit got them through the dark times of Win 1/2/3 it was all the money spent on ease of use and the whole "developers developers developers" meme that allowed MSFT to win the whole ball of wax.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I totally disagree with all the anti-Bill Gates rants here.
Let me see where MS was when Gates left? Oh yeah ...
1. IE owned 90% of the browser market
2. SQL Server was rapidly gaining marketshare over Oracle and DB2
3. WindowsCE aka Windows Mobile owned 90% of the smart phone market
4. Windows owned 95% of the desktop operating system market
5. Customers upgrading Windows/Office every 2-3 years during life cycling desktops.
6. MS was first with the MS tablet
Cons
1. XBOX lost 1 billion a quarter. Thats the only negative cost center under his leadership
Things were very good under Bill Gates
Today under Balmer
1. IE owns less than 50% of the browser market in North America
2. SQL Server is rapidly being replaced by MySQL for many internet/intranet sites
3. Windows Mobile owns only 6% of the market
4. Windows only owns 85% of the US market thanks to Apple. 10 years ago they had something like 3% market share rather than the 12 - 15%!
5. Customers are keeping and still buying WindowsXP and Office 2003 and refusing to upgrade if they life cycle to new desktops or not.
6. Ipads and now Andriod tablets are eating XP tablets for breakfast and took over the whole market
Pro
1.I think XBOX is now breaking even
So, in other words Microsoft is losing their existing monopoly slowly and every new market they are trying to get into is just a money losing division. Notice I did not even mention Linux up there. Apple and google, combined with MS incompentence for their existing monopolies are doing the work for us. The fact is MS already won the war over Apple and the Palm Pilot in the mobile wars. Now they are losing BAD and this is inexcusable if I were a shareholder. You can hate Bill Gates all you want for his business tactics, hence I chose his name back in 1999 as he was perceived as unstoppable then. Something needs to change
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Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks
Wrong. Why would you start out with an incorrect, inflammatory, weird statement like this? You have some interesting points re how Microsoft made every wrong move conceivable WRT the acquisition of Danger and its products, but credibility==zero hen you start off with some nit-picky undies-too-tight pronouncement. And you make it mildly fun to pick on you.
For the record, Danger's "Hiptop" phone platform was sold under the Hiptop name outside the US for the first three versions. In the US, T-Mobile was the sole provider, and the formal name for the product was "Sidekick" for versions 1,2 & 3. The Hiptop branding was dropped entirely when Danger T-Mobile released the Sharp-mfr'd SIdekick iD, though the name continued to be used by some developers for internal reference designs. Do you still insist on saying "Touchdown" instead of Microsoft Exchange Server? The Sidekick iD was followed by the Sidekick LX, Sidekick Slide (mfr'd by Motorola), Sidekick 2008, and Sidekick LX'09 (aka Mobiflip). Long before the Microsoft's acquisition of Danger, "Sidekick" was the effectively-sole product and branding.
As for MSFT's series of missteps, you largely have the sequence right. I would add, though, that Microsoft's 18-month-late launch pissed of Verizon product managers so badly that Verizon dropped all voice and data plan discounts and rebates at Pink's launch, effectively requiring a $100/month plan for a teen phone. Microsoft may have beaten Pink within an inch of its life, but Verizon put the final nail in the coffin by making it grossly unaffordable to its target market.
I think not...(*poof*)
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time
Before MS-DOS, Microsoft had Xenix, a quite popular unix clone at the time.
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...unless he's already done that.
I can't completely agree with this. I'm pretty sure Intel would love to get rid of a lot of the cruft in the X86 ISA, and release a properly new product. Partly because they've tried it once already. The reason they can't is that so much software is compiled to work well on X86.
And in the end, when people are buying a PC, they expect to get a PC that does everything they want of it. ARM are doing very well, as smartphones become better and so bought by more people, and tablets take off. But in the end, there aren't full fledged ARM based PCs. That line is going to be incredibly difficult to cross. Maybe tablets will blur the lines - a tablet with a docking station providing keyboard, mouse and full-res monitor, might for instance create demand for desktop-style software recompiled for ARM ISA, but it is very far from a sure thing.
The business was built up on desktop and office app dominance. But now operatings systems are turning into commodities with the advent of virtualization/emulation/cross-platform frameworks and with widespread, sophisticated web standards. Applications are turning into commodities with the reverse engineering of formats and the advent of new standards.
Essentially, interoperability is bleeding the life out of Microsoft.
Microsoft's (current state of) livelihood is based on barriers; let them suffer. They won't die, not any time soon -- they make solid operating systems. They do make good products, despite all the security issues and bugs we've seen. But now that they've lost their stranglehold on the market they become just another player. They won't grow this big again based on being just another vendor.
This is what all those crazy advocates of "open standards" have been trying to achieve all this time. If all that griping about secret APIs and protocol pollution didn't make sense to you before, maybe it begins to make sense now.
Where Microsoft clamped down on diversity, it can no longer. And the gradual technological progress that Microsoft offered can now be replaced with the fertile offerings of a far wider sphere of operating systems and applications developers. Things like the Great Languish -- IE's stagnation for half a decade during what should have been a period of explosive growth for web technology -- are no longer possible.
I look forward to watching technology take huge strides, relative to what it had been doing under Microsoft's control.
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That wasn't his only stroke of luck. It was lucky that IBM licensed PC-DOS rather than insisting on buying it outright, lucky that his parents both worked for IBM, lucky that Compaq came along and cloned the IBM's BIOS, and lucky in a lot of other ways.
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