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by peterashford
2656 days ago
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I don't think it's historical revisionism. The initial stroke of luck was IBM not realising what a gold mine they had gifted Microsoft. Beyond that point, MS leveraged their platform advantage to neutralise competitors. They made Lotus 1-2-3 run slower on their platform, then copied it. Stacker's code, they straight out stole. Once they were in a powerful position, that gifted them more power, but it was luck that got them there in the first place. None of that has to do with any meritorious coding by Gates. |
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http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Lotus employees themselves said they don't recall DOS ever breaking or slowing down their app, and Microsoft gave them betas to test. Any compatibility issues were bugs in DOS that Microsoft fixed. So you're repeating long since debunked myths here. Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is one of the strategic issues Gates got right.
Secondly, IBM not realising the OS was a "gold mine" is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's not luck. Luck is a dice roll, it's something that could happen to anyone. Noticing important opportunities other firms have missed due to lack of strategic insight isn't "luck", that's indeed the heart of merit!
Thirdly, Stacker wasn't stolen. The Stacker lawsuit was about patents, it happened because Microsoft evaluated Stac's technology and decided to go with a different compression engine, which pissed off Stac so they sued. The judge concluded any infringement wasn't "wilful" i.e. the Microsoft people who did DoubleSpace didn't know about Stac's patents. This is the kind of dispute that happens to every software company.
Finally, being in a powerful position didn't automatically "gift them more power". It doesn't work like that. Look at Azure - it doesn't benefit from Windows at all, yet is growing like a weed and beating GCP. That's not something that was gifted to them merely by being there.
What I'm seeing here is a very strange view of business and leadership - good decisions are described as luck, hard work to build new products is zeroed out and described as merely 'gifts', and a bunch of garbled or false urban legends are used to minimise their achievements.
Look, I've never worked for Microsoft and have no particular reason to love them. In the 1990s I was a full on Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy in fact. But with the benefit of age and time, and watching competitors, I can see now just how many good decisions Gates made repeatedly to get him and his firm where he is now. It wasn't luck.