

The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995) - cromulent
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.html

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dave_sullivan
1) I had heard Bill Gates was long winded in written correspondence, but wow.

2) I've often been impressed by his intelligence and grasp of a wide variety
of topics in interviews, but this letter really makes him look like
Nostradamus...

Definitely worth a full read, really enjoyed it.

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__rkaup__
'the Microsoft boss later grumbling that after 10 hours of browsing the
Internet, he "had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other
than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format," then adding, "I did
see a great number of Quicktime files"; and his determination to "match or
beat" the services offered by Netscape, a "competitor 'born' on the Internet"
who then boasted "70% usage share" in the browser market.'

This seems to confirm my biggest problem with Microsoft. Why do they need to
have their own version of everything? What do they get from this? How come
they don't try to innovate as much as open source does, instead?

~~~
danilocampos
> This seems to confirm my biggest problem with Microsoft. Why do they need to
> have their own version of everything? What do they get from this?

Microsoft is a business hooked on vendor lock in. Once they've got an
organization using Windows, boom, they've got a money pipe that could feed
them for over a decade. Which then means they can sell them Office, and boom,
another stream of cash. As time goes on, network effects bloom in the form of
users locked into file formats and encourage further growth.

It's almost a viral strategy, aimed at corporate IT. It's what they know how
to do. It also illuminates why every product _must_ be "Windows This,"
"Windows That." They want to increase the surface area of their flagship so it
can continue to own large volumes of users.

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aresant
Worth a complete read - amazingly accurate assessment of what actually came to
be.

Also insight into MSFTS current problems - Gates' genius mind was able to
coordinate across many different biz divisions from consumer to enterprise.

Not many other candidates in the world with that bandwidth or visionary
insight.

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archangel_one
To be fair, it can't have been long before that memo that he wrote The Road
Ahead, which infamously made very little mention of the internet at its first
release, necessitating a whole bunch of additions for subsequent printings. I
don't find it as amazingly visionary as all that - for example, he barely
mentions the importance of search which his company would later end up sinking
huge amounts of money into.

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slackgentoo
> he barely mentions the importance of search

To be fair, he mentioned 7 critical steps. Search engines are No. 5.

~~~
archangel_one
Huh, my PDF viewer seems to be failing to display a couple of pages towards
the end. That's annoying.

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duncans
It was Steven Sinofsky that convinced him, with his infamous "Cornell is
WIRED" email in '94.

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barista
And that makes you think, if this guy knew it is coming and was heading the
most influential and powerful software company at that time, why did Microsoft
fail to build on this vision?

~~~
chulipuli
Have they really failed?

I reason they have not. Bing, the .NET framework, the OOP languages and IDE,
Interet Explorer, XBOX, etc. are all mentioned in that memo, and are succesful
divisions/products.

I don't know of any other company with such track record (if there is, please
mention it).

Not a fanboy, though.

