Microsoft was happy to place bets on every system they could. Bill Gates didn't bet against anyone. He placed lots of bets on lots of systems, knowing that one would work out. The IBM PC is what made their fortune. But the bets they placed on other systems were already doing very well for them. Including on Apple.
The Microsoft-Apple relationship began in 1977 with Microsoft introducing Applesoft BASIC and later licensing it to Apple. Microsoft SoftCard followed in 1980, enabling Apple machines to run to programs designed for the CP/M. Sure, there was the infamous MS-DOS deal with IBM. But in the same time period Steve Jobs visited Microsoft to demo early prototypes of the Macintosh, and Microsoft was the first major company to develop programs for the Mac. In the end Microsoft BASIC and Microsoft Multiplan were shipped simultaneously with the introduction of the Macintosh, and Microsoft announced at the launch that Word, Chart, and File would ship soon.
When I look back at the history, I see no sign that Bill Gates was betting against Steve Jobs. His most successful bet was not on Steve Jobs. But he had lots of bets on Jobs as well.
Early on, before a leader in the PC market was established, investors had the choice of betting which horse would win--Bill Gates at Microsoft or Steve Jobs at Apple.
Many people did get rich betting on Gates, so indirectly, yes, Bill Gates does show that people have gotten rich betting against Jobs. The hyperbole is nice, but only that--hyperbole.
"The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows."
Check your timeline. By 1990 betting on Microsoft was not betting against Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Windows 1.0 was released in the same year. However Windows struggled at that point. According to Microsoft (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistorydesktop.mspx for confirmation) the first successful version of Windows was Windows 3.0. That was released in 1990, and its main competitor was a severely mismanaged Apple. At that point Bill Gates was emphatically not competing against Steve Jobs.
When you're investing in Microsoft and not in Apple, that's a bet against Apple. And it wasn't just investors that had to make that bet ... software developers and customers had to pick.
In the early '90 support for Apple's hardware / OS was a second class citizen and it still is in many areas.
The original quote was 'nobody has ever got rich betting against Steve Jobs'. The fact that at times Microsoft had close dealings with Apple does not stop the fact that their biggest bet of all - on the IBM-PC, commoditized hardware and the Windows OS itself - was quite clearly in competition with the Macintosh and Apple.
This was 'a bet against Steve Jobs', and it made Bill Gates (and many others) quite, quite rich.
Nonsense. When you are "betting" on every platform in the market, it's not betting. Try going to the track and betting on every horse in a race. You'll lose money.
Microsoft is a software company, Apple is a hardware company. They overlap but if you look at it through that fundamental lens you'll understand. Gates bet on software, Jobs on hardware.
Microsoft was happy to place bets on every system they could. Bill Gates didn't bet against anyone. He placed lots of bets on lots of systems, knowing that one would work out. The IBM PC is what made their fortune. But the bets they placed on other systems were already doing very well for them. Including on Apple.
The Microsoft-Apple relationship began in 1977 with Microsoft introducing Applesoft BASIC and later licensing it to Apple. Microsoft SoftCard followed in 1980, enabling Apple machines to run to programs designed for the CP/M. Sure, there was the infamous MS-DOS deal with IBM. But in the same time period Steve Jobs visited Microsoft to demo early prototypes of the Macintosh, and Microsoft was the first major company to develop programs for the Mac. In the end Microsoft BASIC and Microsoft Multiplan were shipped simultaneously with the introduction of the Macintosh, and Microsoft announced at the launch that Word, Chart, and File would ship soon.
When I look back at the history, I see no sign that Bill Gates was betting against Steve Jobs. His most successful bet was not on Steve Jobs. But he had lots of bets on Jobs as well.
For more on the history, see http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h...