Looking Ahead: To the Victor Goes the Spoils
by Jerry Pournelle
May 14, 1998
intellectualcapital.com
It happened in 1989. Bill Gates put on a full-court press to get every major computer and technology writer and Wall Street analyst to come to his Really Big Show, "Charting a Course for the Future," at which he would demonstrate and evangelize for the new graphical-interface operating system to replace DOS. The show would take place on the new campus in Redmond, but in a temporary building because they had just moved in, and the presentation center building was not ready yet.
The walls were decorated with huge banners and posters touting the operating system of the future. Each of us got a briefing book with copies of the charts each speaker would use. These were made using Microsoft PowerPoint, running on an Apple Macintosh; no IBM personal computer was capable of doing it. The new operating system would run graphics programs like PowerPoint; until it came out, though, if you wanted that capability, you had to buy a Macintosh.
The name of the new operating system? IBM OS/2, to be developed in partnership with Microsoft. Every one of those charts said "OS/2: Charting a Course for the Future," and to rub in the point, they gave away small boxed compasses. I still have mine.
Windows hardly appeared on any of those charts; it was a supplement to OS/2, which would feature an extra-cost interface to be called "Presentation Manager."
The meeting started at 0900, with a welcome from Gates. He waxed enthusiastic about OS/2, then turned the meeting over to an IBM executive. The IBM exec spoke for five minutes, then apologized: He had to catch a plane back to Boca Raton, Fla., where the IBM "Entry Systems Division" (that is how they thought of desktop computers in those days) was headquartered. Then he walked out, leaving most of his hour vacant.
Betting the ranch
Gates filled in as best he could, but it was clear to everyone in the room that something was terribly wrong. Here, Gates had assembled a stellar cast of financial and technical analysts and writers, calling some personally to get them to come; and in front of this group, in Microsoft's new headquarters, IBM pronounced that its "partner" was not important enough to keep its executive around to finish his speech. It was a terrible insult, and no one knew it better than Gates.
He brooded that day and through dinner that night -- in those days Gates had both lunch and dinner with his guests -- and the next day he announced that if you wanted to get your applications running on OS/2, your best route would be to get them running on Windows first. Shortly after that, IBM broke off the partnership with Microsoft, and Windows and OS/2 were in competition to be the future operating system for desktops. Most industry insiders predicted a clear win for OS/2; after all, IBM was a much larger company than Microsoft, and had splendid marketing capability and a very strong stable of very competent programmers. How could they lose?
Gates, meanwhile, went to every major software developer in the industry to try to get them to port their applications to Microsoft Windows.
They would not do it. WordPerfect dominated the PC word-processing market. Lotus 1-2-3 was the runaway leader for PC spreadsheets. Both turned him down flat, and without word processors and spreadsheets, Windows was doomed.
As Gates put it in a 1995 presentation, "In 1989, I went to all the major software houses and asked them to write applications for Microsoft Windows. They wouldn't do it. Then I went to the Microsoft Applications Group, and they did not have that option."
Wielding windows
So, as the final decade of this millennium opened, most people did not know they wanted or needed a graphical user interface (known in the computer trade as a GUI), and those who did used Macintosh computers. Most large corporate systems ran one or another variant of Unix, and lived with what we would today consider clunky and hard-to-use applications; if you wanted pretty printing or graphics, you got a Mac. OS/2 would fix all that, but IBM was in no hurry. Wait for it.
Then Gates bet his company on Windows. He threw every asset he had into coding and promoting Windows and getting applications running on it. He was betting that the PC industry was in for a huge spurt of growth, and that most of the growth would be among new users who did not want to learn command lines like "C:\copy A: /s/v," who didn't want to use a typewriter to fill out forms, who didn't want to pay the high prices Apple charged for graphical systems, and who would not wait for IBM to take care of "entry systems" customers.
Gates made the right bet, of course. We know that now. It was not so clear back then.
Windows was pretty awful when it first came out, but machines got more powerful. Each new Windows release was an improvement, both in bug fixes and adding new features. ATI developed the Graphics Accelerator Board. Suddenly, Windows began to catch on -- in homes, schools, then in offices. So did Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all ported from the Mac to Windows, then rewritten for Windows from scratch. Then came Windows for Workgroups, which ate the lunches of several companies that had made a good business out of selling peer-to-peer PC networking. Microsoft was accused of unfair practices, but then IBM included that feature in its catch-up version of OS/2, and that particular hubbub died.
Sour grapes?
IBM hung on for a while with OS/2. They had superior technology, but they did not have the applications, and they did not act as if they wanted any. At a time when Microsoft was literally forcing free copies of its applications and driver-developer kits on people walking past their booths at trade shows, IBM was proud of charging "only $695" for its driver-developer kit. Incidentally, one of the main complaints against OS/2 was the lack of drivers for a great number of hardware devices people had in their existing machines. If you wanted OS/2, you bought a machine that used OS/2-compatible hardware; they left all those "legacy systems" to Microsoft.
Eventually IBM abandoned OS/2 for the general public (there is still some corporate-level support, but none for end users), and Apple, having always gone for immediate profit rather than market share, imploded; and lo!, Windows stood there nearly alone.
Now Judge Robert Bork and Bob Dole and Ralph Nader are piling on, accusing Microsoft of being a monopoly. Microsoft is bad for consumers, and the government must step in to protect the rest of us, they say.
Now true, at one time the rest of us had to pay more than $1,000 just for essential software -- say Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, a good outliner like Grandview -- when now you can buy a whole computer with Microsoft Office installed for not much more. But think of the future. Microsoft keeps offering more features for less money, but one of these days it will change and act like a true monopolist, and we must set a bureaucracy to watch before that happens.
But your old software and operating system will continue to work: You will not have to buy anything new if it is overpriced. Microsoft may be a monopoly, but surely the time to sic government on Bill Gates is when he acts like a monopolist. So far, he has given us better products for less money. That has cut profits for a lot of people, who now want the government to do something about it so they can keep some market share.
Apparently, their profits are not so small that they cannot hire Bork, Dole and Nader.
I do not carry water for Microsoft, and I am as hard on their bad products as anyone else. I was a great champion of OS/2 as a technically superior operating system to Windows. And so what?
Gates bet the company and won. That is called competition. Those subsidizing the Bork, Dole and Nader show bet the wrong way, and now want government to hedge their bad bets. That is called sour grapes. If I were in a worse mood, I would say it is called tyranny.
|
