Friday, June 20th, 2008
Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme and extracts appear on the News Website.
One quote struck me:
‘The magic was not so much in the value of the deal with IBM, but rather that we did the evangelisation and we gave tools and information and just let anyone write software who wanted to. So the whole PC industry really took off around the variety of software packages that we got people to write.’
So Microsoft’s brilliance was to challenge the entire model of software development and encourage a multiplicity of cheap packages that would be able to meet needs in a variety of industries at a variety of levels simultaneously. So software drove hardware that drove software etc. at every cycle the price came down and value went up. A brilliant model before its time that ensured the IBM PC became the industry standard.