....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I saw Bill Gates on my TV recently talking about innovation. A Federal judge has ruled that Bill and his company Microsoft have bullied and bashed their competition in the name of dominating the market place. And Bill's response is to start making TV commercials talking about how much innovation he has planned. I had to laugh. But then, I guess Microsoft has always been more about image than about reality.
Back in 1974 a company out in New Mexico put together the world's first home computer, the Altair 8800. It was a kit and had to be assembled. It didn't have a monitor or a keyboard, but Gates and his high school buddy Paul Allen saw an opportunity. They made a few changes to the already well established ( and in the public domain) BASIC language system and then sold programs in the "new" language for the Altair. With the profits Bill and Paul formed Microsoft.
They almost went bankrupt in the first years, like most small businesses. Then in 1980 IBM decided to get into the home computer market. Gates and Allen struggled for months to invent a language they knew the more complicated IBM machines were going to need. When they failed Gates went out one afternoon and bought Q-DOS,(Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 and then sold it to IBM as a Microsoft invention, MS-DOS. That sale made Bill Gates a billionaire by the time he was thirty.
IBM's only competition in the home computer market at the time was Apple Computers, run by a genius named Steve Jobs. Apple had a better product and was about ready to deliver and even better system. But Jobs made one mistake. He saw Bill Gates as a like-minded innovator and tried to enlist Gates on Apple's side. To show his trust Jobs let the Microsoft team take a good long look at the new Apple operating system then under development.
In August of 1995 Gates introduced "Windows", which was a function by function duplicate of the Apple original. Windows 95 crashed a lot and it was a little clumsier than the Apple product. But Windows had IBM and IBM knew how to build and sell computers. Apple went into decline, not because Bill Gates had out-innovated Steve Jobs, (nobody has ever done that) but because Steve Jobs is not a great businessman and Bill Gates is.
Gates had the business savvy to realize early on that people wanted computers that would be work like cars. You turn the key and it goes. So he bought a word processing program, renamed it Microsoft Word, and made it part of Windows. He bought lots of different types of programs, renamed them and bundled them together with Windows. Windows dominants the entire world.
If you invented a great accounting program sooner or later Microsoft would offer to buy you out. If you refused, Microsoft would buy another accounting program and then give it away for free with Windows. A lot of talented inventors went bankrupt because they wouldn't sell to Bill Gates. After a while people even forgot that Microsoft had not invented anything.
The Internet was not invented by Bill Gates, anymore than it was invented by Al Gore. But Bill Gates almost owns it. And anybody using the Microsoft web browser can testify that Microsoft often simply doesn't recognize any other system on the net. If you have a web site you either use the Microsoft systems or your web site just doesn't show up, your customers can't find you and you can't do dimes worth of business. That is the definition of a trust.
There is nothing wrong with being a good businessman. Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world and he deserve to be. He was lucky and he was smart and he was bold. But innovative? Please.
Kimit A.Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. His work may be also be read in the Los Angeles Daily News