Resolve and Fortitude : Microsoft's ''SECRET POWER BROKER'' breaks his silence Read Online Free Page A

meetings were complemented by casual gatherings where our top guys informed us about sea changes they’d spotted shaking up the industry. Bill’s updates offered a wealth of insight into PC manufacturers’ affairs, their upcoming product announcements, and the horizons of hardware component manufacturers. They also caught up with MS software competitors, their expected directions and potential strategies. Bill was uncannily well-informed, and his alchemistic industry foresights nearly always came through. He used these gatherings as an effective method to foster trust and ignite confidence in MS’s destiny. Participants left pumped up, filled in, and utterly convinced. Leadership at its best! His only shortfall was a virtue called patience. I was in good company.
    Steve kept us abreast of operating system developments, the latest feature changes, embarrassing delays, and joint development activities with IBM. He considered himself the guardian of that company’s loyalty, ensuring her support for at least MS-DOS and OS/2—a new operating system jointly developed with IBM to replace DOS and MS Windows. What surprised me the most was that the trio viewed IBM simultaneously as a vitally important collaborator and a potentially deadly cobra! In the mid ’80s, IBM was the largest software company in the world. The bulk of her software was meant for use on her mainframe 6 platforms. Nothing prevented her from challenging us with alternative PC software. MS was loaded with tons of talent brimming with ambitions but was tiny and with rather scant resources compared to IBM. The top guys rightfully worried.
    Another competitor we watched and examined closely was Apple Computer. As she went from her earlier platforms to the Lisa workstation and the most innovative Macintosh (Mac), Bill admired her. Nevertheless, she constituted another formidable competitor well ahead in operating system (OS) design. A true threat to the IBM PC platform and potentially MS’s livelihood! We nonetheless supported the MAC with advanced office productivity applications such as MS Excel and MS Word, an experience that helped us when we later adapted them for MS Windows.
    No one in MS ever quite understood why Apple didn’t license her Mac OS to other manufacturers. Back in ’84/’85, Bill suggested this several times to Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s founders, who was in charge of Mac development. If he had acted upon that recommendation, he would have radically altered the PC landscape, MS’s future, and my career. 7 Jobs disagreed with Bill because he wanted end-to-end control over all aspects of Apple’s products and despised what made MS so successful—freely licensing OSs. After Jobs got ousted in 1985, the new team did not pursue this unique opportunity either and stayed on Jobs’s course until Mike Spindler, my ex-boss, took over as Apple’s CEO in ’93. Lucky us!
    To keep the troops alert, Bill and Steve were fond of depicting an atmosphere of chilling paranoia, of predators waiting to devour us. Monsters in the darkness, a competitor du jour—IBM, Lotus, WordStar, DRI, any of them. Their warnings instilled far more than merely in-depth comprehension of the company’s goals and objectives. They made certain we stayed on our toes, putting competitors on notice while vigilantly attempting to predict their next moves. But the wildfires of fear and obsession sputtered for me at times. The rants became a bit theatric, a match in the wind. The German-born mathematician would have preferred more realistic and analytical evaluations, and many of my colleagues shared my belief. To inspire us to jump in the trenches and blaze away as if our lives depended on it, the top guys led us to believe an army of dangerous Huns was always advancing over the horizon, fully intent on annihilating us. Competing for our execs meant keeping enemies constantly in sight—the favorite tactic from their portfolio of persuasion. The only one! Fearful explicitness