Over the Easter weekend, a little company called Microsoft turned 40. Bill Gates sent a letter to all Microsoft employees, and The Verge posted it online
In the coming years, Microsoft has the opportunity to reach even more people and organizations around the world. Technology is still out of reach for many people, because it is complex or expensive, or they simply do not have access. So I hope you will think about what you can do to make the power of technology accessible to everyone, to connect people to each other, and make personal computing available everywhere even as the very notion of what a PC delivers makes its way into all devices.
I’m still not sure if Microsoft’s positive contributions outweigh its negative ones. Sure, they played a vital role in making computers popular and affordable, but at the same time, they’ve illegally harmed the competition – and thus the advancement of the entire industry – and played a huge role in strengthening one of the biggest threats the industry faces today: patents.
Tough call.
MS did bring computing to the masses. All the unix vendors and IBM included were trying to milk the business market for all it was worth, and Apple was doing its wierd Apple thing they do.
And intel’s open hardware didn’t hurt one bit either.
Note the big unix vendors are mostly gone and IBM retreated.
But MS turned from a market serving company into a self serving market milking company almost overnight. They caused many of us a lot of pain, aggravation and frustration. But they did set some standard.
And now MS finds itself not even a second place player in 2 markets it helped pioneer: smartphones and tablets, which they lost because of their desire to milk the market.
Time to move on, but only after MS’s desire to shove their trusted computing crap on us is crushed first.
Edited 2015-04-06 19:02 UTC
The hardware was open but for a while every IBM clone you purchased had to come with (or at least pay for) a copy of MS DOS. Even if you weren’t going to run MS DOS, you had to pay for it. I think that hurt the market for alternative operating systems. Why buy an awesome DOS alternative when you’d already owned a copy of DOS 3.3?
But, by making DOS ubiquitous, it made it cheaper and easier for developers to target that platform. Imagine if there had been five or six 8088/8086 operating systems to choose from? I think that eventually one or two operating systems would have risen to the top, but I wonder if it wouldn’t have taken longer for the market to mature. Sometimes having choices sucks, because people don’t make a decision until there’s a clear choice to make.
I think Apple had a better product. (I stared using Macs in 1985/86 when my family had a nice Compaq Deskpro at home and I couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that Macs were better – I just couldn’t afford one).
It’s hard to imagine how things would have developed without Microsoft, though. Microsoft’s security disasters during the 00s may or may not have been replicated by other players. During its heyday, the Amiga had virus problems that rivalled Windows, even without the help of the internet. The Mac had incredibly shoddy security before OS X, and would no doubt never have survived Windows-like popularity. Linux would of course be as unpopular as it is today.
I think the situation would suck no matter what. Perhaps we’d all use OS/2 on IBM computers.
One of the reasons that these systems lacked security is that the underlying processors lacked the feature that allow you to enforce security. For example, MMUs weren’t shipping on most home computer processors until maybe the late 1980’s/early 1990s.
Take a look at Android. Maybe the pc revolution would have started 5 years later but it would be a lot healthier and we would have seen a lot more innovation. There is no doubt in my mind that MS did more harm than good. No contest.
I personally think it would have been exactly the same, only with a different label. See what Apple is doing today with Web standards and ecosystem lock-in? And do you think that Google would have “open-sourced” Android, had it appeared (and grown) in the same epoch of, say, Windows 95?
I guess a lot of people are unable to see things clearly as they are – they seem to be locked in that newish trendy adage “OMG M$ is bad Apple is c00l Google Is Not Evil etc. etc.”… And unable to build up thoughts of their own. 🙁
Because…
How ironic that you would say that.
Apple got the memory protections much later than Windows. If they had won, things would have been at Win 3.1 level until 2000.
If Apple had achieved Microsoft-like dominance, they would have had no reason to implement memory protection that soon … which of course would have opened the door for other players, as MacOS 9 had no place in the internet age.
You mean the OS/2 that was originally developed by Microsoft?
Uh no. It was a joint project right from the beginning.
Technically, Windows users of today are running OS/2.
After all, Windows NT started its life as OS/2 version 3. 
If MS and IBM hadn’t gotten into a spat and split (with IBM writing a new OS/2 version 3 and MS relegating the OS/2 “face” of NT to the backburner), it would probably still be named OS/2.
Sounds scary already. Thanks, but no, thanks. There should be something better and more humane than Microsoft to connect people.
Edited 2015-04-06 22:38 UTC
“In the coming years, Microsoft has the opportunity to reach even more people and organizations around the world. Technology is still out of reach for many people, because it is complex or expensive, or they simply do not have access. So I hope you will think about what you can do to make the power of technology accessible to everyone, to connect people to each other, and make personal computing available everywhere even as the very notion of what a PC delivers makes its way into all devices.”
You already own 90%+ of the market, do you really need to own the rest? Technology is out of reach for most people because you charge more for the OS then the hardware costs. The point of technology is NOT to make Microsoft more money. And we already have what will bring the PC to all masses. Its called open source. And there is nothing you can do to stop it and to be honest, you’re not even welcome to participate in many people’s opinions.
Edited 2015-04-07 02:05 UTC
Hello TechGeek,
just for your information Windows had been free since April 2014 for phones and tablets with screens smaller than 9 inches.
Best regards,
Jan Sichula
Thats nice. Its still no excuse for the fact that they have siphoned billions of dollars out of the tech industry that they then used to stifle competition. And why not give away the OS the version that failed. They sure couldn’t sell it. But I digress, the free that really matters is freedom.
Edited 2015-04-09 04:22 UTC
Microsoft is a dinosaur and a founder of the industry. It deserves cheerful congratulations on the 40th anniversary and the deepest respect, whatever the drawbacks of the company’s products are. Together with multiple other grand doers on online space, such as Google, Facebook or Amazon, they made computerization possible. Will it have negative effects for the generations to come? Let’s say, the Y generation in a vast majority of counties build their future according to the principles that such companies establish. So, the answer is pretty evident. The issue is how our oldy-moldy ethics will tune to the way Microsoft and other giants develop. For now, we already experience gaps in the way privacy works with different services. We all know how profound the influence of social networks is not only on personal issues, but work opportunities, financial possibilities and social activity. As a matter of fact, Microsoft has made a lot during these 40 years, but a lot is still to be done. Read more about these issues in these articles:
http://loansmob.com/no-verification-payday-loans/
http://bgr.com/2015/04/06/microsoft-bill-gates-letter/
Edited 2015-04-08 09:33 UTC