Another story about Bill Gates
When a student asked Bill Gates for advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. He said: “Have a vision, look further into the future and identify opportunities”. He also commented: “I do not go after the market, I go where the market will be”. During a newspaper interview, Gates said: “I never come to work and say, ‘Hey, I am successful, let’s just lie around and enjoy. That is not the way we do business, we must be a hungry company and always thinking what would be our next meal?”
During the time at Microsoft, Bill Gates always sets direction where he wanted his company to go. He often wrote short memos to his employees about his vision. In 1976, the early day of software industry, before the IBM Personal Computer was developed, and just few months after created Microsoft. He argued with friends that software had economic value, a necessary condition for a successful business. He wrote: “Nothing would please me more than being able to hire 10 programmers and flushed the market with good software.” At that time, hardware was everything and made a lot of money for companies like Apple, HP, Atari, Commodore, Intel, National Semiconductor. Nobody thought about software and most people considered software was just a hobby for “boring engineers”. Gates asked his friends: “Why there is nobody getting rich writing code? Why didn’t they get back their investment on their efforts? Why they are not making money? His friend later told the local newspaper: “He is a prime example of the entrepreneur who has vision. He believes that the investment of time, energy, and imagination must deserve a big money return”.
Few years later, when Microsoft was successful with the operating system MS-DOS, Bill Gates look further into the man-machine interface then wrote: “ Microsoft believes in mouse and graphic as invaluable to the man-machine interface. We will bet on that belief by focusing all our new developments with mouse and graphics into a new product: Microsoft Window”. Gates’ memos completely changed the computer industry by making computer more easier to use for all users. His friends told the newspapers: “He always look into the future, identifies opportunities, selects the most promising ideas, studies them in great detail, and then communicates them very effectively to his company, then to the industry.”
Microsoft’s focus on the graphical user interface had been successful. Microsoft was grabbing market share of Apple. The company had its initial public offering in 1986 and made Bill Gates the richest man on earth. That day he send a memo to his employees: “I have to say, that I got pretty excited about the fact that we are now the number one software company in every respect (sales, profit, units, leadership, people )”.
By 1995, Microsoft became the largest software company. It was the dominant provider of operating systems and launched Windows 95 with more success. The company of 20,000 people are getting richer and more confidence than ever but Gates warned his employees: “Do not let this blind you, something may come as a surprise. Keep looking further for new opportunities, do not stop”.
His warning was correct because just few months later, Netscape Communications released its Internet browser, providing a gateway to the growing volume of content on the World Wide Web and diminishing the importance of Windows because the browser worked the same regardless of a computer’s operating system.
On May 1995, Gates sent a memo to all Microsoft employees, comparing the arrival of the Internet with the development of the IBM’s PC. He wrote: “In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is critical to every part of our business because the internet would set the course of our industry for a long time to come.” He continued with a nine pages under the title “The Internet Tidal Wave.” Where he clearly set a new direction for the company. The memo had the desired effect. Microsoft developed a new C# programming languages better suited to Internet development, server software that runs more than a third of the world’s Web sites and a browser called Explore. Microsoft bundled its Internet Explorer browser with Windows, a move that helped make it the dominant browser. However, it also created a decade long legal battle that damaged Microsoft reputation, cost billions dollars.
During the time Microsoft was busy with the legal issue. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford graduate students who work on a search engine. Few months later, they created a small company called Google. Over time, it became the leader in the Internet’s application for searching online. Many people believe that if Bill Gates was not occupied with the legal issue, Google may not have a chance to succeed.
Microsoft did not have a search engine until 2005. By that time it was too late to catch up. However, in Oct 2005 Bill Gates wrote another memo in which he predicted: “The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “Service wave” of application and experience available instantly over the internet to millions of users. The future will be in service as software will become a service”.
However, at that time, there were debates between software as a product or a service. Most people argued that Bill Gates was wrong because nobody would make money on service. Even people in Microsoft also believed that the way of making money is to sell product (Software). It took five more years for people to realized his vision. Today, as more companies are moving into service, from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and HP. People began to look back to Bill Gates’ vision and concluded that he was correct as service is now the new direction for the software industry.
As the new that HP, the largest hardware company is moving into software as service. The newspaper again look for Bill Gates for his next prediction. Bill Gates said that currently he is fully occupied with global issues of how to eradicate diseases in the world. He does not pay attention much to the technology market but he hints quietly that the future may belong to another technology: Biotechnology.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
