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well, microsoft was the first software company where
we wrote software for personal computers and we believe that we could hire the best engineers
there was a unbelievable amount of software to be written
and we could do it well we could do it on a global basis
and... the original customer base was the hardware manufacturers
and we sold to literally hundreds and hundreds you know... over a hundred companies in japan
and over a hundred companies doing word processors and industrial control type of things
we know in the long run we wanted to sell software directly to users
but we actually didn't get around that till nineteen eighty
when we had uh... our first sort of games and productivity software that
that people would go to a computer store in actually buy the the software package
we actually talked about it in an article
and i think nineteen seventy seven was the first time it appears in print
where we say a computer on it on every desk and every home
and actually the
we said running microsoft software
if we were just talking about the vision we'd leave
that those last three words out
uh... if we were
talking in an internal company discussion
we put those words in
and
it's very hard to recall
how crazy and wild that was you know on every desk and in every home
you know at the time you have
people who are very smart saying
you know why would somebody needed computer or even Ken Olsen
who would run this company digital equipment
who made the computer i grew up with
and you know that we admired
both him and his company immensely
was saying that
this seemed kinda a silly idea
that people would want to have a computer
when
IBM
saw that we had written software for all the personal computers
they came to us sought our advice on the design
but we said you should put the discant
and since they wanted to ship very quickly
another company
uh...
called digital research
had done that work
for the eight bit machines
and they were starting to do a version for this new these new sixteen machines
we commenced by the end of the sixteen bit machine
using this
eighty eighty six eighty d eight processor. Well Digital Research
really hadn't finished the work
and then IBM was getting frustrated because Digital Research
wouldn't sign even a non-disclosure agreement
and then some of us uh... particularly Paul
and uh...
key person named Kozhikode Nishi
uh...
was from japan worked with us
said no no no we should just do that ourselves
and because of a quick timing
we end up liscensing the original code from another company
uh...
and turned that into MS-DOS
and
so then
subsequently MS-DOS competed with
this Digital Research CP/M
uh... after about two or three years and MS-DOS
became far far more popular
uh... then
than CP/M and then eventually we would
take an add
graphics capability on top of MS-DOS
and then integrate the two together
and so today when we talk about Windows
it actually includes
all those MS-DOS things in it. that's the full operating system
although most of you think of the graphics in Windows and stuff there's a lot of
more classic operating system capability that that's built in there
the IBM initial deal is a flat fee deal uh... another flat the deal
it had certain restrictions
that prevented IBM
from selling to other hardware makers
so people did
IBM PC compatible machines
we would get the revenue by doing business directly with those people
and that the deal was very complicated but it was a deal that
Steve Balmer who's a key person of the company by that time
and i thought a lot about
and it was a fairly
junior team from IBM so we tried to make sure they're giving our belief that
personal computers would be hyper popular
that microsoft would get
a lot of that upside so
they felt they got a very good deal, which they did
as the industry expanded
we uh...
for new versions and for different machines, we got that opportunity even
though they did not pay us the royalty
even in the early days if you set a computer on every desk in every home and
you'd say okay how many homes are there on the world how many desk are there on the world
you know can i make twenty bucks for every home, twenty bucks for every desk
if you get these big numbers
but part of the beauty of the
whole thing was
we were very focused on the here and now
should we hire one more person
if our customers
didn't pay us
whould we have enough cash to meet the payroll
we really were very practical about
that next thing and so involved in
the deep engineering
that we didn't get ahead of ourselves we never thought
you know how big we'd be. i remember
when uh... one of the early lists of wealthy people came out
and
uh... one of the Intel founders was there
the guy who ran Wayne
computer actually is still
Wayne is still doing well and we thought hmm... boy, the software business does
well
in fact, microsoft could be
somewhere to that, but it wasn't real focus that
that everyday activity of
just doing great software
drew us in
and some decisions we made, like the quality of the people, the way we were very global
that vision of
uh...
uh... how we thought about software that was very long term
but other than those things you know we just came in to work every day
and
uh...
wrote more code
you know hired
hired more people
it wasn't really until the IBM PC
succeeded and perhaps even into Windows succeeded that
there was a broad awareness that microsoft
was very unique
as a software company that these other companies have been one product
companies
hired
people couldn't do a broad set of things, didn't renew their excellence, didn't do
research
uh... so
and we thought we were
doing something very unique, but it was easily
not until nineteen ninety five or even nineteen ninety-seven that
that there was this wide recognition that we
we were the company that had
had revolutionized software
when i was very young
hadn't been exposed to computers, so i was mostly just reading,
doing math, learning about science
and i wasn't sure what
my career would be
i knew i loved
learning about things, i was an avid reader
but it was when i was twelve years old that i
i first got to use a computer
actually a very
limited machine by today's standards uh... but that
definitely fascinated me when i was first exposed
i was intrigued
uh... by figuring out what it could do and what it couldn't do
and some friends and I spent
lots of time uh... the teachers got intimidated, so we were on our own
trying to figure it out actually we gave
course on computers
uh... to the other students
and it became
you know a fascination where
uh... we
got paid for doing computer work and
talked about forming a accompany
uh... but