These questions originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answers by Brad Silverberg, Co-founder Fuel Capital; Partner at Ignition Partners; Microsoft SVP (1990-99), on Quora.
A: Top of the list for me is that Bill did not engage, either himself or the company, in the political process early enough. When Microsoft's competitors were effectively lobbying the government, Bill's attitude was the government should just go away and leave Microsoft alone. In his view the company was competing hard but fairly; it was creating value for customers and that should be enough. Well, this approach of not constructively engaging the government and concerned politicians, of not alleviating concerns that were not going to go away, was a disaster. The US federal government, many states, and the EU all essentially declared war on Microsoft, and Microsoft paid a devastating price.
Intel did a better job figuring out how to negotiate with the government and avoided the catastrophic fate Microsoft suffered. Google has done a better job with the US government but it seems the EU is on Google's case now.
Bill also had a difficult time figuring out how to respond to the opportunity / threat of the Internet. It's understandable. When you own Windows in the late 90's, life is good and why would you want things to change? Bill's view was to protect Windows, and didn't come up with an approach that kept Windows and Microsoft's systems strategy at the forefront. The result is that Microsoft's strategic position declined in the 2000's. It's now coming to grips with the new reality and making necessary, if belated, changes.
Bill's pursuit of Longhorn led to the debacle that was Vista, though Bill was Chief Software Architect, not CEO, at the time.
...
A: Microsoft enabled and capitalized on the massive growth of the PC in the 90's. Microsoft provided a standard software platform, which brought life to powerful, inexpensive hardware from hundreds of vendors all over the world. The sun never set on the PC empire. Microsoft drove and benefited from the transition from DOS based PC to graphical UI's - with Windows and with the best graphical apps (Word, Excel, etc.). That inflection point was Microsoft's key opening. It drove the virtuous cycle of an easy to use, consumer oriented OS (Windows 3.x and 95) led to millions of users, which led to more applications which led to more PC manufacturers shipping more computers with Windows which led to more users, and so on. It then broadened its business from desktops and individual users to enterprises and IT, complementing the consumer oriented Windows 3.x/95 with Windows NT, NT Server, and the enterprise server apps like Exchange and Active Directory.
One of the unsung heroes of Microsoft's success in establishing Windows is the role Visual Basic played. As companies were making the transition to graphical computing, VB made it so companies with modest app development abilities could easily develop many of their standard form based applications, like order entry. Today of course people use HTML but back then VB did incredible missionary work for Windows. Windows had the apps and the dev tools, which were a major reason for its winning in the market.
In the 90's the company had a view that it did whatever it could to make its customers successful, and its own success would be a byproduct of its customers' success. By customers, I mean end users; IT managers who deployed and supported Windows; companies that developed apps for Windows, both those for sale to third parties and for their own internal use; hardware manufacturers that developed Windows PCs and devices; service organizations that would devise solutions based on Windows and Office; and so on.
Once you get that virtuous cycle going, it's a beautiful thing.
...
A: Yes and no. The best accounts of Microsoft and the Internet that I've read are Breaking Windows by David Bank and How the Web was Won by Paul Andrews.
There were parts of Microsoft that were inspired by the opportunity of the Internet and its potential for transforming Microsoft, both its products and culture. And there were parts of Microsoft that were either oblivious to the Internet or saw it as a threat and tried to develop non Internet Microsoft proprietary solutions.
The company developed the best TCP/IP clients and included them for free in the OS, versus charging $495 per client as third party ISVs were doing. And it innovated to make connecting to the Internet simple for normal humans (e.g., with DHCP) versus the nightmare it was at the time that prevented the Internet from becoming a mass phenomenon. Internet Explorer 3 & 4were ground breaking, innovative products of vision and hard work. What's now called Ajax was developed by the IE 4 team (dynamic HTML, DOM). CSS first appeared in IE. IE 3 had a componentized architecture that allowed any app to incorporate the Internet, not just the browser.
By contrast, the first version of MSN in 1995 was completely non Internet. It had its own proprietary formats and protocols for everything. It was, believe it or not, X.25 based, not TCP/IP based. Yikes!
There was a struggle inside the company over the future strategic direction of the company, of Internet first vs. Windows first. In the end, after IE succeeded in building the fastest, best, most reliable, and most popular browser, the company decided to essentially abandon IE. The company saw it as Internet vs Windows, rather than how to advance the Microsoft platform so that it was "and" rather than "versus." And the rest is history.
Microsoft went off in its own singular direction while the rest of the world went in a different direction. The exciting innovations now had a different, non Microsoft center. For consumers there were innovations like search, social, ecommerce. In infrastructure, large scale distributed systems, big data, cloud, powerful new frameworks, all developed on Linux not Windows. That is changing now as Microsoft is rejoining the outside world.
These questions originally appeared on Quora. - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.