Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985)
<i>&gt;But selling software to consumers is different from selling highly technical operating systems directly to computer companies. To compete against sophisticated marketers like Lotus,</i><p>The really young techies won&#x27;t remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding.<p>The 1970s Microsoft was originally a &quot;programming languages&quot; company.  They sold MS BASIC and MS COBOL.<p>In the 1980s, they added <i>productivity apps</i> like word processors and spreadsheets (Word and Excel).  What&#x27;s amazing is that they didn&#x27;t acquire those from a competitor (like the later acquisitions of Spyglass for IE or Vermeer for MS Frontpage).  Word &amp; Excel were homegrown at Microsoft and Bill Gates hired Charles Simonyi to lead their development.<p>They added <i>operating systems</i> like MS-DOS and later MS Windows &amp; Window NT.  MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler.<p>Nobody else replicated Microsoft&#x27;s successful diversity in software.  That included Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Computer Associates, Adobe, etc.<p>That&#x27;s 3 very different areas of software : programming +   MS Office + operating systems.  All 3 were huge profit machines.<p>In the 1990s, they continued success with server-side software like SQL Server and MS Exchange.<p>To give a modern analogy, imagine Jetbrains just selling programming IDEs like IntelliJ and PHPStorm. And then Samsung comes along and says, <i>&quot;we need an operating system for the millions of smartphones we&#x27;re going to sell&quot;</i> so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben[1] to write the Android os for Samsung.  And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram.  That absurd combination from <i>one</i> company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaires.<p>Compare that to Google where it&#x27;s almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords.  Diversifying revenue is not easy.<p>A comparable (and possibly more astounding diversification) in modern times would be Amazon&#x27;s origins from selling books &amp; CDs to selling AWS computation resources.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Android_(operating_system)#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Android_(operating_system)#His...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Instagram#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Instagram#History</a>