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