Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Business

Against the Open World

The journey of Microsoft as a company can be paraphrased into three leaders and their approach to the industry. When bill gates developed a proprietary OS, he knew he had hit the potluck. Over the next few decades, he ensured that the Microsoft ecosystem kept itself updated and remained a close source. Given the philanthropy that Bill is known for, many expected the then-richest man to let go of the closed head and let the CS community have a look at the masterpiece, but Bill's wrath against open source was second to none. He and his successor Steve Balmer would call the open-source OS like Linux cancer. However, at the turn of the millennia, they were hit by rivals like Google in terms of the biggest tech company. Unlike Apple, Bill hadn't been able to trap its customers into an ecosystem. Therefore the battle moved away from OS to browsers, where the once reigning internet explorer faced an upward struggle from two emergent, one which its earlier rival had open-sourced to, an