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Subjects > Computers > Microsoft > Challenges and Strategy By Bill Gates
TECHNOLOGY: Technical change is always a challenge for the current companies in a field. Even if they recognize that a change is taking place, they are tied to the past. New companies will move to exploit the opportunity. Our gain in applications is in no small part due to the failure of existing leaders to listen to what we and other people were saying about GUI. Technical change can be a new hardware platform like NeXT?Create, a new type of machine like Pen or Multimedia, a new software platform like Patriot Partners, a new category, a redefinition of a category or a much faster development methodology. Many of the changes that will take place in PCs can be anticipated (peformance, memory, screens, motion video), however, understanding when and how is still quite complex. Other changes like linguistics, reasoning, voice recognition or learning are harder to anticipate. We will reduce our technical risk by strenthening our reltationship with the research community and having some projects of our own in areas of greatest importance (development enviroments and linguistics, for example). Nathan (and Kay Nishi before him) has pointed out that the transition of consumer electronics to digital form will create platforms with systems software -- whether it's a touch screen organizer or an intelligent TV. The need to work closely with Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Thompson and other Japanese consumer electronics companies will require people in both Tokyo and Redmond working with both the research and product groups in these companies. We should have an annual exchange of research thinking with most of these companies similar to what we want to do with MIT or Stanford. We have the opportunity to do the best job ever in combining research with development in the computer field largely because no one has ever done it very well (although Sun and Apple are also working hard on this). Nathan's kickoff memo talks about having the research group use our tools and including program managment inside the research team.
Our proposition is that all of the exciting new features can be accomodated as extentions to the existing PC standard. Others propose that start-from- scratch approaches are clearer and therefore better. This is the essence of the debate with Go, NeXT?Create and Patriot. To win in this we have to get there early before significant development momentum builds up behind the incompatible approach. The key to our Macintosh strategy was recognizing that the graphics and process of the PC would not allow us to catch up soon enought to prevent Mac from acheiving critical mass so we supported it. Sun presents a particular challenge to us because they have significant development backing and high end features to go with their RISC performance. ARC is the most evolutionary way to get to RISC and it will require a lot of good execution by us and others for the strategy to succeed.
Our evolutionary proposition should be quite marketable to users -- combined with hardware neutrality the nessage is "Our software runs today's software on all (almost) hardware and both today's and tomorrow's software on all (almost) of tomorrow's hardware".
Other sections of this memo:
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