MSDOS is the first well known successfully marketed product from Microsoft. In the following years, Microsoft was developing OS/2 in collaboration with IBM. After a short stint, Microsoft part ways with IBM and created Windows OS. Now, rest is history!
Microsoft has been and still known for its bread-n-butter product, the Windows Operating System(OS). In layman terms, an OS provides basic infrastructure or platform to run applications on top of it that adhere to the specifications put forth by the OS. By creating Windows, Microsoft created a platform and made it mature/intuitive/monopolize over the years. Lets dig into it.
In the 80s when Microcomputers called PCs were taking shape to bring computing to the common man, the computer giants such as IBM, SUN were still selling tightly coupled proprietary hardware and software as a single package to customers. Customers were forced to buy hardware and software together from a single vendor. Sun was selling Solaris with their proprietary hardware architecture. Apple was selling Macintosh (flavour of *nix) with proprietary hardware and software. IBM was selling its own monsters. Eventhough IBM was getting interested in Microcomputers or PCs, the hardware and the software would come from its own stable, still making it a closed system no different from *nix predecessors.
Arrival of Microsoft changed the business equations ripping apart the proprietary hardware cum software business model. Rather, Microsoft created the diversified computer industry by establishing itself as a pure-software company with creation of its operating system, Windows. This threw open opportunities for anyone to manufacture the hardware compatible with Windows in contrast with the computers manufactured by SUN, HP, IBM etc. This was the beginning of ‘Off-the-shelf’ PC phenomenon.
The PC was more modular now. Each of the hardware components were now manufactured by innumerous companies. All they had to do to make the hardware work with Windows was by providing drivers as per the specification published by Microsoft. The driver, a piece of software allows the Windows to recognize and interact with the hardware. So, anyone could manufacture a motherboard, a graphics card, Hard disk drive etc and make it work with Windows! This resulted in commoditization of the PCs.
The PCs were getting better day by day, more affordable and most importantly lots of choice for customers to put together a PC from off-the-shelf components. At the same time, Microsoft published the Windows API to allow anyone to write applications to run on its Windows OS. A software platform was born to rule the forthcoming decades of personal computing. Anyone with the knowledge of the Windows API could write killer apps and make millions of dollars. Big corporations were born out it.
Similar to commoditization of hardware, Windows platform resulted in creation of software industry as a whole or atleast, served as a trigger. InstallShield, Norton Anti-virus, Business Objects are few big corporations that were born out of the Windows platform. Why would I credit Microsoft and Windows for achieving this?
Eventhough, the industry behemoths SUN, IBM, HP, Unisys were still around; they were still selling completely packaged hardware and software. And, they were so expensive, only research organizations and universities could afford it. Creation of Microsoft and Windows as a software-only company resulted in segregation of hardware and software industries as well as Software becoming a mainstream business. Windows was so intuitive compared to its *nix counterparts, that it accelerated the adoption of personal computing by masses. This was the biggest achievement of Microsoft and Windows to date.
Those were few credits to Microsoft. There are more credits to write down in the next post.
More to write about:
What are the bad things that Microsoft did? How Microsoft transformed itself into a Software juggernaut? Where it won? where it lost? What is it doing now to stay relevant in the current service-oriented world?
