“Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match.  But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role.  The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them.  In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise.”

David Moschella

It’s an interesting quote from David Moschella, but to be more accurate, now that Bill Gates is partially retired, we ought to say that Microsoft owns the table. But not for much longer. The truth is that the age of Microsoft is now coming to an end and so is its ownership of the table. It’s interesting to review a series of forward looking quotes from Bill Gates in that light.

The Prescient Bill Gates

You’d think that someone as successful as Bill Gates had remarkable vision. There’s little evidence of that. He’s made a number of proclamations that were outrageously off the mark, but mostly when people are critical of them it’s because they don’t understand the context. We could all be as wrong as Bill is in these things. Here are the main examples:

“There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.” (Bill Gates, 1980)

And in 1980, that was true.

“640K (of memory) ought to be enough for anybody.”  (Bill Gates, 1981)

Moore’s Law was not realized to be a reality in 1981 so this is not as stupid as it sounds. Also Gates didn’t say it ought to be enough for anybody ever. He remarked later (in 1989):

“I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn’t – it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.”

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“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.” (Bill Gates, in BusinessWeek, November 1984)

One could argue that this turned out to be true, it’s just the the Macintosh didn’t proliferate as widely as many people, including Bill Gates, expected. And then programmers on the PC eventually caught up with the Mac. At a Macintosh conference in the same year, Gates also said:

“To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”

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“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”
(Bill Gates, quoted in OS/2 Programmers Guide, November 1987)

Again we have to look to the context. This was said at the time that IBM and Microsoft were collaborating happily together. Had they managed to stay friends Windows would never have seen the light of day and OS/2 might have become what Windows became.

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