> just what did Gates contribute to the success of the organization?
> Does anyone know? Is he a technical genius and a business genius rolled
> into one? Or was he just a geek in the right place at the right time?
>
Gates' contibution is certainly not technical. Initially, he was incredibly lucky.
In the late 1970s, when Microsoft was a small company selling a Basic interpreter, a programmer in Seattle wrote a version of the Commodore (I think it was Commodore) 8-bit operating system for the then new Intel 8088. (At the time, the 8088 was used in any computer.) In a move of either incredible foresight or incredible luck, Gates bought it from him.
A few years later, IBM decided to get into the personal computer business. To minimize development time and cost, IBM decided to do as little developement as possible; instead, they bought components from other companies whenever they could. Gate got the contract to supply the OS. I would certainly like to know how he managed it - Microsoft had no OS experience at the time. The software that Microsoft supplied, MS-Dos, was a modified version of the os that Gates had bought a few years earlier.
Most importantly for Microsoft's future, IBM let them keep ownership of the operating system (even though the IBM made the pc hardware architecture non-proprietery, to encourage other companies to build compatible machines).
That one sale made Gates' fortune. Every pc sold (IBM or not) came with a Microsoft OS, first MS-DOS and later Windows 3.1, 95 and now 98 (which still contain a highly modified version of MS-DOS at their core; only NT was developed from scratch).
Since the early 1980s, someone at Microsoft has been very clever at both marketing and market control. I suspect that Gates is responsible for what is business, not technological, triumph.
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Barnet Wagman
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