>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.
Bill Gates could not even predict the importance of the internet, and he dismissed that technology in an early version of 'his' book - only later, when he saw the writing on the wall, he changed the story and published an updated version (according to his critics). That pretty much rules out the foresight of this myopic visionary.
Good luck - perhaps, but there is a third possibility - neither luck nor foresight, but inside networks and information leaks. Accordning to the opinion I heard from someone at the Engineering Dept. here at Hopkins, the development of pc's is hardly technological innovation - it is basically repackaging of the old hardware technology (especially processors) used elsewhere (NASA, military). In that sense, the pc revolution is, to paraphrase Marx, history repeating itself as a farce.
If that is true, the execs who introduced 8088 as the 'cutting edge innovation' aka XT knew perfectly well that such 'innovation' will become obsolete in a year or so - because they already had the technology that will replace it. This is known as planned obsolescence -- the standard practice of monopoly capital. So knowing what is lying ahead in computer development did not require much insight or luck, just being 'in the know' which way the captains of industry plan to sail.
So if that is true, the question of BG's 'genius' should be phrased as follows: was the information about which way the captains plan to take industry leaked to him by an inside friend, or was it a more organized collusion, aka 'strategic planning' of which he was a part?
Regards
Wojtek Sokolowski