Word: microsoft
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Steve Jobs was still running Apple Computer from his father's garage in Los Altos, Calif., in 1976 when he got his first call from Microsoft--offering to sell him a version of the BASIC computer language for the prototype Apple I. No thanks, Jobs said. His pal Steve Wozniak had already written a BASIC, and if they needed a better one, they could do it themselves over the weekend...
...typical Jobs: quick, dismissive and at least half wrong. Jobs ended up licensing Microsoft's BASIC after all (on terms that turned out to be, as usual, very advantageous to Apple). And though he went on to become, for a time, the golden boy of Silicon Valley--in 1981 Apple's $334 million in sales dwarfed Microsoft's puny $15 million--it was Bill Gates who became the emperor of all computerdom...
Dashing, mercurial, impetuous and given to wild bouts of infectious enthusiasm--Microsoft employees were warned to beware of his "reality-distortion field"--Jobs drove Apple's engineers to build not just good but "insanely great" products that would "make a dent in the universe." He lured PepsiCo's designated heir to his Cupertino, Calif., headquarters with what may have been history's craftiest job pitch. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water," he asked John Sculley, "or do you want a chance to change the world...
...summer of 1981, IBM announced the PC that would break open the computer business and eventually marginalize Apple. Jobs took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal headlined "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." Shortly afterward, he flew a small entourage to Redmond, Wash., to tell Microsoft about the Mac and persuade the programmers to write for it. Bill Gates didn't need much prodding. He agreed to produce the software--and then promptly launched a copycat project that would become Microsoft Windows...
...exhausted Jim Barksdale, the veteran CEO who had been hired to figure out how the scrappy start-up could survive against all odds--against Microsoft!--sat in a hard chair on the edge of the stage and did his genteel best to calm his people. How many of you came to Netscape because we acquired your company? he asked. A quarter of the employees in the room raised their hands. Well, said Barksdale, this is just another acquisition...