4 ms·

Selling basic most likely didn't get them a fortune though. DOS was the real moneymaker, and Windows, had its success derived from DOS. They did make a success

Selling basic most likely didn't get them a fortune though. DOS was the real moneymaker, and Windows, had its success derived from DOS. They did make a successful transition to Applications though, at a time when Lotus 1-2-3 was making a killing and Lotus was the biggest personal computer software company. The cloud transformation too is likewise big, quite possibly securing Microsoft the company for the long run, but Gates is not involved in day to day any more for MSFT.

stan_rogers 7y ago
They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite. Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.
simonh 7y ago
Microsoft made a lot of money from MS Basic back in the day, it was the standard Basic for most machines long before MS-DOS. This mattered because it effectively made software portable between machines regardless of what OS it ran on. An MS Basic program written on a Commodore machine would run fine on an Atari, a Superbrain, TRS-80, Apple II or later an MS-DOS machine. As a result Microsoft was a major player in the microcomputer software space years before MS-DOS.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  Well...not so much that second to last sentence. Yes, they had the same MS-Basic core, but each manufacturer added additional features (and took away some as well), so that a BASIC program from a C64 couldn't run on an Atari or an Apple without some serious rewriting.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Those sorts of features mostly only mattered for games, but even at that time Microsoft was mainly aiming at business users and business programs, and licensing value added features such as the MS Basic compiler.
- DerekL 7y ago
  Note that Atari BASIC for the 8-bit computers wasn't made by Microsoft and is incompatible in some ways. Microsoft did port BASIC to the Atari computers, but not until 1981, and it was much less popular.

stan_rogers 7y ago

They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite. Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.

simonh 7y ago

Microsoft made a lot of money from MS Basic back in the day, it was the standard Basic for most machines long before MS-DOS. This mattered because it effectively made software portable between machines regardless of what OS it ran on. An MS Basic program written on a Commodore machine would run fine on an Atari, a Superbrain, TRS-80, Apple II or later an MS-DOS machine. As a result Microsoft was a major player in the microcomputer software space years before MS-DOS.

jhbadger 7y ago
Well...not so much that second to last sentence. Yes, they had the same MS-Basic core, but each manufacturer added additional features (and took away some as well), so that a BASIC program from a C64 couldn't run on an Atari or an Apple without some serious rewriting.
- simonh 7y ago
  Those sorts of features mostly only mattered for games, but even at that time Microsoft was mainly aiming at business users and business programs, and licensing value added features such as the MS Basic compiler.
DerekL 7y ago
Note that Atari BASIC for the 8-bit computers wasn't made by Microsoft and is incompatible in some ways. Microsoft did port BASIC to the Atari computers, but not until 1981, and it was much less popular.