"impossible" ... This reminds me of a story Robert Cringely tells of Bill Gates. It seems mister Gates knew a certain thing was impossible to do, so he didn't t

"impossible" ... This reminds me of a story Robert Cringely tells of Bill Gates. It seems mister Gates knew a certain thing was impossible to do, so he didn't try ... and lost million$ and market share when his competitor went and did it anyway. Here's the story: This business of taking software written for the 8086 processor and porting it to the 80286 normally required completely rewriting the software by hand, often taking years of painstaking effort. It wasn’t just a matter of recompiling the software, of having a machine do the translation, because Microsoft staunchly maintained that there was no way to recompile 8086 code to run on an 80286. Bill Gates swore that such a recompile was impossible. But Drew Major of Superset didn’t know what Bill Gates knew, and so he figured out a way to recompile 8086 code to run on an 80286. What should have taken months or years of labor was finished in a week, and Novell had won the networking war. Six years and more than $100 million later, Microsoft finally admitted defeat. http://www.cringely.com/2013/03/24/accidental-empires-chapter-14-counter-reformation/ http://www.cringely.com/2013/03/24/accidental-empires-chapte... Accidental Empires is a good book.