Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates flew into London at the beginning of the week, fitting into his tight schedule a couple of guest appearances at separate conferences organised by Microsoft and Businessland (UK) Ltd on Tuesday morning. His theme was the future of desktop computing in the 1990s, and put the emphasis on persuading his audience that the Microsoft products MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2 were the embodiment of a family strategy on the part of Microsoft, rather than a mess of conflicting, overlapping products. On the way he predictably took the opportunity for a few swipes at Apple Computer Inc, Steve Jobs and Unix. Microsoft, as Gates pointed out, had a leveraged role within the software industry during the last decade, more important than the size of the company would suggest.
The 80586
The $1,000m turnover, 5,000 employee company set the basis for today’s base of 40m MS-DOS personal computers, all binary compatible and with standard keyboard, memory architecture and instruction set. Evolving from this base will give us the benefit of the past and the innovations of the future, said Gates. With the 80486 now available, the workstation sector has lost its advantage, he said: multi-tasking, graphics, 32-bit addressing – all of these are now available to the PC user. The PC has grown so rapidly it has now taken on all the features of the workstation. And Gates predicted that the 80586 (or whatever Intel chooses to call it), would double the performance of the 80486 in 1992, by improving the clock speed and reducing the number of clock cycles per instruction to an average of one, achieving 35 MIPS at its introduction, and up to 70 MIPS by 1994. OS/2 users, however, are still waiting to take full advantage of the 80386 chip, and will have to continue waiting until the end of this year – probably only days before year-end said Gates ominously. OS/2 version 2.0 will feature 32-bit addressing, TrueType fonts (co-developed by Microsoft with Apple in preference to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts – a decision that brings to two into conflict with IBM, which has chosen Type 1 for its Systems Application Architecture families), the ability to run multiple MS-DOS applications, and demand paging support. –
Microsoft Corp founder and chairman Bill Gates may be a two billionaire but he treats his wealth – all anyway locked up in his Microsoft shares – as an irrelevance. Having created a billion dollar software company from the ground up, and still only 34, he believes that there is plenty more for him and his company to do, most notably to push back much further the barriers to ease of use of computers for those that are not highly skilled. He also of course has plenty to say on the state of the industry as he sees it: John Abbott was there and got the message.
Gates said that combined with the advantages of multi-tasking, improved file system, security, and with IBM’s Systems Application Architecture and developments on top such as OfficeVision, OS/2 2.0 will be just too attractive to ignore for any developers with existing 32-bit software. He expects applications to come flooding in from Macintosh, Unix, Windows and DEC VAX environments. But others within Microsoft are privately less optimistic about the future of OS/2, and even Gates admitted that the pace has been slower than we wanted but the applications have been coming out quicker than theydid for MS-DOS itself, so perhaps we were being unrealistic. MS-Windows, on the other hand, is doing rather well, with over 600 applications and a 2.5m installed base – a similar base to Apple, according to Gates. The forthcoming MS-Windows 3.0 promises size and performance enhancements, multi-media support and user interface improvements such as colour icons, icon dragging and three dimensional effects similar to Hewlett-Packard Co’s NewWave interface – and will also include TrueType fonts. The aim is to wean the majority of MS-DOS users into taking advantage of MS-Windows, up from the 20% that currently take it. MS-DOS will remain Microsoft’s entry-level system for Intel 8088 ha
rdware and above, and will not be enhanced to include multi-tasking. The recommended growth path for users will be via MS-DOS with Windows to OS/2 without losing anything he said.
Little faith in Unix
Despite Microsoft’s 20% stake in the Santa Cruz Operation Inc, currently pushing its message for binary compatible shrink-wrapped Unix, and touting its low-cost Open Desktop operating environment, Gates appears to have little faith in Unix. I see it in an important, but different role, not on the desktop, he said. The variety of Unix versions prevents generic packaged software, and the old model of source set up for each new hardware platform, doesn’t give you the rigid model of MS-DOS and OS/2, although there is a strong argument for it away from the desktop. Santa Cruz Operation’s $120m turnover and 500,000 Xenix and Unix licences still amounts to only some 2% of the size of Microsoft’s software sales, making it, in the words of Gates, only a significant niche player. Gates was more critical of Steve Jobs and his efforts to establish the NeXT Computer System. Steve’s entry is most interesting, he commented. If anyone can generate enthusiasm around an incompatible system, he can. On the subject of Apple’s prospects, Gates said that now everyone else had caught up with graphical user interfaces, Apple would need to find new innovations in order to justify its position as the minority standard – graphics is no longer a point of differentiation.
