The Microsoft of Today is Not the Microsoft of the Past

Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, but few seem to understand that its biggest accomplishments aren’t about technology.

Yes, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started the personal computer industry by creating a BASIC for microcomputers. Yes, Microsoft popularized the graphical user interface (GUI) with Windows, and then embraced and extended the Internet, bringing it into everyone’s homes. And yes, Microsoft has often been on the leading edge of adopting new technologies from CD-ROM to connected TVs to web services. It had an incredible run with Windows and Office in the past, and and the modern Microsoft has created formidable cloud computing and now AI businesses.

A critic might point to the failures, also-rans, and me-too products that dog Microsoft’s history, too. MS-DOS wasn’t the first operating system for microcomputers, that was CP/M. Windows wasn’t the first GUI for personal computers, that came from Apple with the Mac. Microsoft didn’t invent pen computing, web browsers, pocket-sized computing devices, MP3 players, Internet search engines, tablet computers, email apps, office productivity suites, e-commerce, smartphones, online communications services, social networking, personal digital assistants, cloud computing, AI, or most of the programming languages its used or sold over time. And so much else.

These and more are fair game for any conversation or debate about Microsoft. But what the company should be celebrating–or brooding over–isn’t the past, and it’s certainly not any particular technology or product. Likewise, while we on the outside shouldn’t “celebrate” a company that has taken so much from so many in its history, it’s fair to acknowledge the impact it’s had, not just on this industry, but on us all, as individuals. Microsoft is a fact of life, an ever-present behemoth that is more successful today than it’s ever been, even though it was at one time far more powerful.

? I’m not dead yet!

What Microsoft should celebrate, what we on the outside should at least acknowledge, is tied to everything I wrote above: It’s still here, it’s still relevant, and it’s still influential.

This is highly unusual. Apple, which will celebrate its own 50th anniversary next year, is the only other company in our industry for which we can make a similar claim. But Microsoft is a company that should have been greatly diminished when its core products no longer mattered as the market changed, and it should have then begun a long, slow, and inevitable decline. This is what happened to most of the giants in our industry, from IBM to Novell to WordPerfect to Lotus to Netscape to Sun Microsystems to Yahoo to so many others.

It’s happening right now to Intel.

And that is a particularly interesting comparison because Microsoft and Intel rose to fame and fortune on each other’s coattails, starting with the dawn on the PC industry and accelerating through the PC clone business, the rise of MS-DOS and then Windows, the necessity of the PC for the Internet, and into the modern era. But where Microsoft and Intel diverged–and where Microsoft and Apple aligned–was in understanding that there would be, and then was, a post-PC era. And that this era would be defined by online services that required giant datacenters and by mobile devices. And that both of these new markets would require efficient new software and efficient new silicon. Microsoft rose to that challenge. And Intel did not.

The success that Microsoft created for itself required it to accept that a once-dominant product was on the wane. And that is the mistake that doomed Intel: Despite years of pleas from Microsoft, especially, Intel kept to the script, kept building ever more powerful, but ever less efficient chips. A comparatively shrinking market continued to embrace these chips, fooling Intel into believing it was doing the right thing. But Microsoft didn’t fall into a similar trap. It kept introducing new Windows versions, but it also plowed forward with handheld and pocket-sized computing devices, smartphones, and then cloud computing services.

It wasn’t always successful. But Microsoft’s software as a service vision led to the mammoth success of the cloud computing era. And that was the foundation Microsoft needed to make up for the computing “waves” it did miss–smartphones, AR/VR/MR, personal digital assistants, and more–and grow to a level that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier. Today, Microsoft is one of only a handful of companies that can deploy and advance AI at scale, and there is no capability in our industry more powerful or more lucrative than that. Now or in the past.

So let’s credit for rolling with the changes. It took some on the chin, it rose above its previous bad behaviors–the belligerent Bill Gates of the antitrust era will remain a black mark on this company’s soul, no matter how much we mythologize his role in creating this industry–and it kept evolving. That isn’t just difficult for most companies, it’s impossible. When you think about the most dominant companies on earth in any given decade, there’s only one similarity between them all: They’re either dead or irrelevant now. Most simply cannot reinvent themselves in the face of change. Instead, they ride out whatever assets they have. And then they die, like the dinosaurs they inevitably become.

But not Microsoft. Born in an era of yellow and green living rooms, shag carpets, bell-bottomed jeans, wide collars, and stagnation, Microsoft today, is modern and future-leaning. But it’s also humongous and powerful in ways Gates, its aging co-founder, could hardly have imagined in his youth.

That’s not all.

? Not invented here? No problem

Though Microsoft is often criticized for “not inventing anything” or “not innovating,” these claims miss the point entirely. Instead, we should celebrate–or at least acknowledge–that Microsoft’s greatest contribution to society has been the democratization of technology.

I noted up top that Microsoft didn’t invent personal computer operating systems, the GUI, or the Internet. But what it did do was spread those things to the entire world like wildfires, giving technologies to the masses that had previously been expensive or secreted away by what I always imagine as white lab coat-wearing experts, lording over those they view as peons. Microsoft is nothing less than the Prometheus of the modern age, the giver of flame–in the form of technology–to humanity.

Prometheus was punished for his sins by the gods that sought to keep that fire for themselves. But Microsoft, though wounded by antitrust and competition, remains unbowed. You may not like it. But you should at least respect it.

? Congratulations!

So congratulations, Microsoft, you deserve it. Not because you got it right every time, and not because you had the best products, services, or technology. You deserve it because our industry is all about change, and while most lose sight of that in time, you never stopped changing and evolving in the face of forces that would have wiped you out.

And that is something I can respect.