While crashed on the couch this afternoon I sat and watched the movie “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” - a made for TV movie from the late 1990s that tries to tell the story of the early years of Apple and Microsoft. While there are many parts of the story missing, lots of it is wrong, lots of it invented, and even more of it is taken completely out of context, the movie was still enjoyable.
I am fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective) to remember back as far as 1980, and the emergence of Apple and Microsoft. I was only a small child when Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were at University, but I do remember seeing Microsoft Basic version 1 on the MSX home computers, MS-DOS on the IBM-XT, and reading about these amazing computers that nobody could afford called Apple Macintosh’s.
I remember becoming the “expert” among my friends with the configuration of MS-DOS 5, with the various machinations of high memory, expanded and extended memory, device drivers, interrupts, and addresses. In the days before “Plug and Play” my knowledge and know-how was valuable - and it was all gained by reading the books that came with it all (when was the last time you saw a proper book with a product?).
It’s interesting - I read some press reviews of “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” on the internet, and some of them asked why the movie painted Steve Jobs in such a bad light. I saw it very differently than those reviewers. I thought the movie got it about right. Steve Jobs is all about experience, feel, presentation, polish, and reliability. To this end, he is played by Noah Wylie in the movie with his heart on his sleeve - a visionary. Somebody who did hurt people along the way - who walked all over people, but who saw that damage as an acceptable cost to meet each goal.
Bill Gates is depicted in the movie as the quiet, unassuming guy. He’s played by Anthony Michael Hall, and again - I think they got it right. He’s quiet, but quiet in the same way that Joseph Mengler probably was. The early deals done by Microsoft with both IBM and Apple didn’t hurt people - they destroyed entire companies. Bill, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer quietly stole ideas, software, staff and money without breaking any laws. By the time any of their competition realised what was happening it was always too late.
It’s interesting to see that following Microsoft’s initial copying of the Apple Macintosh operating system has happened repeatedly over the last 25 years - right up to Windows Vista, and it’s wholesale copying of virtually every feature in OSX Tiger - the current Apple operating system.
The next 25 years are going to be interesting. Microsoft are busy trying to copy other successful products - except of course their games machine is a huge financial failure, and their media player (the Zune) is a total disaster. While enviously watching Apple sell hundreds of millions of iPods, and over a billion music tracks, a far greater threat to Microsoft has appeared… Google.
Quite how the battle between Google and Microsoft will unfold is hard to predict. Perhaps we should all be thankful that we live during such interesting times. We will be able to tell younger generations that we were there when the internet came about. We remember the first emails - the first viruses - the creation of the world wide web. We remember the IBM-PC, the rise of Microsoft, the later rise of Google…