THIS week, millions of people all over the globe will be falling over themselves to buy a product that hardly any of them will ever see. It is a revised set of instructions to run the basic functions of IBM- compatible computers. The product is not innovative (its rival has been selling something similar for years), yet it has already become a legend before its lifetime. Enter Windows 95, the most publicised product of its time even before its creator, Microsoft, has spent a single cent of its $100-million-plus marketing
Microsoft is no ordinary company. It has emerged in the past 15 years from nowhere to become a corporation worth mega-billions on the stock markets. It is the corporate icon of the age, a knowledge-based company whose output is packed into a handful of computer disks which will fit in a couple of trouser pockets. It took 500 people three years to build and de-bug. Microsoft is also the living embodiment of that business school adage: never be first with a new invention. The operating system which Microsoft devised was derivative to start with, but has since won the battle to become the standard operating system for IBM computers and the hundreds of “clones” it has spawned, which account for 80 percent of all personal computers sold.
This raises the interesting question: why aren’t other software manufacturers attempting to “clone” Microsoft’s operating system in the same way that IBM was taken to the cleaners by imitators? The conventional answer is that IBM overpriced its machines, with the result that others could easily build much cheaper versions, whereas Microsoft pitches its price so keenly (Windows 95 will sell for $89 in the US) that others dare not risk the enormous capital needed to take it on. But the market is still so vast – – there are 70-million current users of Windows and rising fast — that sometime, somewhere, someone will surely emerge to take on the new giant of the computer industry. That, after all, is what Bill Gates did.