contempt
Tim Jackson
Gradually, the view took shape at Intel in the mid-1980s that the guys at Microsoft simply didn’t care that their programmes ran very slowly on Intel processors. Intel set up a team of three or four people inside the group developing its 386 microprocessor, and gave them the job of making sure that all the key companies that would be writing software for the 386 knew how to take advantage of the chip’s new features. Yet Microsoft, in stark contrast to the programmers working on Lotus 1-2-3 or the Unix operating system, didn’t seem to be listening.
The contempt was mutual. In Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, the design compromise that Intel had made in its 8086 chip – arranging the computer’s memory in segments of 16 bytes each – looked like the stupidest decision ever made in computing history. From Microsoft’s point of view, it made no difference that the original rationale for the arrangement was to maintain backward compatibility; Bill Gates wasn’t interested in Intel’s concern for customers who had designed products on its earlier 8-bit processors.
The cost of the segmentation decision, in Microsoft’s eyes, had been to cause untold trouble and inconvenience.
As a result, programmers at Microsoft were less than receptive when Intel’s crack software engineers called up with suggestions on how Microsoft could improve its programmes. One Intel engineer recalled the reaction. “We’d go to the applications guys, and say: `We studied the code in Excel, and we found this loop that if you change it you can speed the whole thing up by a factor of eight,'” he said. “They’d say: `We don’t care. We’re going to add this new feature. People buy our applications because of new features.'”
With this mistrust between the two companies, it was no wonder that the fading of IBM as a force in the PC industry coincided with the beginnings of out-and- out hostility. From Bill Gates’s point of view, the PC business was now a zero-sum game between the pair. Every dollar that Intel could extract from the buyer of a PC would be a dollar out of Microsoft’s pocket – and vice versa.