Once upon a time, a young man named Bill had a vision. He saw "a PC on every desk, and every machine running Microsoft software". And lo, it came to pass, and the company Bill co-founded became a gigantic machine for making money, and Bill became the richest man on Earth. This agreeable outcome was arranged in a most ingenious way. The tedious business of making computer hardware was left to others – so-called "original equipment manufacturers" (OEMs), who sweated away in Taiwanese and other jungles manufacturing machines that attracted ever-smaller profit margins. All Microsoft did was to write the software for the operating system and the Office applications that transformed OEM hardware from expensive paperweights into something that could do useful corporate work. Because most of the expense in creating software is incurred upfront, once it's been written every subsequent copy is, effectively, free to produce. And because for a long time Microsoft Windows was the only game in the corporate town, all Bill and his mates had to do was collect their monopoly rents. Which they did. Indeed, they were so focused on the revenue stream that flowed from the world's desktops into their coffers that they failed to notice an important development. It was called the internet and a cheeky start-up company called Netscape was busy exploiting it. Netscape's leaders even talked boldly about the likelihood that a program called a "web browser" might one day replace operating systems like Windows. Now that did get Bill's attention, and in 1995 he composed a famous internal memo that likened the net to a tidal wave. "Developments on the internet over the next several years," he wrote, "will set the course of our industry for a long time to come… I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now I assign the internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the internet is crucial to every part of our business. The internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981." Read more http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/21/microsoft-realignment-steve-ballmer-naughton
