Beyond the Windows

LESSON 1.0 from Bill Gates for Indians in high profile public positions: know when to quit. Arguably the world’s best-known entrepreneur could easily have carried on. But Gates has left the job of directly running Microsoft just when, as the analysis we carry on the op-ed page points out, the revolution he started is being overtaken by one he had always played catch-up to: the internet. More than 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers run on Windows. For many lay computer users, PCs mean Windows. This is an extraordinary achievement but one that may not last.

The notion of a PC pre-bundled with software will probably be successfully challenged as soon as broadband internet connections become as globally ubiquitous as PCs. Consumers will buy just a shell, and software as well as personal files will be stored in secure servers, accessible easily. Gates’s Microsoft is in this game. But there are others, too, and plenty of software choices will be available. Firefox, an internet browser, is already a serious challenger to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which, instructively, was made successful only after ruthless Microsoft business tactics ensured the elimination of Netscape, once the world’s favourite browser.

From this point, Gates-bashers — there are plenty — construct an elaborate demonology. They, willfully or otherwise, ignore that while Gates made tons of money out of Windows, he could hardly have done so if his product was fundamentally flawed. There’s a tendency everywhere to assume that companies with big market shares must be deeply flawed in some absolute sense. This is, bluntly put, romantic nonsense. Gates’s Microsoft was ruthless and sometimes too close to the regulatory bone. But he bested competition. Competition may best his company in the future. That’s market economy and Bill Gates will always be assessed as one of its most extraordinary participants.