BILL
GATES STORYTOP
BUSINESS LESSONS FROM BILL GATES
Lesson #5: Revolutionary Ideas are Shown, Not
Told
Computer screens once displayed just text.
In the early 80’s, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
would travel around the country delivering seminars about how graphic interfaces
were the operating systems of the future – but nobody believed them. Computer
companies told the Microsoft boys that graphic interfaces would be too slow and
that it would be difficult to write the software for them. Attitudes quickly
changed in 1984, when Apple launched the Macintosh. It became the first
commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).
All of a sudden, it was obvious to everyone that
the wave of the future involved windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device.
Within a few years, the market was flooded with graphical OS software. Notable
examples include Deskmate, Workbench, and – of course – Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft was able to release Windows 1.0 in 1985, just a year after the Mac’s
success, because they had actually started developing the software two years
earlier.