And if we have conveniently forgotten most of this, one legacy of that witch-hunt will stand with us forever: more than anything, the sudden (as opposed to a slow) collapse of the dot.com boom in 2000 appears to have been precipitated by the loss of market confidence stemming from the Federal Government attacking a single commercial enterprise for no obvious reason other than that it was too successful.
I lot of us feel that the collapse was due to MS continuing to squash/steal every single competitive/innovative idea produced by others. The people who COULD innovate gave up and MS couldn’t innovate on its own. To underscore that point, here’s a question: name a single software innovation that MS invented and commercialized all on its own.
…the gold standard was set by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard — two men whose careers Gates has always quietly emulated.
Er…no. Read Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company and reevaluate. MS is nothing like the HP of old. And the poorly-socialized Gates can’t hold a candle to H and P in his relations with his employees.
