whole strategy would have been ruined
because Windows was very important to us.
They weren't going to change anything and
they were going to get us to cave in
or take us all the way to
the Supreme Court on this thing.
We assumed that the lawyers, the judges would all
come to the right conclusion which eventually they did.
And Apple lost.
But in that period of about six years
that this case was going on
it may have lulled us into a
bit of complacency thinking that
we were going to be insulated,
you know, from the Windows attack.
The launch of Windows 3 in 1990
killed off Apple's hopes
that the Macintosh would win the gui wars.
Today we're introducing Microsoft Windows version 3...
The six years' labour to produce a GUI
that made IBM PCs and all the clones
as easy to use as the Mac finally came up trumps.
In a year Windows 3 sold close to 30 million copies,
consigning the Mac to a niche in the market.
Ladies and gentlemen the Windows 3 development team.
Bill Gates strategy won out.
At every stage in the PC's development
he joined the leading hardware company
and by carving out a dominant market share
for his product made his software the industry standard.
You know the original PC did our evangelism in the way
we created tools for that and pulled that together.
Take Windows did we bet our company on that
did that come together?
Virtually everything we've done,
when we've first come out with it there's a lot of scepticism
but most of the things we really stuck with them
and despite all that second guessing
we were able to pull them off.
The problem was the industry wasn't measured by
who has the best selling personal computer
or who has the most innovative technology.
The industry was measured by who had the most open system
that was adopted by the most other companies
and the Microsoft strategy ultimately turned out
to be the better business strategy.
The only problem with Microsoft is
they just have no taste,
they have absolutely no taste,
and what that means is
I don't mean that in a small way
I mean that in a big way.
In the sense that...
they, they don't think of original ideas and
they don't bring much culture into their product
and you say why is that important
well you know proportionally spaced fonts
come from type setting and beautiful books,
that's where one gets the idea
if it weren't for the Mac
they would never have that in their products
and so I guess I am saddened,
Not by Microsoft's success
I have no problem with their success,
they've earned their success for the most part.
I have a problem with the fact that
they just make really third rate products.
I will admit quite frankly that I think
Windows today is probably four years behind,
three years behind where it would have been
had we not danced with IBM for so long.
Because the amount of split energy,
split works, split IQ in the company
really cost our end customer
real innovation in our product line
and so whenever I hear these criticisms
which I gotta to say sting eh sometimes,
I say to myself just you watch,
just you watch Windows 95, Windows 9...
there's no lack of focus there hasn't been here
for the last three or four years
since we didn't have this big spot with IBM.
And i think even in the operating systems here now,
you'll start to see clear, clear...
and people will recognise clear leadership.
We just keep making them better.
We get millions of phone calls
we get to go out there and talk to customers
there's nothing cast in concrete. If people decide
there's something we should change we change it,
it's a lot better than most industries in that sense.
I think the way that applications user interfaces
have advanced over the last decade
Microsoft has been at the forefront
of a very high percentage of that,
and you know,
I think it's great stuff.
On August 24th 1995, Gates delivered
the coup de grace to his software rivals.
Windows 95 combines a PC's