Rebirth of the Tech Madman

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After embracing ib's thigh and becoming the appointed operating system supplier of ib-p, Microsoft's development path is not smooth.

First of all, this deal is a one-time buyout. ib will not pay Gates for copying one by one according to its own PC shipments. Unexpected s-s licensing fees brought on by the rise of p compatibles.

Secondly, ib has always hoped that Microsoft, a little thing, will develop an operating system for itself honestly, and not half-heartedly put resources on other software to carry out so-called development and growth; Gates certainly does not want his ambitions to be so suppressed. The conflicts between the companies have never stopped.

In addition, competition from peers often makes Microsoft overwhelmed and embarrassed.

The first enemy is the digital research company. Gary Kildare, a Seattle fellow who had a close relationship with Gates earlier, thought that the cooperation with ib should belong to his own p/, and then launched a revenge action-s The roots come from p/, so it is naturally difficult to match the p/-86 who wants to counterattack and recklessly. If it weren't for Gary Kildall's poor market operation methods, clinging to high prices, it is still unclear who will win the battle for the operating system on the ib-p platform.

If Digital Research Corporation and Gary Kildare are old-timers in the industry, and it is natural for Microsoft and Gates to be on the verge of a major enemy, then Lotus Software, which was only established in 1982, has suddenly emerged and swept everything, which is very interesting.

Microsoft's spreadsheet software Uliplan was beaten to the ground by Lus1-2-3, and its office software product line was completely continued by Apple's eel on the a platform.

It has to be said that Gates is a lucky contender. Even if he is at a disadvantage, as long as he resists and does not make low-level mistakes, the opponents will basically be dazzled by the temporary victory, and then they will fall so hard that they can't find their front teeth.

After Lu s1-2-3 achieved great success, it took advantage of the situation to expand its product line and entered the field of enterprise workflow application software with more stable and lucrative profits, thereby breaking the barriers of hardware platforms and colliding with the philosophers who had already been entrenched there.

Lu s1-2-3 uses its own name to promote its three major functions, namely spreadsheets, chart generation, and database management, but in fact the latter two are decorations, and only spreadsheets are practical. Even so, Lu s1-2-3 became a smash hit only by relying on the function of the spreadsheet.

However, when confronted with Zheru, Mitchell Kapoor realized that Lu s1-2-3’s background was insufficient, so he decided to follow Zheru’s example and integrate various office software, including spreadsheets, word processing, and databases. mode, developed its own Lotus application suite.

Creativity is not necessarily so valuable sometimes, without strong execution, it is still a castle in the air after all.

It is not so easy to implement an office application suite. First of all, it needs a unified architecture to realize the communication of various programs, and then involves software component interfaces such as pnenbjeel component object model in the original time and space, nbjerequesbrkerarhieure general object request agent architecture, rba, etc. technology.

As a result, Lotus Software Company fell into the quagmire of stagnant product development, and new products were not available for a long time, and then lost the momentum of rapid development before. Take a breath.

Although Mitchell Kapoor is the founder of Lotus Software, he does not have the status that Tang Huan is to Zheru and Gates is to Microsoft. He depends on venture capital and is naturally responsible for poor management. Similarly, quitting the company he founded, fortunately, he was much more respectable than Jobs when he left Lotus Software.

Without the founder of Mitchell Kapoor, Lotus Software may have lost some flashes of inspiration in technology.

However, the level of capital operation has been enhanced, and through the acquisition of several companies, the thin product line has been rapidly enriched.

Gates knows this, so he still dare not take Lotus Software lightly.

But just when he could barely breathe a sigh of relief, another aggressive software company, brlan, began to emerge and threatened Microsoft's position on the ib-p platform.

In this time and space, although brlan did not have the genius of Anders Helsberg to join from the very beginning, even without urbpasal low-price dumping to provide primitive capital accumulation, even the right to name the product urb was virtually deprived Yes, but its founder, Philippe Kahn, also has the characteristics of a passionate, talented, and energetic entrepreneur.

Under the leadership of Philip Kahn, brlan launched a text editing software called private ekik. Once it was launched, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, becoming a best-selling software, helping the company to gain both fame and fortune, and gaining popularity in the highly competitive market. Stand firm.

Compared with similar products, the main feature of private ekik is that it integrates practical gadgets such as calendar, calculator, automatic dialer, a private i watch and so on.

For example, when programmers write assembly language codes through private ekik, they can easily use a hotkey to call out a private i table query, or the calculator can convert between binary, decimal and hexadecimal.

Logically speaking, the i industry has never been short of geniuses. Impressive ideas, technologies, companies, and products emerge almost every month. Private ekik is nothing more than a best-selling software. Ci still found brlan's threat.

It turns out that private ekik can be conveniently invoked through a hotkey, and various integrated practical gadgets are hidden under the appearance of a technology called edaynaeansayreprivate enprgra memory resident program or sr.

The so-called SR, specifically, is that after the software using this technology is executed, it will be hidden in a certain location in the memory, and usually will not appear on the screen at the initial stage. However, the user can use a shortcut key to call it up and use it immediately. After finishing, the user can use a shortcut key to hide it again.

With Tang Huan around, SR is certainly nothing new in the industry, but Brlan is the first to successfully introduce this technology to the ib-p platform, which immediately caused a sensation.

You must know that after the launch of ib-p/a using the inel80286 microprocessor, the ib-p platform has the hardware foundation for multitasking, but Microsoft's operating system s-s is unable to provide such support. Fangyuan got his wish on the personal computer platform.

However, after sr was transplanted to the ib-p platform, it created a false impression of multitasking execution for users, which became a big selling point, and other software developers followed suit, forming a wave of sr software craze.

It is entirely conceivable that how many hotkeys can be combined with an rl key plus other keys, and will soon be divided up by the sr programs that suddenly come in a spring breeze overnight and thousands of pear trees bloom, resulting in hotkey conflicts.

More importantly, the memory management mechanism of ib-p and s-s is not relative coordinates, but absolute coordinates. The space allocation is fixed by numbers, such as user programs below 640kb, and system drivers above 640kb program etc.

When thousands of sr program troops rush into this small space and scramble for positions, more and more serious conflicts will definitely occur, giving the already unstable s-s a gorgeous excuse to crash and crash.

Seeing this chaos, as the pioneer of SR technology on the ib-p platform, Philip Kahn felt that his brlan should stand up and become a leader in order to formulate an SR specification that everyone abides by, so that the SR program can run better.

But just as Philip Kahn raised his arms and shouted, waiting for the crowd to gather, he was attacked by Microsoft brutally.

Because the formulation of the SR standard will touch the lower-level iner-perable interrupt vector table of the ib-p platform, that is, i, which is equivalent to a one-dimensional array storing 256 interrupt service program entry addresses.

To some extent, s-s is the packaging of the interrupt vector table with the ultimate goal of portability and practicality. The importance of the interrupt vector table is self-evident.

Now, Philip Kahn jumped out all of a sudden, bluffing and wanting to move the interrupt vector table, Gates suddenly blew up, what does brlan want to do, does it want to replace Microsoft?

In order to stop brlan's ambitious plan, Gates once again used the trick he used to deal with the challenger iin during the ib-p platform graphical user interface battle.

He declared: Microsoft will soon launch a new version of s-s, providing a new mechanism similar to sr.

The effect of this smoke bomb was obvious, the SR application cooled down rapidly, the attitude of third-party software developers tended to be conservative, and the SR standard of brlan was left out in the cold, and no one cared about it.

In the end, the result of this SR craze was that it was anticlimactic.

In the final analysis, SR's real energy is still quite limited, so it's not wrong to be so short-lived.

However, Microsoft and brlan have formed a feud over this, and the focus of the battle has recently shifted to the field of programming tools for the ib-p platform.

In addition to private, Microsoft also has, frran, and pasal in the product line, which were also part of the original ib order.

And Philip Kahn was very discerning. He purchased ba private and programming tools from outside brlan, packaged them, and launched them under the names of brlan ba private and brlan, which was a great success. The latter, in particular, is extremely popular.

In this operation process, Philip Kahn's brilliance is once again reflected. He also played a rule challenger in software licensing, that is, allowing users to have multiple copies, as long as only one copy is running at a time, which makes the software licensing agreement extremely simple and clear.

Programmers are often full of personality. They hate the complicated software license agreement full of legal provisions. It is too troublesome to glance at it. But brlan's clean and neat, it is really popular.

In this way, Microsoft was forced to be embarrassed and exhausted by brlan just like the passiveness of Lotus Software during the spreadsheet software war.

Therefore, when Tang Huan suggested that Microsoft should protect its own territory first, Gates was speechless.

When he put down the phone, Steve Ballmer asked, How was it going?

Don said, don't be in a hurry, let Microsoft deal with the competition from brlan first. Gates replied with a slight frown.

Microsoft ba privately became the macro programming language of Zheru's office software, which involves a lot of things. It will definitely not be negotiated once. It's fine if Tang doesn't expressly reject it. We'd better find him face-to-face for public relations. Steve Ballmer didn't think much, and suggested casually.

I'm worried that with Tang, Microsoft has no use value. Gates analyzed with a heavy tone: So, Tang really has no intention of handing over this benefit to Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer touched the top of his head that was beginning to lose his hair due to the company's pressure, and said bitterly: We can't get involved in the ongoing personal computer standard war. The advantages of the Fangyuan computer standard are becoming more and more obvious. Naturally, Microsoft can no longer continue to add value to itself through the bargaining chip of ib-p. Moreover, due to the existence of ins, we and ib are increasingly unable to agree.

The layout of ib on personal computers is stupid, of course we have to reserve. Gates waved his hand without regret, Don's proposal is not unreasonable, we must first protect our own territory. It is rumored that brlan will extend its tentacles to the field of spreadsheets and databases, and Microsoft does not have any reserves in databases, it seems that the most direct method must be adopted, acquiring a related company to make up for the shortcomings.

Steve Ballmer agreed with Gates' idea, and said, There are many excellent database management systems compatible with Ba color on the market. Anyway, Ba color can't enjoy the copyright alone. Let's just buy an excellent compatible company. gone.

? (To be continued.)