XFool wrote:Interesting to bear in mind that, when Bill Gates came to the UK, he gave an interview in which he explained that (contrary to the usual history) MS was keen on finding a partner in the computer hardware field. He said their candidate machine at the time was the Victor Sirius (US designation) - "an interesting machine" - but the company were not, for whatever reason, interested. The rest is history...
So we might have all been running Windows on updated Sirius machines!
What point in MS's history was that about?
The start of MS's rise was Gate's coup in getting on board with hardware partner IBM. Building on the customers' trust in the IBM name, MS then put itself at the centre of an "IBM clone" ecosystem, nurturing newcomers like Compaq and Dell, and numerous others long-forgotten. It was the collective strength of that ecosystem that gave MS market victory over a range of much-superior systems that were around in the 1980s.[1] To have taken one hardware partner after IBM would surely have risked jeopardising that ecosystem and consigning MS to the dustbin of history.
Then came the '90s, the era of Win95, of supreme arrogance, of "embrace and extend", and of first ignoring then sabotaging the Internet. Can't see how hardware would've fitted there.
That leaves recent times, as they've become a more normal bigco. And now they do produce hardware: they sell "surface" tablets, and they bought Nokia. But surely that's not what you were talking about? Was there a time when he envisaged MS directly competing with IBM and Oracle as a full service in the Enterprise, perhaps when Oracle acquired a top-end hardware capability by buying Sun?
[1] A lesson from history that informed my most-successful-ever investment, when I twenty-bagged with ARM. Back in 2008 when I first started a portfolio, I could see ARM was at the centre of an even greater ecosystem and was sure to prosper. And they even had a much-superior product!