Like this:

A documentary about how the personal computer-market started and developed. It goes from young hippies who started to build their own computers in the Silicon Valley in California, bankruptcy threatened calculator-companies in Albuquerque who takes help by Harvard-dropouts to get their new product to work, huge computer companies with dresscodes and company songs… To the garage hippies and harvard dropouts being multi-billionairs.

It basicly tells the story about two companies of today – Apple and Microsoft. Or – if you’d like to take it down to a personal level – two entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Having seen the movie “Pirates of the Silicon Valley” I recognized most of the happenings. Like how Steve Wozniak started out in his garage building computers, and his friend Steve Jobs saw the brilliance and they started the company Apple. Well, that is very briefly how it happened.

Bill Gates and his older friend Paul Allen read about a company down in Albuquerque needing a software to get their computer to work, so they started making one. Bill realized the computer industry wouldn’t wait for him to finish college, and he therefore dropped out of Harvard. They founded the company Microsoft.

Noone at this time thought about the personal computer industry as a potential world-leading market. “I thought this was the most fun you could possibly have with your clothes on“, says some guy who worked for Microsoft in the documentary.

Later on, Steve Jobs bought the graphic interface from Xerox very cheap, since the Xerox board didn’t see the potential in the technology. Bill Gates stole this when being hired by Apple to develop their new software, and putted it into his own new software – Windows.

I think it is funny how Steve Jobs says straight out how he critizise Microsoft for their lack of taste, for not bringing own original ideas or not bringing much culture into their product. He claims he has no problem with their success, but with the fact that they just make third-rate products. And I can really see how he is thinking. Microsoft mostly steals their ideas and make them into product for a big range of people for a good price, while Apple focus more on style, but to a higher price for the customer.

In the end of the documentary, the story-teller says “Apple, the company Jobs took from a garage to the fortune 500, is in trouble. It is now a fading force in the PC marketplace”…
I remember myself reading only yesterday at PingPong about 2 people who, out of everything in the world they had that they thought was bad, wrote Windows. And that they would, or had, changed to Mac. Somewhere, sometime… Something happened. Steve Jobs came back to Apple 1997. Since then it has been a complete success. Ipod, Macbook, Pixar…

Advertisement