Historical Footnotes
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The Minesweeper Moment
Shortly after Windows 3.0 shipped, we rounded up and shipped some of the games floating around inside Microsoft, most of which were byproducts of developers teaching themselves to program Windows. Minesweeper was one of the games in the first Entertainment Pack for Windows (tagline: “It’s not just the most fun you can have with Windows,…
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Dinosaur Down: IBM’s Q3 Earnings
The earnings release speaks for itself (love that typeface – they must still do press releases on a Selectric typewriter in the IBM museum), but a few comments: A billion dollar (as in $1,000,000,000) miss on the top line. Everything in varying levels of freefall, led by the swan dive of the hardware business (Power…
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Exploring Alternative History
Bloomberg has a nice piece revisiting the broad vision Microsoft laid out in June 2000 at the grandiosely named Forum 2000. They even have an edited cut of some of the scenario videos developed for the event to bring the vision to life. The event was originally scheduled to open the new millennium in January…