"Bill Gates - Challenges & Strategy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gates Bill)

evolving architecture, a couple of implementations. Everything we do should
focus on making Windows more successful.

A source of inspiration to me is a memo by John Walker of Autodesk called
"Autodesk: The Final Days" (copies available from JulieG). It's brilliantly
written and incredibly insightful. John hasn't been part of Autodesk
management for three years and hasn't attended any management meetings for
over two years, so he writes as an outsider questioning whether Autodesk is
doing the right things. By talking about how a large company slows down,
fails to invest enough and loses sight of what is important, and by using
Microsoft as an example of how to do some things correctly he manages to
touch on a lot of what's right and wrong with Microsoft today. Amazingly
his nightmare scenario to get people to consider what's really important
is Microsoft deciding to enter the CAD market -- something we have no
present thoughts of doing because it would stretch us too thin. Our
nightmare -- IBM "attacking" us in systems software, Novell "defeating" us
in networking and more agile, lower cost structure, customer-oriented
applications, competitors getting their Windows to act together is not
a scenario, but a reality.

Recently a long time employee mentioned that we seem to have more challenges
facing us now than ever before. Although I agree that it feels that way
I can say with confidence that it has felt that way every year for the
last 15. We decided to pursue a broad product strategy from the very
beginning of the company and that means we have a lot of competitors.
Our success is incredible, not just within the software industry or computer
industry but within the history of business, and the combination of this
with the incredibly competitive nature of our business breeds challenges to
our position. I think it is critical to divide these challenges into different categories.

Category 1
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This category containes issues of great importance but which I judge should
have little effect on how you do your job or our future.

APPLE LAW SUIT: This is a very serious lawsuit. If the judge rules against
us, without making it clear what we have to change or asks us to eliminate
something fundamental to all windowing systems (like overlapping windows)
it would be disastrous. At the very start of this lawsuit we decided that
Bill Neukom and I would give it very high priority and that the rest of the
executive staff could focus on their jobs without learning about the complex
twists and turns of the lawsuit. Microsoft is spending millions to defend
features contained every popular windows system on the market and to help
set the boundaries of where copyrights should and should not be applied. I
think it is absurd that the lawsuit is taking so long and that we are
educating the third federal judge on the case. I am pleased with our
work on this case. Our view that we will almost certainly prevail remains
unchanged.