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Buying Guide: Charles Simonyi: Former Xerox PARC, Microsoft employee
As a researcher at the famed Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, Charles Simonyi built the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processor. In 1981 he moved on to Microsoft, where he led the development of Word and Excel. Today he runs Intentional Software, a company that aims to turn even the greenest computer users into programmers.
Q: In the mid-eighties, after the debut of Windows 1.0, Microsoft was shipping versions of Word and Excel for the Macintosh. But on the PC side, why did these apps run only on DOS?
A: At that time, the demands of the applications were higher than Windows could handle. The OS was slow to progress, and a lot of that had to do with politics. Microsoft was in a bad marriage at the time. The success of Windows really had to wait for a divorce from IBM.
Q: Why was it so hard to develop Windows in tandem with IBM?
A: IBM was a large organization that wasn't equipped to operate in a nimble and efficient way. There was this tremendous bureaucratic organization where trivial decisions took an infinite amount of paperwork. That's expensive. Plus, it makes it very difficult to reverse decisions. The more people invest in decisions, the more they cling to them. All you need is for people to cling to a couple of bad decisions and you're dead.
Q: Was that the only problem?
A: The other big constraint was that Microsoft set out to build an open system that allowed other manufacturers to build their own PCs and peripherals. That is inherently much bigger and much messier than what Apple set out to do. Apple was also a hardware company. Their platform uses only two printers and one mouse and two keyboards and one computer.