Chapter 33 foreword

In the summer of 2000, my colleagues and I were attending a large academic conference across Europe and Asia in Istanbul. When we returned to the hotel, we saw English instead of the local Turkish spoken on TV.Take a closer look, Microsoft Chairman William Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, is wearing casual clothes and delivering a TV speech with a serious expression.It turned out that the protracted case against Microsoft by the US Department of Justice finally had its first trial results.After years of investigation and evidence collection, the Ministry of Justice finally found enough evidence of 146 pages of Microsoft monopoly and unfair competition (see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details) .The court ruled that Microsoft's monopoly behavior has violated the anti-monopoly law and constituted a threat to Apple, Sun, Netscape, Lotus, Real Networks, Linux and other companies. As a remedy, Microsoft will be forcibly split into two companies, one A company that operates the operating system and a company that deals in other software.On that day, Microsoft's stock plummeted by half, and its market value shrank from 500 billion US dollars to less than 300 billion US dollars, and it has remained at the level of 200 to 300 billion US dollars since then.At the thousand-person reception the next night, everyone except Microsoft was delighted with the result.This shows that Microsoft's monopolistic behavior has indeed caused public outrage.

In the entire IT field, Microsoft will always be the worst enemy of all companies.Relying on its monopoly position on the operating system and extremely strong financial resources, Microsoft is almost invincible in the computer field.For more than two decades, Microsoft, as a link at the top of the ecological chain in the computer field, has stimulated the development of the entire computer field on the one hand, and on the other hand has killed countless innovative companies, large and small.Today, it remains the richest company in the world by cash and is the most valuable technology company.There are countless legends in Microsoft, and Gates, its founder and chairman of the board, is a legend himself.Their stories have already been circulated all over the world, so I will not repeat them here.I just want to introduce how Gates and Microsoft seized and used the opportunities brought by the information revolution to build an IT empire.