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Podcast: Revisiting Microsoft’s startup years, in search of new insights
- Microsoft’s startup era was focused on developing software for personal computers, which at the time did not exist in the ’70s.
- David Marquardt, Microsoft’s first outsider investor, details the importance of the team behind Microsoft’s success.
- Microsoft was one of the first enterprises to charge for desktop computing software.
- Microsoft famously struck a deal with IBM that not only got the IBM PCs, but also created a platform that was cloned around the world.
- Microsoft’s choice to move to Seattle was to a get competitive advantage in the job market for programmers and for home reasons.
- It became Microsoft’s town, even after Amazon was established and growing, and is only recently becoming Microsoft’s and Amazon’s town.
- The Seattle job market allowed fewer startup companies, and had a sizable engineering force from the University of Washington.
- Microsoft’s culture in its early days was very hard-charging, which historically was a culture that drove women out of technical roles in tech.
- Success comes with the support of more mainline institutions; the new economy grows on old-economy foundations.
- Microsoft has done so much to define Greater Seattle, despite being a company town, first of timber and then Boeing.
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