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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
2 Jun 2025 Acquired The Steve Ballmer Interview
“Really, I would say we—few other companies, but I would say we—defined what a modern software business looked like.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
- Attribution
- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 2 Jun 2025
- Publisher
- Acquired
- Episode
- The Steve Ballmer Interview
Transcript context
…This is the creation of the software industry. There were a couple of software companies that made packages for IBM mainframes, but almost everything was custom. Really, I would say we—few other companies, but I would say we—defined what a modern software business looked like. The notion that there could be lots of developers and yeah, there were some, but it’s not like we think today. There were developers doing lots of standard applications. No. There was no licensing model, no business model. Nothing. VisiCalc was around. So it would’ve been counterintuitive or required too many mental hops to think, we’re IBM. Wait, are we giving away the future by allowing someone to distribute a wide operating system that ends up being the target that everyone standardizes on? Which eventually created all of modern Microsoft.…
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