Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Soon with the Internet coming, it'll enable servers that face externally from your company. The punchline here is that NT becomes the seeds of Windows Server, the business line, which become the seeds of Azure today. The other important takeaway on NT is it was going to take a long time to build. It was going to take a long time to test. It was going to take a long time to sell and deploy, and it was going to have really strict requirements for what it could work on because it's a power hungry operating system built for enterprise IT administrators. That is not your short-term product strategy. That is a long-term bet that a team is going to work on concurrently while you're figuring out what to do after Windows 3.1. In 1991, Bill Gates sums this up in a memo where he says, “Our strategy is Windows. One evolving architecture, a couple of implementations, and an immense number of great applications from Microsoft and others.” Every word in that sentence does a bunch of heavy lifting. You got one architecture. Okay. I think what that basically ends up meaning a few years later is one application programming interface (API) that developers can target so that when they want to write a Windows app, it works on both NT and whatever the evolution of 3. 1 is. That's one architecture, but it says one evolving architecture. That buys Microsoft a little bit more fluidity in the one architecture that's being targeted. Then you hear a couple of implementations. This basically says, even though developers are targeting what became the Win32 API, the one way that we write applications, there are two different implementations. For many years, they would display very differently on NT systems versus—spoiler alert—Windows 95, the successor to Windows 3.1. By Windows 95, you mean Windows 4 that was supposed to ship in 1993?…

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