Digital Wars

The book I read to research this post was Digital Wars by Charles Arthur which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is about the war for market share & control of the internet by Microsoft, Google & Apple. Bill Gates the owner of Microsoft was once asked what company he feared the most & said what he feared the most was someone building something in a garage in Silicon Valley & selling it much like how Apple started because a small firm like that could respond to market forces much more readily than Microsoft ever could. Apparently out of the established companies he fears Google the most because they are a software company as well as a search engine & are run along similiar lines to Microsoft. He fears if he doesn’t watch Google very carefully they could put Microsoft out of business. Nowadays Bill has handed over much of the running of his company & concentrates on his charity work, stopping preventable illnesses in developing countries. When Apple brought back Steve Jobs to run the company they were almost out of business. Apple had filed a lawsuit against Microsoft because the Windows interface of using the mouse was quite similiar to the Apple Lisa which I think used a touch screen. Bill bought $150 million of non voting shares in Apple & agreed that he would continue to support an AppleMac version of Microsoft Office. Without all that Apple would have gone out of business. Nowadays Apple makes more revenue from iPods than from computers aside from the iPad. In 2011 Apple overtook Exxon to become the highest valued company on the stock exchange. Apparently Toshiba came up with a very tiny hard drive which was incorporated into the 1st generation iPod. Also they originally only worked with iMac computers & were seen as a way to increase Apples share of the computer market. It was inspired of Jobs to see that if they made iTunes compatible with Windows they could sell a lot more iPods. A lot of Apple fans saw it as sacrilege. A lot of the iPods competitors were much bulkier than the iPod & Jobs was instrumental in insisting it be as tiny as possible. Microsoft brought out the Zune which was a capable machine but was inferior to the iPod. It shared features with the Xbox & Xbox Live. I think if you had the wireless adaptor you could stream music from the Xbox to your Zune which was quite nifty.