VC. In Chicago??

Dell and Microsoft

The relationship btw Dell and Microsoft is a very interesting one. Michael Robertson, of Linspire, has a little article on it in his latest "Michael's Minutes".

Towards the end of my time at b-school Kevin Rollins visited the GSB. Good speaker and very nice guy. Afterwards in the q&a section I asked him what he thought about selling more Linux machines and how that would affect their relationship with Microsoft. He basically responded that it did not affect them in any way - Microsoft sells products to Dell's competitors and they were free to do the same. But as we can see from Robertson's writing, Dell is probably still constrained in this area. Its interesting because Dell has grown into an enormous and powerful company in their own right, but as Robertson mentioned, they have little flexibility in their business model.

Apple and Microsoft

This article by John Gruber is very interesting. He looks at Apple's "mistake" in not licensing the Mac operating system many years ago in a different light. In his analysis that is not the root of their troubles since there is a good chance it wouldnt have worked anyway. Rather they should have maintained some sort of compatibility with the Apple II, which had been a very successful product, and parlayed that in order to continue building the company. This would have been very similar to what Microsoft has done all along, starting with MSDOS, then Windows and many of its other products.

It makes you think about the true value of backward compatibility (a concept mentioned prominently in Joel Spolsky's recent article as well as the issues between introducing evolutionary vs. revolutionary products (the former probably being easier to make backward compatible than the latter and therefore having a better chance of success).