Microsoft: Blue way back when

Way back when Bill Gates out-blued Big Blue, and used those tricky Eliminate and Reduce key elements on Steve Jobs, to own the desktop operating system market.

Let's consider the key elements of what made the company what it is through a Blue Ocean Strategy lens. When Microsoft cooked up their DOS deal with IBM, and released Windows, they unleashed a blue company that's been nearly impossible to kill. Let's look at what they changed from the AS-IS curve, in a nutshell.

Microsoft of way back when:

Eliminated the tie-in between operating systems and computers. This seems obvious now but, back then, it would've been as weird to buy a box without an OS as it would be to buy a car without a motor today. Eliminating the box-business was a gutsy, insightful, and brilliant risk.

Greatly reduced what I call the "Mac experience." Buying a Windows box wasn't an elegant, graceful, and emotional experience. It swapped the emotional PC buying experience of the time for a purely functional experience. They gave consumers what they needed to make their business, and not a lot more.

Greatly increased the ease of programming their new machines. I remember calling Apple way back when -- sometime in the early Mac days -- to ask about buying a compiler and getting manuals. I don't remember the exact price but it was something ridiculous. Microsoft, by comparison, went and purchased Visual Basic; they did everything they could to make people write software for their new computers. The software wasn't as elegant or beautiful as that one the Mac, but it was functional and that's what businesses needed.

Created the de-coupled operating system/computer market. I'll admit it; I've basically used this one twice, but in two entirely different contexts. Microsoft created two industries: operating systems and machines. The machines relatively quickly reduced to a commodity but desktop operating systems, with the training required for end-users to use them and the mass consumer preference for consistency, have taken a much longer time.

Microsoft today is a different story, saved for a different post, except to say the product -- that has consumers seeing red -- is about as fine an example of tech innovation (innovation for innovation's sake at great cost and little value) as any.