Would You Have Invested?
 

be honest now

depends, wether I had a chance to speak with them first or not.

That's how people looked and dressed in the 70's.

It was an ugly, ugly time in our history.

The guy on the bottom right is the REAL magic man in that company. I forget his name, but he's actually a PhD in archaeology and is basically the "idea" man for MS. He's the guy who looks at all the future trends and analyses it. Then tells Bill "we should go into cabling because of convergence" or whatever. His job is to make sure MS has a foot in every possible future avenue and if it wasn't for him, MS would still be selling just software and not be so embedded into society.

It's not like those guys would have dates and parties to distract them.

Are you implying that a good investment is determined by how a person looks and not on the merit of their product or potential service?

dude I seriously cracked up when I read that! It's rough and those guys are having the last laugh but still a good chuckle! :laughout:

i always tell myself do not judge for appearance!!!

exactly what panky said, which is what I meant in my first post but was too lazy to type :p

Can't go by looks it was 1978, I agree with Panky too

But at the time, they were probably not as scary as they look now. I can't help feeling that they were still a little scary, but not that much. :)

You should never judge a book by its cover! :)

Ok, how about the fact that Microsoft didn't actually have a product and basically signed a contract with IBM BEFORE they even had their DOS program. They then went and bought DR-DOS from a guy named Gary Kildare, for like $50,000 and then just rebadged it with their name. They had absolutely nothing, no product, nothing. Microsoft was an incredible fluke.

I call it BALLS not fluke. Any which way you cut it, they are an intelligent organization. Their market positioning is so widespread and embeded that you can't escape using a microsoft product. <-- that's simply good business.

They must have had something to have ended up so successful... even an idea is something and I doubt they formed a company on the merits of their good looks!

I give Microsoft a lot of credit for where they are today, but why I call it fluke is because the guy they bought the DOS program from originally said no to IBM. Microsoft was the 2nd choice. So this guy, instead of making millions, got $50k from Microsoft. There's a really good documentary on TV, a 3 part series. I think it's called the Birth of the internet or something like that. It's REALLY interesting and it talks about the big companies, how they started, and all that. Like XEROX for example, could have been the dominant company in the world because most of the big "ideas" came from people in their company, and XEROX said "No". Lack of vision on their part kept them in the copier business.