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The phrase "bet the company" -arrgh I realize this is trivial, but I have heard Bill Gates claim he "bet the company" with the move to Windows. Maybe so. But since then, it seems to be a pet phrase of his and others at MS, when touting some new initiative or other. I notice the phrase is being revived for Longhorn.
Michael Joyner
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/winer.if.html
Matthew Lock
It's probably hyperbole, but it's also true that Longhorn is a humongously more ambitious effort than WinME...
John C.
Don't they use "Bet the farm" too ?
Steve Jones (UK)
Let Google be the judge:
Matthew Lock
Especially since Apple is going to beat them out of the gate with virtually all the compelling Longhorn features, in OS X 10.4. :(
Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Besides, there was so much demand for a GUI and no credible offer that was compatible with DOS at the time, how risky a project was Windows for MS?
Fred
There's a current financial scandal going on in London about a stock flotation where the floater bet using spread betting that the price would rise by such and such an amount. The betting company had to lay off that bet of course and ended up buying shares in order to cover themselves, hence covering the volume of the offering.
Simon Lucy
Oh, and the credible alternative at the time was Gem, which pre-dated Windows was scaled for 8088/8086 which Windows never was and was in many ways superior.
Simon Lucy
Gem? We had that on our Amstrad PC back in 1986, there was little wonder why that didn't last.
Matthew Lock
It did last in lots of ways.
Simon Lucy
Oh yeah GEM was on the Atari ST too. That was reasonably popular until the early 90s.
Matthew Lock
Forget GEM, Amiga OS was way ahead of the game. It took windows until 95 to catch up.
Ged Byrne
Anyone that uses "bought the farm" in place of "bet the company" is an idiot. If you've "bought the farm", it means you died.
Devin
I thought Windows was the weapon MS used to fight off IBM and OS2 (which as I recall, MS also developed but for some reason OS2 never really worked very well; how did that happen?)
Anony Coward
I am going to do a white paper.
gambler
Gem? GEOS was the best windowing environment for PCs in the pre-Windows 95 era. It came with several decent applications and it ran well on 80286s.
Bored Bystander
Wasn't GEOS originally developed for the Commodore 64?
Matthew Lock
To motivate the troops you need to continually reinvent
son of parnas
Yep. It was called GEOS on the C64, and when it grew up and got PC roots, it was called GeoWorks Ensemble. But it was basically the same philosophy.
Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
> Especially since Apple is going to beat them out of the
Jack Squat
> I thought Windows was the weapon MS used to fight off IBM and OS2 (which as I recall, MS also developed but for some reason OS2 never really worked very well; how did that happen?)
"I am going to do a white paper."
Tapiwa
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