The Case for Microsoft Amid the Curse of the Information Age

The Case for Microsoft amid the Curse of the Information Age

When Bill Gates finally laid to rest his executive mantle over Microsoft, a company he built almost single-handedly more than three decades ago, by June last year, he may be forgiven for letting out a heavy sigh of relief than triumphant exuberance. For the past few years, Microsoft has become the biggest thorn among tech roses, with every government regulator chasing off the company’s back as allegations of anti-competitive practices continued to haunt Redmond. What started as one of the prime movers in the tech industry and is understandably lauded as responsible for the outburst of information and communications technology (ICT) down the mainstream has become a burgeoning, overbearing corporate behemoth that sought to dominate the entire personal computing landscape, at least according to the company’s fiercest critics, which include, among others, Google and the open source community.

Has Microsoft’s position indeed turned for the worst? What has become of the company’s preeminent motto, bringing “a computer on every desk and in every home” in light Microsoft’s recent dilemmas? Is there still a case for Microsoft being a champion of the personal computing industry?

A Brief Look into Microsoft’s History

Who could have imagined that a Harvard dropout would eventually become the world’s richest person thanks to a visionary approach of having “a computer on every desk and in every home”?

Enter Bill Gates and Microsoft.

As told by Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates has had an obsession with computers even at a young age. His time was that of large mainframes and bulky punch cards; only a few schools, let alone companies, had computers during that period and people wanting to explore how these machines worked had to troop to the nearest university to have their source codes tested after queuing up. Good thing for the young Gates he came from an upper middle-class family and was enrolled in an...