Bill Gates:

We never thought how big we'd be. That wasn't a real focus. The everyday activity of just doing great software drew us in. And some decisions we made- like the quality of the people, the way we were very global, the vision of how we thought about software- that was very long term.

But, you know, other than those things, you know, we just came in to work every day and wrote more code and hired more people. And it wasn't really until the IBM PC succeeded, and perhaps even until Windows succeeded, that there was a broad awareness that Microsoft was very unique as a software company, and that these other companies had been one-product companies, hadn't hired people, couldn't do a broad set of things, didn't renew their excellence, didn't do research.

So we thought we were doing something very unique, but it was easily not until 1995, or even 1997, that there was this wide recognition that we were the company that had- had revolutionized software.

Bill Gates:

We never thought how big we'd be. That wasn't a real focus. The everyday activity of just doing great software drew us in. And some decisions we made- like the quality of the people, the way we were very global, the vision of how we thought about software- that was very long term.

But, you know, other than those things, you know, we just came in to work every day and wrote more code and hired more people. And it wasn't really until the IBM PC succeeded, and perhaps even until Windows succeeded, that there was a broad awareness that Microsoft was very unique as a software company, and that these other companies had been one-product companies, hadn't hired people, couldn't do a broad set of things, didn't renew their excellence, didn't do research.

So we thought we were doing something very unique, but it was easily not until 1995, or even 1997, that there was this wide recognition that we were the company that had- had revolutionized software.