Who's more visionary: Microsoft or Apple?

This teaser in today’s Business Insider SAI Select struck me:

Yes, Microsoft Did Change The World More Than Apple

Vision is important but it’s not the only thing.

I’d argue that Microsoft originally was extremely visionary.

“A PC on every desk” was very very visionary at the time.

When Bill Gates was expressing this vision, both of my parents were programmers here in Denmark, and the brightest minds at the time believed that Denmark would probably have at most a few handfuls of computers, total.

It was very visionary.

And to see that software could and should be sold separately, and not given away for free along with the hardware, and to see that it could be big business - the most valuable part of the business - that was truly visionary.

I remember the info-graphic in Clayton Christensen’s original book, Innovator’s Dilemma, that shows where the profit went in the PC industry. It’s depicted as a series of buckets, where some of them are leaky, and others end up collecting all the $$$. The ones that end up with all the $$$ are the ones that have a lock on the most performance-critical piece of the technology chain.

I don’t know if Bill Gates fully realized the vastness of what he’d done, but there’s no doubt he was very visionary. Still is, fighting against AIDS and malaria and other things. Not of the same kind of visionary as Steve Jobs, but definitely, clearly a visionary.

Now, Steve Ballmer, on the other hand… :)