Bill

Reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, and I found this quote (p211):

It was clearly not enough for Microsoft to beat the competiion; Gates wanted to eliminate his opponents from the playing field. “Bill learned early on that killing the competition is the name of the game,” said a Microsoft executive who was with the company in the early 1980s. “There just aren’t as many people later to take you on. In game theory, you improve the probability you are going to win if you have fewer competitors.”

And on the next page …

“There was absolute determination on Bill’s part to take Digital Research out of the market,” said Curry. “It’s part of Bill’s strategy. You smash people. You either make them line up or you smash them.”

Interesting. It’s of course particularly interesting when you realize that this book was written in 1993, well before the antitrust trials and the Netscape incident.