Скачать или смотреть Microsoft's First 100 Customers: Bill Gates' Desperate Cold Calls to IBM

How did Bill Gates turn a lie into a billion-dollar empire? This is the true story of Microsoft's first 100 customers—from a desperate demo in Albuquerque to the IBM deal that changed computing forever.

THE DEMO THAT STARTED IT ALL

In 1975, two college dropouts had a problem. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had promised MITS a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800—but they'd never actually tested it on real hardware. They wrote the entire program on Harvard's mainframe computer, simulating a machine they didn't own. When Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque with the code on paper tape, everything depended on one moment: would it work?

FROM 16,000 TO 1 MILLION IN 4 YEARS

This video reveals exactly how Microsoft went from one customer in 1975 to dominating the personal computer software industry by 1980. You'll discover:

• The brilliant licensing strategy that made Gates rich (royalties per computer sold)
• Why software piracy almost destroyed Microsoft before it started
• How Gates promised IBM an operating system he didn't have—then bought one for $50,000
• The contract clause that IBM missed and Microsoft became worth billions
• Why retaining ownership instead of selling software was Gates's genius move
• The mother-son connection that helped get IBM's attention

📊 THE NUMBERS THAT TELL THE STORY:

• 1975: First customer (MITS) - 16,000 revenue • 1977: Commodore, Radio Shack, Apple license Microsoft BASIC • 1979: Revenue exceeds \1 million from licensing deals
• 1981: IBM PC launches with MS-DOS
• 1986: Microsoft IPO creates thousands of millionaires
• Today: Microsoft worth over $3 trillion

💡 BUSINESS LESSONS FROM GATES:

License, don't sell (recurring revenue beats one-time payments)
Retain ownership at all costs (the MS-DOS clause that changed everything)
Support multiple platforms (don't lock into exclusive deals)
Structure deals for scale (per-unit royalties grow automatically)
Promise first, figure it out later (calculated risk-taking)
🎯 THE IBM GAMBLE:

When IBM came to Microsoft in 1980, Gates didn't have an operating system. He promised them one anyway, then scrambled to buy QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000. He renamed it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM while retaining rights to sell it to other manufacturers. That decision made Microsoft the most profitable software company in history.


SOURCES:
Information verified through "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire," Gates's own writings, and archived computer industry publications from the 1970s-80s.

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💬 COMMENT: Would you have had the courage to demo software you'd never tested on real hardware? What would you have done differently?

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