[ Thanks to Bryan Campbell for this link. ]
“Historians tracing the tectonic movements of Microsoft have at
their disposal a nifty shortcut: the company’s habit of outlining
its future through memos.“From 20-year-old Harvard student Bill Gates’s infamous ‘Open
Letter to Hobbyists’ (in which he chided his fellow computer
enthusiasts for not paying for software), to the 1995 watershed
“Internet tidal wave” memo, to 1998’s ‘Halloween’ memo warning of
the impending Linux threat, the company likes to use these screeds
to hint at its next steps…”