Stealing from the Giants: How Microsoft and Apple Pilfered Xerox's Innovations to Dominate Tech

One of my favorite anecdotes from the business world is from the early days of Microsoft and Apple in the 1980s and how Microsoft went on to become the world leader in OS space. 

The year was 1979 and Apple was the upcoming tech leader of the world. Its product, Apple II was the world’s first highly successful personal computer. It was a raging success and Steve Jobs became the rock star of Silicon Valley. But he was looking for his next big breakthrough as a tech entrepreneur. And the answer came at XEROX (Yes!! the photocopier company). Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was the highly regarded research center of Xerox. Believe it or not Xerox was the first company to come with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and an idea for a computer mouse. Xerox executives did not understand the technology but Steve Jobs did. He offered 100,000 shares of Apple in exchange for knowledge transfer to Apple engineers. The Xerox executives happily agreed.

As fate would have it, Steve Jobs hired a young college drop out as a third party software developer – Bill Gates (Microsoft was then an unknown software company with ~40 employees) to write GUI codes for its next product. Bill Gates was not the person to let go of that opportunity.

Due to delays, Apple could not release its GUI OS until 1983 and that’s when the NDA between Apple and Microsoft ended. In 1984, Bill Gates introduced its own GUI-based OS– popularly known as WINDOWS. When confronted by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates famously replied, “Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." And the rest is history. Yes, there were lawsuits and court cases but eventually Bill Gates won and went on to become the richest man in the world.

It’s amazing how a photocopier company could have ruled the PC industry but it wasn't to be. In the end, the future belongs to those who grab the opportunity when they see one.