Before viewing the film, "The Pirates of Silicon Valley", I didn't know much about the computer world. All I knew was that there was Apple and there was Microsoft. I knew Apple was way expensive, and out of my price range, and Microsoft, although highly more affordable and for the most part more popular, there were and still are constant complaints on the programming problems. I didn't know the half of it when it came to the highly competitive nature of the two companies, nor did I know any of the "nuts and bolts " of how these companies came to be.
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After viewing this film, I learned that although exceedingly intelligent, the richest man in the world today is a college drop out! Bill gates dropped out of Harvard University to pursue computers. Did this venture work out in the end yes; he created Microsoft, and is now the richest man in the world. Does that make his decision to drop out of Harvard good, personally, I don't think so. Fortunately, he was lucky that it worked out the way everything did! .
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I also learned that Hewlett-Packard made a horribly bad business decision when they mocked Steve Wozniak's homemade computer. Being that Wozniak worked at HP, he signed an agreement that they would have "first dibs " on anything he invented during his employment. As so, they were the first company to be offered this revolutionary machine; and what did they do? They literally laughed in his face, and asked what a common person would need a computer for! In the words of Homer Simpson, can we say "DOH! "?.
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Lastly, I learned that after everything that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went through; after the manipulation and stealing, after the competitiveness and the paranoia, in the end Microsoft came out on top. Even though Microsoft was not as good as Apple and even though they both knew that Apple was better, Microsoft still came out in the lead. Bill Gates "beat " Steve Jobs in this "computer war ", and sadly no one cared that Microsoft wasn't the better of the two.
