Article details how Ross Perot almost bought the company in 1979
Imagine for a moment a world without Microsoft as we know it today. Remake “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Bill Gates instead of Jimmy Stewart discovering how the world would be different if he hadn’t been there.
What might have been without Microsoft leading the personal computer revolution is mentioned in an article on the MSN Money Web site titled, “The 8 Dumbest Business Decisions.” Along with stories about Decca declining to sign the Beatles to a record contract, Web portal Excite passing on paying $750,000 for a nascent Google and the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, is the story of how Texas billionaire Ross Perot passed on an offer to buy Microsoft in 1979.
At the time, Perot ran the company he founded, Electronic Data Systems, which sold large computer systems to government agencies and large enterprises. He invited a geeky Bill Gates into his office to learn about Gates’ four-year-old 30 employee start-up.
According to a 1993 biography of Gates, Perot said Gates wanted an asking price of $40 million to $60 million for Microsoft, although Gates remembers the price tag as being in the $6 million to $15 million range. Never the less, neither party was satisfied with the price, neither counter-offered and the deal went nowhere.
But imagine if Microsoft had been acquired by EDS. Would Microsoft be a household name today? Sure, acquiring Microsoft would have given EDS a larger presence in business and enterprise computing, so there would likely be Microsoft Office, Windows Server and other enterprise applications. But would there be a consumer-oriented Microsoft? Would Gates have stayed with EDS? Would there have been the Windows operating system or the Internet Explorer Web browser? Would there be an Xbox, the Zune or Windows Media Player?
Without Microsoft, maybe Netscape would today be the dominant Web browser and maybe it would have been dragged into federal court on antitrust charges.
If Microsoft hadn’t served the consumer market, would there be all the software companies building applications to run in Windows that there are today? Would they be writing for the Apple platform instead? Would the open source movement have evolved the same way?
Of course, a consumer market could have evolved some other way. This exercise is kind of like wondering if North America would have ever been discovered if Queen Isabella hadn’t funded Christoper Columbus’s voyage. Eventually, someone would have discovered it.
But it’s interesting to read that Bill Gates and Ross Perot, two of the smartest and most successful business people on the planet, couldn’t come to an agreement on a deal. Perot calls it “one of the biggest business mistakes I’ve ever made.”
Of course, if Perot had acquired Microsoft, he might have been too busy running it to run for president in 1992, he wouldn’t have drained votes from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton wouldn’t have been elected president. Then Clinton wouldn’t have been able to hire Monica Lewinsky as an intern. So things might have turned out better overall.
