During the 1990s, Microsoft did not have a potential rival in the market.
In the early 1990s, Microsoft Windows seemed to have no competition, but before long the threats appeared. One of them was Borland and its Turbo C ++ programming environment. Another was the so-called NeXT, a company created by Steve Jobs in 1985 and with which the foundations were laid for Apple.
Steven Sinofsky, a well-known Microsoft employee, would end up publishing an autobiographical newsletter entitled ‘Hardcore Software’ in which he recounted crucial moments of the company.
At the beginning of the 90s, Microsoft, dominated the market for personal computers, realized how BASIC no longer attracted developers, who were beginning to be interested in object-oriented programming languages and much more powerful languages such as C ++ .
Borland and its Turbo C ++ were much faster and integrated editor, compiler and debugger.
At Microsoft, he was falling behind when it came to innovation. In fact, Sinofsky confessed, they still used Xenix (a commercial UNIX) and OS / 2 to develop software for MS-DOS and Windows, and they envied platforms like Apple.
However, Apple was not strong in the market. Steve Jobs had been fired, but had founded NeXT, a company that was not known to the public, but was followed by Bill Gates and the rest of the industry.
“Microsoft had to do something,” stressed Sinofsky. “Something with Borland and NeXT.” The executive thus made it clear that although Microsoft had managed to dominate the market, its privileged position was threatened in terms of software.
Jobs and Macintosh
“The Macintosh was a revolution that made computing easier for the end user. But the software developer paid the price … It is very difficult to develop software for the Macintosh. If you look at the time it takes to develop an application with a GUI, the user interface takes 90% of the time, ”Jobs commented at the presentation of the first Macintosh.
With NeXT, Jobs wanted to solve the problem, and in his NeXTSTEP operating system he integrated development tools with the Objective-C programming language.
NeXTSTEP ended up being the foundation of Mac OS X even a decade later, and Objective-C would still be the reference language for programmers for iOS development. Microsoft, meanwhile, was still stuck in the past.
