Microsoft’s monopoly profits funded an audacious bid to own the coming Internet

Evidence

In 1996, Microsoft was at the height of its powers, the technology sector’s most intimidating behemoth, brutally efficient and plainly bent on the conquest of all that surrounded it. Its billions in profits based on sales of its ubiquitous, if unloved, Windows and Office, the graphical operating system of most computers on earth, had made it the most valuable company in the world. If anyone had made a fortune by cornering the market for nuts and bolts and sticking to it, it was Microsoft. It was a surprise, therefore, when on January 3, 1996, its chief executive, Bill Gates, wearing his large, dark-framed glasses that were not yet a hipster affectation but still the sign of the true nerd, posted an essay on Microsoft’s website, with a counterintuitive title: “Content Is King.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 861

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Gates’s ‘Content Is King’ essay marks the point where the tech industry explicitly recognized attention/content as the real commodity, tracing the lineage of platform economics.
• XREF: connects to: The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34; Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons; AOL’s closed pay-for-play garden lost to the open Internet’s full variety — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 747 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism #expands (0.75) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34
• AOL’s closed pay-for-play garden lost to the open Internet’s full variety #exemplifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 747
• Early Internet designers overwhelmingly opposed permitting advertising on the network #contradicts (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 662
• Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons #complicates (0.70)