Full Episode
I'm a little hoarse today, so hopefully we don't have to do a lot of talking.
Good luck with that.
All right, let's do this.
Okay.
Welcome to Season 14, Episode 6, the season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Well, listeners, here we are, Microsoft Volume 2 at long last.
After the ancient history of Volume 1, we now get to the stuff that you grew up with, the internet, Windows XP, Xbox, the browser, search, and mobile. And in this era, Microsoft had a lot of the right ideas. with a lot of the wrong timing and execution on everything from the Zune to Bing.
But despite that, from 1995, where we start our story, to 2014, where we will end this episode, Microsoft grew their annual revenue from $6 billion to $80 billion. They became a phenomenally successful company and really cracked the code on selling enterprise software. I began the research thinking our part one episode would be about the rise and this episode would be about the fall.
Cultural problems, failed consumer products, antitrust, but it's really not that straightforward. And after spending months unpacking it all, I actually don't think that's the right framing anyway. And on Microsoft's 1998 antitrust suit against the Department of Justice, everyone knows of this case, but most people really have no idea what actually happened. Did Microsoft lose?
Well, not really, but the answer is nuanced. Finally, today, we dive into it all. Oh, and listeners, we have just one announcement for you here today. Yes. We told you before that September 10th, we are doing the biggest thing in Acquired's history, and we're doing it in the city of San Francisco.
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