What is your Strategy - if you are Bill Gates in 1987?

Let us conduct a Thought Experiment.

You are Bill Gates - in 1987.

The Scenario is as painted below

1. But MS-DOS is now coming to the end of its natural life cycle. A change in the S-curve is coming, and the industry is far from certain how things will work out.

2. Microsoft is still a $346 million minnow in 1987 compared to the multibillion-dollar giants.
2.1 IBM is its own powerful multitasking OS/2 system;
2.2 AT&T is leading a consortium of other companies, including Sun Microsystems and Xerox, to create a user-friendly version of the widely admired Unix operating system;
2.3 Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation are pushing their own version of Unix.
2.4 Apple is also still a threat, consistently out-innovating the rest of the industry, and its highly graphical Macintosh is selling well.

Question: What are your Strategic Options and how will you execute them? Remember you are the young Bill Gates.

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The above problem is rewording of the detailed scenario described at the Link

Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe

The author of the book The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that a radical new view sees economics as a highly dynamic and evolving system with implications for companies and organizations everywhere.

What I like about the details is the description that STRATEGY IS A PORTFOLIO OF EXPERIMENTS

This to my mind is the most important message for all.

When I talk about work is experimental, my experiments have yielded so and so results - and may be we can do some experiments in the new context to see what works and what not - I am told by managers and senior leaders of organizations, that if we just do experiments when we will do work!

Understand that there is nothing like work - everything that we do - the chores and jobs can actually be viewed as experiments - hence keep the option of incorporating change as it happens.

Bill Gates actually executed six simultaneous strategies as per the post above.

How similar to Toyota's SET BASED CONCURRENT ENGINEERING (SBCE)!!!!!

Well - I know- my fascination with SBCE continues!