Movie review: Pirates of the Silicon Valley

Silicon valley :this name always reminded me of a place where creative minds (of really decorated and highly qualified people) would set course to give to the world , the best technology can offer , mainly through mind boggling software advancements and solutions.

So when i heard the name of this movie ,the term 'Pirates' seemed pretty somewhat irrelevant in context with Silicon valley, but after watching the movie i understood the point of keeping the term in its name.

the movie constantly circled around a thought:
"Intelligent people create ,but the great steal."

This point was also very evident in the film.And to make things more interesting ,the movie used real names,Steve Jobs(CEO of Apple) and Bill Gates (CEO of Microsoft).The movie is about how Apple and Microsoft came up and how Bill gates became one of the richest men alive:

The movie starts of with the background of Bill and Steve .It seems that Steve was more into hare rama hare krishna kinda things , and stayed more in the " Yo-peace" world than reality , you can say that was because he hadnt struck or lets say he had not found his passion yet...but during all that time while he was blissfully enjoying himself, his best pal with him thoroughout, who was nicknamed as "Wazz" in the movie, his father was working for Hp(Hewlett Packarrd) at that time and Wazz handling a project- he was trying to developing what we call today the "PC"- the first ever personal computer using digital logistics ,boolean algebra and the abascus logics .

..that is where Steve got curious and something sparked within...an instinct..that this is something big rite here...history was in the making.

and decided to work alongside with his buddy..when they finished, they showed their machine in the their college science exhibition ,where they received most of the crowds ...people got curious of what all the machine is capable of....from the exhibition they moved on to a bigger platform ,a town science expo where more people could see and know about it..thats where Intel kicked in and approached Steve with an offer to work with them and put this machine into mass production ,thats where the careers of Steve and Wazz took of and they both worked in a division which Intel named Apple...during this time and before developing the pc- Steve and people of that generation knew very well about a company called IBM(International Business Machines) which not only had very strict work policies but strong foothold in the market and desperate craving for success they just did not stop come what may...this made them have an air about themselves..which i think was made by-far obvious by the kind of advertisements they made on tv back then.... because of this Steve had a grudge against IBM , he wanted to do something to defeat the company and the PC did his biding.


When Steve was working with Intel,Bill on the other hand was trying his best to achieve something in the computer world but he wasnt getting a proper platform, when he learnt about the PC ,he bought it ,studied it and learnt that it doesnt have an operating system to make it user efficient.So he tries to make one OS for it .But his efforts go in vain...so he decides to approach IBM (since they were at the top in those times in the computing world) ,talks to the top level bosses and tells them"What good is a machine ,if it doesnt have an Operating System?"
and that if they sell the PC with an OS which Bill would provide them with ,which would have very simple syntaxes, then IBM would rule the market,and have a stong monopoly,people at IBM got impressed and agreed with Bill.
Bill's colleague it seemed knew a guy who had built an operating system but did not know where to put this into use ,he had stored the entire codings of the operating system in magnetic tapes ,but he did not know how would it help him earn some moolaah to whom should this be shown to,or the kind of exposure it needed,or where else can it be used ,so this colleague approaches the guy- buys the OS(i.e. all the magnetic tapes) for $10,000 and hands it over to Bill.
Mr.Gates takes this OS sells it to IBM for a six figure amount and calls it the MS-DOS(as in microsoft's disk operating system).The conditions are all the royalties should go to microsoft and royalty should be on every machine manufactured and running on MS-DOS as its OS.
-neat isnt it..

Meanwhile the company Xerox was working on something called the GUI(Graphic user interface) and the Mouse.The people whom Xerox approached to show this ,made a mockery of all this and told them that Xerox should concentrate on the paper copying technology rather than all this.Because they actually never understood why did Xerox come up with this idea in the first place.

Steve learned about this and decided to approach Xerox with an handsome offer
he bought the GUI and the Mouse concept- integrated this in his PC, and came up with a new machine he called it the Apple Macintosh.He took this step in order to beat IBM pcs with MS-DOS.However to correct some tweaks it wasnt sent into mass production..Bill however after working with IBM came to know about Apple..he had a hunch that Apple here was on something big, something which will change computing completely.So he approaches Apple and tells them that he can help correct those tweaks and as well as help Steve defeat IBM because he claimed to know what exactly MS-DOS lacked..Steve agrees and gives Bill three of the PCs with Macintosh

Bill studies Macintosh and builds his own copy of it and calls it "MS-Windows".

In a way Bill gets away with more because MS-Windows=(GUI+Mouse+Apple's Macintosh)
Steve feels ruined when Bill goes public with this ,Bill calls Steve also a copycat coz he to took the idea of GUI and Mouse from Xerox.Steve splits out with Intel and establishes the company Apple with hope of again rising up in to computer world but in vain...in the coming years the company itself sacks Steve and makes him resign.

Microsoft knows Apple is helpless without Steve so it initiates a takeover .Apple has no other option but to call Steve back and puts him as the CEO ,Steve breaks the takeover but only partially.
As of today Microsoft owns a part of Apple!!