The meeting with stock analysts in early August 1993 would be no exception. The company was enjoying its eighteenth consecutive year of record profits and revenues. Quarterly revenues had topped $1 billion for the first time. For the fiscal year, profits were $953 million, up 35 percent from 1992 figures. Revenues had reached $3.75 billion, up 36 percent over the $2.76 billion the previous year. Such performance was being driven, for the most part, by the success of the company’s operating systems, DOS and Windows, now installed on nearly 90 percent of the world’s personal computers. Microsoft had shipped 30 million copies of Windows and continued to sell 1.5 million copies a month. Version 6.0 of MS-DOS, introduced earlier in the year, had sold 5 million copies. And as good as those numbers were, they could only get better. Just a few days before the meeting with the analysts, Microsoft had begun shipping Windows NT, its new-technology, 32-bit operating system aimed at more powerful computers.
