Some years ago, some of Gates's managers convinced him of the importance of the Internet. Gates saw that the Internet would continue to grow and completely reorganized Microsoft as an Internet software solution provider.

This was a "make or break" solution to a problem that faced Microsoft some years in the future.

Gates conceptualized that if his company did not have a sizeable Internet presence, then eventually Microsoft would become irrelevant to a majority of computer users in the following decade.

The same fate would befall Microsoft as had befallen IBM when the world switched away from mainframes to personal computers.