25 YEARS ON: Bill Gates’ ‘Internet Tidal Wave’ memo, a seminal document of the unfolding digital age.

When Netscape was founded in 1994, according to one of its principals, Jon Mittelhauser, “Microsoft didn’t even know what a web browser was, really.”

About Netscape, Gates declared in the memorandum: “We have to match and beat their offerings ….”

More broadly, the “Tidal Wave” memorandum also represents an intriguing and rather detailed assessment of the state of the internet, and its emerging capabilities, in 1995.

“I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance,” Gates wrote of the internet, adding:

“Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

Gates pointed out how little Microsoft content was then available on the World Wide Web. “Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats,” Gates wrote. “After 10 hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format. I did see a great number of [Apple] Quicktime files. All of the movie studios use them to offer film trailers.”

He also wrote: “Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network.”

“Amazingly.”