> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done.
> we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier
> THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive and not a thing I've seen much.
There's a lot of places within Microsoft that operate with an extremely high degree of attention to detail, completeness, and utter mastery over a topic. It's amazing.
For example, the C# language design committee will, almost to a fault, consider every single little micro-scenario for a proposal and weight them all together to figure out if it's going to be feasible to implement, able to accomplish the goals that the proposal sets out, and if it fits in with the "spirit" of the rest of the language. I think it's a rarity in software to have such care put into the design and implementation process and it's amazing that these things are alive and well within Microsoft.
I was going to have a thoughtful reply, but I looked at your comment history and it seems like you have absolutely zero nuance or objectivity in your evaluation of Microsoft software.
I used to know guys from Microsoft Germany. One day they were debugging some obscure issue in the memory management of Windows 2000. Gates came into their office and asked what they were doing. They explained the situation and they were surprised that Gates had a solid understanding of the issue and could discuss it on a deep technical level. They also said that Gates (and Ballmer too) has an incredible memory. He supposedly can recall who attended meetings years ago and what was said.
His brain seems to operate on a much higher level from most other people.
This is wrong, it is extremely easy to say he didn't earn it.
Calculated as a salary, Bill Gates would need to be paid ~$185,000 an hour since birth to reach his current level of wealth[1]. Of course, that's a little silly, babies don't have jobs. If you constrain him to the time he actively worked at Microsoft his hourly rate goes up to ~$1,582,000.
I think Bill Gates is in the top 0.01% of people for problem solving ability. He's very, very good. But let us not pretend that he "earned" his money. He did an enormous amount of very competent work well above the ability of most of us - and there is no way that his stupendous output comes close to being a "fair trade" for the compensation he received.
If the question is "did he break laws to make his money" then of course the answer is yes. If you think Gates generated more than $1.5 million in value every hour he worked, well, I can't stop you. All I can do is point out that the rates that most people get are not as generous and, while high performers should be extremely well compensated, the structural elements that make careers like Gates' possible are bad for the rest of us.
When Bill Gates stopped active work at Microsoft in 2008, if he had redistributed his shares equally to all 91,000 employees, every one of them would be a millionaire today. I encourage you to think about what 'earning' something means and why you defending this particular system for distributing rewards for productive work.
Let's say there was an individual who founded a company, owned 100% of the equity, and designed a brand new product. The product solved an unmet need for consumers, sold at high profit margins, and was massively successful. Our inventor was well ahead of his time, and the next-fastest similar invention would've been invented 30 years later, during which time $500 billion of consumer value had been created. Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion?
To what degree is Bill Gates' wealth similar to this test case versus network-effect-capture, first-mover-advantage wealth? How do you quantify the value of Microsoft's software quality earning it's substantial market share, versus Microsoft getting there first and squatting on the network effect?
It's interesting to me that you bring up the profit that Microsoft made because I have not. There are things to talk about vis-a-vie Microsoft-the-company and why they were so profitable, but I was only talking about a particular Microsoft employee.
> Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion?
Oh, would I admit it - huh? I do want to say that your account of this company is at odds with the history of Microsoft, which was famously profitable for ruthless business practices more than innovation.
This founder sounds like they have done well. Certainly, they should be the highest paid person at the company. However, consider how disconnected their actions are from their financial reward. Someone could run a nonprofit just as well, generate $500bn in benefit, and get just their salary. The fact that this person can capture as much value as they can has very little to do with the merit of their work.
What I am saying is that Gates did very well at his job, but the reason he was rewarded so highly for that high performance has more to do with choice and imbalanced value-capture than merit. Every Microsoft employee, down to the janitors, has an equal (if proportional) claim on the basis of "this company is successful so they should get value." If Gates deserves his money because the company was doing well and he contributed x% to the company, the same is true for everyone.
I am not arguing here that Microsoft should have had less total compensation to award to employees, I am arguing that Gates has captured too much of its total compensation. I think we, as members of the tech industry, have very immediate incentives (as well as well-founded philosophical ones) to point out this inefficient distribution and advocate for a better one.
You conflated some of my claims about the hypothetical company with claims about Microsoft in particular. I think that the root of it gets down to disagreement in values about how capitalism rewards innovators though, so it's unlikely we'll resolve any of that disagreement today. I might as well say my piece.
>However, consider how disconnected their actions are from their financial reward...
Operating at a high executive level in a corporation is necessarily abstract and disconnected. Bill Gates's most tangible actions were early on, starting the company and taking the risk and creating the first bits of the software. It's turned out that many software products have high margins once established, and high network effects as well. By the time somebody is focusing their attention on the biggest winners among the highest margin, most scalable industries, at the peak of their career success, they can forget the other less-successful founders whose products help people everyday and are awarded in more reasonable proportion. It's tough to know how many of these other founders would have even started a worthwhile business without the potential reward of wild amounts of wealth.
FWIW, I would appreciate it if co-ops were more common as a corporate structure. I've got no beef with that existing, and it is indeed possible for it to exist within the U.S. legal system. I figure that it all comes down to incentives. And as far as Bill's wealth goes he's doing a pretty good job of giving it to people in greater need of it than the average software developer.
Yah, I was a bit cheeky, but I think we're understanding each other!
I guess I want to say that I don't think our two views obviously contradict each other. I think you and I agree on how responsible Gates was for Microsoft's success. I agree with your entire 2nd paragraph.
To me, the part of your account that I am drawn to is how much of Gates' most influential actions were well before he could fully assess his financial rewards. It simply seems true that Gates did not need the full weight of his fortune to motivate him because it did not exist for the period that was most important in generating it.
I do not have much of an answer to any of this - as I've said I think it's fine that Gates be absurdly rich - but I think it's important to point out these obvious misallocations where someone is eventually paid world-changing amounts of money for work they completed years ago when they could only be relatively sure they were going to be paid life-changing amounts of money. I think it is literally and figuratively in all our interests to see if we can imagine a system that distributes rewards more widely.
> And as far as Bill's wealth goes he's doing a pretty good job of giving it to people in greater need of it than the average software developer.
I think there's are certain inevitable problems when you ask one person to allocate this much money that will crop up no matter how good that person is. I guess I would just say, while I think Gates has done very well, I am not sure at all that the net positive change in the world is better when Gates has ~$100bn v.s. him having...$10bn and 5-10,000 MS employees share the other $90bn. A lot of those people are smart and I bet they could come up with ideas Gates has missed!
It worked out for the better in the end, considering Gates has pledged to give 99% of his wealth to charity. To redistribute that wealth to among Microsoft employees would essentially be taking money from the poorest 10% of people and giving it to the richest 10%.
Like everyone, I agree that Gates' pledge to donate his money is a goodness.
I also think you have stopped being critical too soon. It's very optimistic of you to imagine that the Gates foundation is 100% efficient at delivering money to poor people. They actually ban giving money directly[1]. I don't mean to say they are doing badly exactly - just to point out that the fact that all of that money runs through a single set of philosophical principles has impacts on how it is used and distributed.
I suspect that distributing the money to Microsoft employees would noticeably drop the total dollar amount devoted to charity, and exponentially increase the number of charitable experiments the money funds. I believe that's a good trade off - reasonable people can disagree.
100% efficiency is obviously an impossibly high bar for anyone.
> I suspect that distributing the money to Microsoft employees would noticeably drop the total dollar amount devoted to charity, and exponentially increase the number of charitable experiments the money funds. I believe that's a good trade off - reasonable people can disagree.
I pretty disagree strongly with that sentiment. Had the money been distributed to employees, a negligible amount would have gone to charity. It's a stark difference.
I (obviously) don't have exact stats for how charitable Microsoft employees would be if they had more money, but I remember the median annual donation amount for someone earning $60k-$80k in 2010 was $107. Roughly 0.15% of their income. The rate wasn't that different for higher income brackets either.
Dividing Gates' wealth (including his non-Microsoft shares, since he diversified) among 91,000 employees would give them each about $1.1 million. It wouldn't have been a lump sum payment realistically. It would have been given as stock options that grew to that value over these people's careers. That's not a huge pay boost for a Microsoft employee (one site lists the average compensation at Microsoft as $121k/year, or about $3M over 25 years).
Unless Microsoft employees are very unlike other people, we're talking about going from 99% of the money being donated to less than 1%.
As an aside, I believe Microsoft employees do own a larger share of Microsoft than Gates does, even if we converted all of Gates wealth back to Microsoft shares.
The underlying assumption is that if Bill didn't do what he did, whatever products and value werw delivered that earned him the money would not have been created.
Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.
Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field.
Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund.
It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.)
Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something.
So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.
You just reminded me about how IE was designed to prevent the internet from growing. What a wart of a company. Held back the software world for 20 years.
Maybe that's how you think, but I'm not interested in counterfactuals. In *Reality* Microsoft made a lot of useful products and they were compensated for that (probably too much)
Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important basic was to Microsoft’s initial success and how much of his own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more technical interest in it than other products.
Equally impressive was that Joel was hired as a product manager (I believe the official title was Program Manager, but writing product spec nowadays is done by eng or by product managers) fresh out of school, yet he was able to come up with detailed and highly technical product spec - a trait that many product managers do not have, especially in a big company.
It also shows the talent density of the young Microsoft, just like in the young Google, or the young Facebook.
The title was ‘program manager’ which may have implied different things. He was just out of school but also older than a typical graduate so perhaps a little more wise to the world?
I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for prime time[2].
Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really knowledgeable in the space.
Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the early 2000s.
Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often too early on seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of the curve can be a disadvantage.
[1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved over through clever presentation to the user.
[2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate, but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully confuse most sensors.
Your comment about being too early is on point, though I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing. If you're a big company with scale and cash to support it, exploring new frontiers is probably worth it - you either stumble upon the next big thing, or you at least get to stake your flag through some patents, and in the process - make it so if this things does grow - you already have some kernel you can build upon to start that up without having to pay up for an acquisition...
It's not perfect, but from a risk / reward perspective - I can see how this strategy could serve a large tech company well over decades...
Apple’s done extremely well by timing it perfectly, not by being too early. Never mind early or spot on, it’s been pretty late for a lot of stuff, compared to Android.
I still remember my only windows phone. Horrible thing. Had a Start menu and a stylus FFS.
The timing is often waiting for the right design as well as technology. Sometimes it could have been done sooner, if a better design had only been thought of earlier. The modern bicycle is an example, WinCE/phone is the penny-farthing.
After a decade at MS I have come to believe that there is such a thing as a first mover disadvantage. Being too early to market is just as bad as being late. Basically a new venture at a high tech company gets a lot of enthusiasm and funding, but it if doesn't succeed within some time frame, not only does it get abandoned, but the company in general won't try again for quite some time. Something else that can happen is the early v1 product gets a bad reputation, making it hard for a better v2 to gain traction.
This actually hurt Windows Phone sales. Windows Mobile 5/6 (and Pocket PC before) were miserable consumer products[1]. Sales agents in cellphone stores learned not to sell phones from Microsoft, because their device sales bonus would get clawed back when the device was returned. (Manufacturers give $$ to sales staff for each phone sold from that manufacturer, or at least that is how the market worked back when I was last in it, info is circa 2010!
When Windows Phone came out, 2 bad things happened.
1. Sales staff wasn't being offered bonuses for selling Windows Phones
2. When everyone realized how big of a disaster that move was, bonuses started being offered, but staff had been burned by 7-8 years of horrible return rates on prior Microsoft smart phones, everyone knew iPhones didn't get returned, so sales staff pushed iPhones.
oops!
Microsoft Sync is another one. Microsoft tried to make Android Auto back in 2007! Holy shit. Just think about that. In 2007 MP3 playback was still an extra add on in many models. AUX ports were an add on! No one had smart phones! It was crazy ahead of its time. And cars just weren't designed to be "smart" yet. Heck I am pretty sure in 2007 you could still find a few cars that didn't have power windows.
Oh I also used something that looked a lot like docker containers back at Microsoft. It was chained and nested VHD partitions that you could update the OS and Apps separately by just dropping in and relinking the VHDs, so the apps and dependencies were one self contained virtual hard drive image, to upgrade the apps just run some magic commands and the existing OS image had a new app image attached to it.
Microsoft had a working, reportedly playable at reasonable speed (never saw it myself) XBox 360 emulator for PC around, I think maybe 2008 or 2009?
To be clear, that is an insane technological accomplishment, to have it running at playable speeds on PCs of the time.
I got despondent working at Microsoft because I saw so much cool technology just fall by the wayside, or get mismanaged, or get a v1 launched early and then have no one believe in the v2.
Amazon Astro, their semi-autonomous robot, yeah MS tried to do that in 2012 or so. Failed because the tech wasn't ready yet (and for many other reasons!)
Microsoft tried to do eBooks back in 2000. Oops, way too early.
[1] Windows Mobile pre WP 7 was never meant to be a consumer product. Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. Pre-iPhone Microsoft even had a nice little report from some research firm saying consumers would never pay for a cellphone, they would only, en mass, get cell phones for free from their provider in return for the 2 year contract lock in. This was myopic as fuck. As a new college hire I felt like banging my head against the wall every single day for the horrible business decisions that I saw being made, and this was before the iPhone was announced!
An example of this closed mindset: When I first started at work I got my company Windows Mobile device, and shortly thereafter I went out shopping for a new TV. I was at the store wondering which one to get when I realized I could pull out my phone and do research right there. I literally stopped in my tracks and realized that having the internet in my pocket was going to be a huge societal shift. When I told my coworkers what had happened, even the next youngest member on the team dismissed what I said as being inconsequential.
Year later, same co-worker was proudly showing off the barcode scanning app on his iPhone that let him comparison shop in stores...
> "Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. ... This was myopic as fuck."
Yeah, no, that's just pretending hindsight is insight. Mobile and Embedded Devices had just successfully battled Palm and everyone else to becoming the leading smartphone OS with Windows Mobile 5.0, with 100+ devices on the market by the time WM 6.0 rolled around. Smartphones cost as much as they do today, except in pre-2005 dollars (ouch) and mobile data rates were low and crazy expensive up at that time because the mobile operators were milking the business market. It was not at all clear that a market for consumer smartphones could be jumpstarted under those conditions.
Apple's attempt to make a consumer smartphone was a huge gamble (anybody remember the Apple Newton?), admittedly helped by the considerable RDF^H^H^Hbrand leverage and design expertise they'd built up since. It wasn't at all clear that they had any momentum until the iPhone 3 came out with its money-printing app store.
> "Microsoft Sync"
Lay that at the feet of Nadella's takeover; that was a failure of strategic insight. Termination of the Windows Automotive division in the 2014 layoffs came as a complete surprise to everyone since the most recent releases had had very high consumer satisfaction ratings.
> Yeah, no, that's just pretending hindsight is insight.
Not improving basic UX of a product because an organization has a bias that "end users don't matter" is always a mistake. (Even Confluence has gotten their act together in recent years!)
Yes WM was on track to overtake Blackberry through a lower cost structure, but the phone's UX itself wasn't good.[1]
At one point I asked why we weren't including a good onscreen keyboard and I was told that we were leaving the keyboard as something OEMs could differentiate on. (Tbf I was told later that wasn't 100% true, but no one ever did explain why we didn't try to ship a good keyboard!)
> Apple's attempt to make a consumer smartphone was a huge gamble
One that Google also realized at the same time needed to be made.
> until the iPhone 3 came out with its money-printing app store.
Microsoft had an app store for Windows Mobile that they cancelled at the last minute. The source code for it was laying around when I joined. Granted it apparently wasn't the all in one app store Apple had, but not realizing people would even be willing to buy apps was myopic. (I was told it was one person's decision to kill it...)
[1] as a power user I actually loved the Windows Mobile 7 beta devices that had a keyboard and a medium sized screen, but they were already part of a bygone era by the time we got ahold of them.
I really find it sad that people try to kill ideas like this, irrespective of their intent and motivation, though I'd also like to understand these at some point. At HP, I once suggested charging customers for features they'd like to see in a future product, credited back when they buy the machine - this was to help product discovery as every customer had 'ideas' but it was hard to tell which ones mattered. It did not go over well. Now, you see this practically everywhere - from people paying to reserve F150 Lightning, Cybertruck, etc. to things such as Kickstarter.
I remember using some of those early Windows Mobile gadgets. They were pretty nice and decently capable compared to the rest of the mobile device market at the time. Problems included:
1. UI was stylus-only resistive touchscreen and basically ordinary Windows with a little duct tape to not be too awful on small screens. Still far from good though, and the styluses were clunky and easy to lose.
2. IIRC virtually no custom software and what there was was tough to install, and probably tough to develop too.
3. Web tech just not ready yet for a quality mobile web, not to mention the quality of cellular data and WiFi.
Apple took the market because they were the first to realize and really go all-in on needing finger touch screens and the absolute requirement to make every single part of the UI great to use with fingers. And also hit the market at just the right time for mobile web and cellular data to be just coming into its prime.
Fortunately for Android, they were only a little behind and got the idea on finger-first UIs once Apple showed the way.
Resistive screens have sub-pixel accuracy. First gen capacitative screens recommended UI elements be at least 1cm in size!
Microsoft's bread and butter has been productivity apps for so long, with dense UIs, that I honestly think designing for touch screens just collectively made people's heads explode.
Of course the answer is you don't need all of Excel on a mobile device all the time, but it took Microsoft literally decades to accept this.
Windows Mobile actually had some cool software, and this was back when everyone knew Win32 programming, but iphone had that sweet sweet app store and I'd guess that within a few years the number of ObjC developers grew to be larger than the number of Win32 developers, despite Win32 having almost a multi-decade head start!
Just as an aside, it should be remembered that capacitive touchscreen tech was primitive back then and the more precise resistive touchscreens were preferred to make best use of the tiny screens then available. IIRC, the early iPhones had to have their UI designed to work around the lower accuracy of its touchscreen. On the flipside, it must be said the multi-touch capability that gave it pinch to zoom/rotate really did help with usability.
> "...probably tough to develop too"
Depends on what one considers "tough". Windows CE had most of the Win32 APIs that desktop Windows had, so development was very similar.
> They bought webtv, didn't they? Similarly, Microsoft was not only too early on tablet computing, but also never quite got it right.
They bought Webtv and also made Windows XP Home Theater Edition. Lots of technologies get purchased then improved upon by large tech companies, including OS X and Android!
Regarding tablets, one can argue that IPad Pro is slowly becoming what Tablet PC was back in 2003.
IMHO my 2003 Tablet PC experience was amazing. Everyone back then thought I was insane for having a laptop with "only" a 13" screen (17 and even 21 inch laptops were popular back then), but my laptop had an "incredible" 3-4 hour battery life! Heck my tablet had directional mics, I could specify from what direction I wanted audio recording focus on, it was amazing for recording lectures. I haven't seen that tech in a consumer product since. :(
Microsoft not being able to realize they could ship more than one successful OS has hurt them many times. Windows has to be everywhere. Apple got it right by forking the OS and realizing if people wanted to give them money for iOS based devices, let the cash roll in.
MS is better about accepting people's money now days. :) See Azure and Linux hosting.
I was using the tablet computers when they first came out (2003?) and I remain a fan to this day - all of my subsequent laptop purchases have consisted of models with a Wacom stylus and the ability to take notes with a pen. While the Transmeta-based model that was my first purchase was less than perfect, the subsequent models were amazing. All of my class notes from that era are still in some Windows Journal file or on OneNote.
> we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier
> THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive and not a thing I've seen much.
It is hard to say he didn't earn it.