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Bill Gates on a San Diego Electrical Box
Photo: B. Perry
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| Altair 8800 Photo: Michael Holley |
By 1975, Gates had put in his 10,000 hours at the computer terminal. Gladwell considers 10,000 hours to be the minimum time commitment necessary to truly develop exceptional skill in any endeavor. How did Bill do this? In 1968, when Gates was in 8th grade, the Mother’s Club bought time on a downtown mainframe and put a terminal in Bill’s school. Timesharing had only been invented three years earlier. Gates was doing real-time programming in eighth grade – seven years before the arrival of the Altair 8800. He spent his high school years pounding away at any computer he could find time on, developing his programming skills. Thanks, Mom!
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| Albuquerque mugshot after a 1977 traffic violation |
The first years of the microcomputer ‘industry’ resembled the Wild West with hundreds of microcomputers on the market, all with their own flavor of operating system. Digital Research’s CP/M emerged as a de facto standard of the day. In 1980, as microcomputer pundits were saying that IBM had missed the microcomputer revolution, IBM approached Microsoft to develop a BASIC compiler for their new personal computer, or ‘PC’. They also needed an operating system, so Gates referred them to Digital Research and CP/M. When talks broke down between IBM and Digital Research, IBM asked Gates for an alternative. Gates quickly bought the rights to 86-DOS (QDOS) from Seattle Computer Products, ported it to the PC, and delivered it to IBM as MS-DOS. However, Microsoft didn’t sell MS-DOS to IBM; Microsoft kept the copyright and licensed the product to IBM. That meant that every time IBM sold a PC, or their competitors sold a PC clone, Microsoft got paid. More importantly, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the millions of PC’s sold in the subsequent decades. How did Bill Gates get an audience with IBM? His mother, Mary Gates, served on the National Board of United Way alongside the CEO of IBM. It was through his Mom that Bill Gates met the CEO of IBM. Thanks again, Mom!
In the 80’s, the popular application software that ran on most PC’s were from companies other than Microsoft. VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet; a huge success on the Apple II. Lotus Corporation introduced the spreadsheet to PC users with Lotus 123 and dominated that market for over a decade. Wordstar was the first widely used word processor for the PC but it was eclipsed by Word Perfect in the late 80’s, mainly due to adoption by the legal profession. Presentation graphics had many early innovators but Harvard Graphics really caught on with the business community. Ashton-Tate dominated the 80’s database market with its dBase software. Microsoft took the best ideas from all these products and built their own business applications: MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, and MS Access. By the end of the decade, Microsoft apps only had a tiny slice of marketshare - but a perfect storm was brewing that would change all that.
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| Time Magazine cover April 1984 |
Bill Gates saw his first PC-based graphical user interface at the 1982 COMDEX. It was called VisiOn by Visicorp. Users no longer typed commands at a blinking C:\ but pulled down menus with a device called a mouse. He rushed back to Microsoft and told his developers to build him a GUI like VisiOn . The product was named Windows. In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh with its “user-friendly” graphical user interface. A stunned Bill Gates told his Windows team to “make it like a Mac.” When Window 1.0 finally shipped in November 1985, it was brutally slow. The New York Times wrote “Running Windows in 512K of memory is akin to pouring molasses in the Arctic.” Windows 2.0 wasn’t much better.
Without a clear strategy, Bill Gates ran for the cover of Big Blue. IBM was developing a new operating system called OS/2 which would have more memory for applications. Gates convinced IBM to let Microsoft co-develop OS/2 Presentation Manager, a windows-like interface for OS/2. IBM had no interest in Windows and wanted it to be abandoned. Gates was fine with that and considered Windows a placeholder at best. However, a Windows programmer named David Weise and a visiting physics professor named Murray Sargent thought they could get Windows to run in “protect mode”, thus freeing up lower memory for applications. On the sly, Weise spent the summer moving Windows into protect mode. When he finally met with Gates and the Windows team, he said “I think basically we should run Windows in protect mode … and by the way…I have it running downstairs.” After hearing Weise’s pitch, Gates said “We should do it.” In May 1990, Windows 3.0 was shipped running in protect mode. It was fast and the graphics were awesome. Also very important was the fact that three of the business applications, MS Excel, MS Word, and MS Powerpoint were ready to run on Windows 3.0. Sales skyrocketed, as did Microsoft stock, as did market share of the business apps, now dubbed Microsoft Office. Yet, Gates still considered Windows a placeholder for OS/2, “the operating system of the 90’s.” It would take a few years more for Gates to realize Windows was Microsoft’s future at which point he ended the OS/2 relationship with IBM.
In the early 90’s, every business suddenly needed a local area network (LAN) and Novell dominated the market. Thanks to the OS/2 debacle, Microsoft was years behind in the LAN game. By mid-decade, though, they managed to release a fairly stable NT Server which would integrate all the LAN lessons learned by Novell and blow them out of the market. In November 1995, Bill Gates published The Road Ahead , a spectacular conceit that he actually knew what that might be. In the hardback version, he gave scant recognition to the Internet or the World Wide Web stating “today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway.” Soon after publication, Gates realized that the web might be important after all (my 80-year-old grandfather had figured that out two years earlier). Gates added 20,000 words and made the Internet the focus of the revised paperback edition which was published in October 1996. Caught flat-footed once again, Microsoft played catch-up by bundling their new Internet Explorer web browser for free into Windows 95 thus destroying Netscape, the pioneer web browser. This move led to the 1998 anti-trust case United States vs. Microsoft which found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
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| Gates testifies during United States vs. Microsoft |
In 2000, Gates stepped down from this job as CEO and, in 2006, he transitioned out of his role a chief software architect to focus entirely on his philanthropic activities. Despite Gates retirement, Microsoft continued its habit of coming late to the party with the release of its Xbox gaming platform. The next version of Windows, called Vista, was such a mess that the world just laughed (unless your OEM provided it on your new computer in which case you probably weren't laughing). The real action in the digital world moved to the Web where Microsoft doesn’t seem to fit in with their desktop mindset. Have you seen that new Microsoft TV commercial that’s selling Powerpoint to families?! Wow.
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| America's Richest Man Photo: Michael Holley |
Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside. Henry Holt, New York, 1998
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, Little Brown, New York, 2008.
Nathan Max, Faces of Tech Giants Grace San Diego Streets. San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 19, 2012.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, Little Brown, New York, 2008.
Nathan Max, Faces of Tech Giants Grace San Diego Streets. San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 19, 2012.
Well dont sugar-coat it Bunthorne, say what you really think.
ReplyDeleteSomeone's bitter... glad this was as bias as I thought it would be.
ReplyDelete