Farewell to Bill Gates: I doubt we’ll see his equal again
Though Microsoft often produces stuff that doesn’t quite do what it ought to (and in the case of its internet operating systems until Vista, really shouldn’t have done, in terms of treating the internet as being full of happy people who just wanted to create “rich” stuff, instead of malware), I’ve found Bill Gates admirable - increasingly so - since our first meeting. OK, so Microsoft did Bad Stuff. Yes, Bill knew about it, maybe even drove some of it (let’s not go back to the antitrust stuff).
But.. my latest piece at the Guardian says sayonara to Bill Gates:
I first met Bill Gates in 1984. That’s right, 24 years ago. At that time personal computers were still a novelty (the IBM PC had been launched in the US two years earlier) and “Microsoft” was just another of the many companies vying for the market, competing with rivals such as Digital Research. There was even a thriving British computer industry, which even included PC makers. What strange times.
Americans regularly came to the UK to tout the wonders of their products. But even then, there was something rather different about Bill, who this week gave his last speech at CES, and will leave Microsoft in the summer.
In 1984 he met us, a group of technology journalists (I was then working on a trade publication called Computer Weekly), in a hotel room in London, where we sat around a table. The difference between Bill and all the other smooth executives who would come over to schmooze us and encourage us to write nice things quickly became apparent. It was this: if Bill thought you were talking rubbish, he’d not be too diplomatic about it. Because he could figure out where a question was going pretty soon, he’d interrupt and explain the reality. And if you tried to interject, he’d just keep talking - an assertion method that psychologists call “overtalking” - until the other person gave up.
The thing about Bill was that he always had the programmer’s impatience with things that clearly wasted time. The tales of Gates’s programming skills are legend: he may be the first and in some ways the last of the really great programmers.
And it’s that skill - evidenced by a really interesting interview that I dug up on the Wayback Archive (you’ll have to go to the Guardian to find it - which makes him ideal for this task. It’s a great interview in retrospect, which it includes gems such as..
“Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is. And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, whereas speed - if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster - that’s worth an incredible amount.”
My conclusion? He’s just the right guy to be behind trying to tackle malaria and other diseases.
One can almost forgive him Windows for it. After all, even if 1 billion Windows licences = extremely annoying, 1 billion saved lives could more than make up for it.
So, 24 years on, sayonara, Bill. We might see your like again. But I doubt we’ll ever see your equal.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Bill Gates's RDF (Runtime Destruction Field) (7 January 2005; score: 61.77%)
- Oh all right then: Bill Gates get 4 million spams per day (19 November 2004; score: 61.19%)
- D'oh! Bill Gates gets 4 million spams per year, not day, says Ballmer (4 December 2004; score: 58.41%)
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