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: 62.45%)
- D'oh! Bill Gates gets 4 million spams per year, not day, says Ballmer (4 December 2004; score: 58.69%)
- The trouble with software, in Bill's view; and what Jonathan Ross said (2 August 2004; score: 56.07%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
January 13th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Charles,
I think you’re being generous about “last of the really great programmers”. My understanding from reading programmers that had seen some of Gates’ code was that it was pretty sloppy and not that impressive. I can try to look some of this up again if you don’t feel like doing the searching yourself. I seem to recall something in Wired magazine for starters.
A great businessman, incredibly ambitious and driven, and those qualities should serve his humanitarian work very well. But I think there is a tendency to slant computing history in terms of Gates and Microsoft and credit them with innovations that they stole from Xerox, Apple, and countless others.
January 13th, 2008 at 8:15 am
The thing that irks me about Bill Gates ( I met and interviewed him in 1991) is that he rarely delivers what he talks about. And, later on, the things he talked about were things that any technology pundit could have spouted. Look no further than the columns he used to “write” in the 90’s for proof. So no, Gates is no visionary in my book.
I also have question marks over his alleged programming prowess, remembering that he chose to buy (some say rip off) someone else’s operating system and other key software rather than build his own (which was what Linus Torvalds actually did).
But what really gets my goat about Bill Gates is how Microsoft established the kind of dominance they had — by pre-announcing vapourware just to stop people from buying a competing product, and then delivering a half-baked substitute years after the fact. A lot of real innovation in IT were killed off by this heinous tactic, and the memory of seeing so many good companies go under in favour of a less deserving “tech darling” still makes me mad even today. It’s all about realising human potential.
A shrewd businessman to some people is just another selfish, greedy b’stard to me. I hope he will use his ill-gotten gains for the betterment of the humanity to make up for the decades during which he denied them of what could have taken us all collectively a lot further than Microsoft did.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Someone I know who worked at MS in the very early days did tell me me that BG was no programmer. A good business man with wealthy parents, yes, but a programmer, no.
January 13th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
He has often been compared to Andrew Carnegie, who also was a rather ruthless businessman. Carnegie ended his life with probably the greatest philanthropic run in history. If Gates can match it he will be also be remembered more for that than for Microsoft.
January 13th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Good businessman?
I have my doubts.
Certainly he was a rich and probably spoiled kid who got a leg up from rich parents with excellent connections.
With the charisma of a Monty Python chartered accountant and the ethics of a used car salesman, plus good timing and a “little help from his and his dad’s friends,” he managed to make himself a lot of bread. But a good businessman doesn’t need to destroy its rivals in order to succeed.
Thank you Bill. You gave the world - mediocrity.
John Davis
January 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
It’s a bit of a stretch to call him a programmer at all. He certainly hasn’t written code since the mid 70s, and by all accounts, he himself wrote little, if any, then.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
“My conclusion? He’s just the right guy to be behind trying to tackle malaria and other diseases.”
…at a time when, with the perfect storm of resource depletion and climate change looming, it’s the one thing the planet DOESN’T need. I’d be happier if he was throwing his weight behind figuring out how we can all reduce our footprints to around 12% of what we currently consume.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Gosh, what strong reactions. He’s a human being who’s being incredibly altruistic. Not really his responsibility to fix climate change. Isn’t that Al Gore’s job? (And lower childhood mortailty means populations tend to shrink - hadn’t you heard?)
There’s a link in the story (none of you have bothered, have you)? It’s a story by Andrew Orlowski at The Register, and it begins: “Could Bill Gates write code? Yes. And then some, Altair BASIC dis-assemblers reckon”.
In fact.. since you won’t follow the link, you lazy lot..
OK? Sure, he didn’t code much while running the company. But he knew how to write code, and he understood what questions to ask to see if other people did. Go see what Joel Spolsky had to say on the matter - pretty simple search.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Yeah lets forgive Bill for Windows, the antitrust stuff, the companies he put out of business by promising vapourware and countless other things he did to hold onto the Windows monopoly.
None of that small stuff matters anymore since saint Bill is now giving away his money.
Bill probably has to give his ill gotten gains away so he can sleep at night.
Lets hope we’ll never see his equal again.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:57 am
[quote]Although Reuben’s analysis is not quite complete, he tells us that Gates, Allen and Davidoff threw every trick at the book to squeeze the interpreter into 4 kilobytes. They succeeded and left some headroom for the programs themselves - without which it would have been pretty useless, of course.
“It was pretty incredible - they were pretty good at what they were doing,” he tells us.
Reuben draws out attention to a particularly Mel-like feat.
” I found a jump instruction that jumped to the middle of another instruction. Why was this extraordinary? Well, on the 8080, instructions were 1, 2, or 3 bytes in size. Since instructions could be more than one byte in length a programmer had to be careful that he didn’t jump to, say, the second or third byte of a three-byte instruction; since he’d be executing arbitrary instructions that would almost certainly crash the whole program. What was going on??”
Reuben concludes this was entirely intentional. “Rather than skip over some small bit of conditionally-executed code that we don’t want to execute, if that bit of code was small enough (ie one or two bytes) you could simply encode those one or two bytes inside a two or three byte instruction thus saving the three-byte instruction needed to jump over it. The best example of this technique is in BASIC’s error message code[/quote]
You’re kidding. This is your evidence that Gates is the “Last of the Great Programmers”? That he was allegedly one of three kids involved in writing a few hundred line BASIC interpreter for a hobby computer and worked hard to make it small. Ignoring the lack of information on how much input Bill had on the code, hobby magazines at the time were filled with such space saving techniques.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Goodness me, what a lot of peopole who aren’t prepared to see any good in people, especially if they’re called Bill Gates.
Judging by what’s being said here, Microsoft obviously collapsed years ago in a heap of bugs and bad business practice.
Am I “forgiving” antitrust behaviour? Nope. Am I saying that he knew how to get ahead in business? Assuredly. He took on what was then the biggest computer company in the world (IBM) and made sure that Windows, not OS/2, prevailed. He got his vision of a PC on every desk seen through. And people who know programming rather better than me (and, I’d suggest, perhaps you too, gentle reader?) say he knew his stuff: Joel Spolsky, My first billg review:
The end of that article suggests that MSoft got too big for Bill to handle well, and then Steve Ballmer took control, and, well, hell, meet handcart.
Yet I still find an amusing truth in it: if not for Bill and his “wicked” ways, he wouldn’t be so rich, and he wouldn’t be able to distribute it to the world’s poor.
Look at it this way: if there had been lots of successful OSs, written by lots of companies which made smaller piles of money, I bet they wouldn’t be putting their huge fortunes into diseases of the developing world. So our loss (through all those zillions of holes in Windows, etc etc) is the developing world’s gain. Come on, does irony get any better?
January 14th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Bill Gates… The “Robin Hood” of the mentally deficient. He takes from the poor and then gives it back to them years later and they thank him for taking it in the first place.
The man has stolen from the world to create his fortune and now that he’s giving some of it back, everyone seems to have forgotten how he gained it in the first place. Besides Excel, what has Microsoft actually written themselves? They buy out smaller companies and sue others to oblivion,
And now the world carries him on their shoulders as a stand up guy.
It makes my stomach turn….
January 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
@Jp - sorry, that’s utter rubbish. The “poor” in your description are the people who have been able to afford Windows machines down the years. That’s someone who’s rich, viewed from a developing country where access to clean water is uncertain, and to immunisation against common diseases not a given.
Those countries haven’t been splashing out on Windows licences. It’s the rich countries, and folk like yourself, who’ve been making Microsoft rich. Now that money gets funnelled to the developing world, and you’re resentful. Why, were you putting your hand in your pocket to pay for childhood immmunisation in Africa? Do tell.
Billg - and Microsoft - did write Excel (correct!) and put together Office (Word is their own work, yes? Even if Powerpoint isn’t) and I suspect they didn’t buy the technology for Access. And to some extent, it doesn’t matter that Billg got monstrously rich through building on or buying others’ work. It’s that he’s now doing what none of the people who’ve paid for Windows would do individually - pay for the vaccine work and so on.
If he were instead buying vast yachts and football clubs and strip-mining countries for coal, I’d detest him. But he’s doing what I suspect none of the commenters here have even considered doing for a moment - funding health provision in the developing world. Honestly - many Americans are against the idea of funding health provision in their *own* country. Maybe Bill ought to sort them out next.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
@Charles,
>> let’s not go back to the antitrust stuff
No need to “go back” to it, Charles, when it’s still happening today. One of the business practices that the US Dept of Justice pulled MS up for in that antitrust case was the contracts that forced OEMs to pay MS a licence fee for each PC they sold, whether that PC had an MS OS on it or not. Fast forward to December 2007, and MS has been reported to the UK Office of Fair Trading for (amongst other things) trying to charge UK schools a licence fee for every PC that they have, whether that device has MS software on it or not.
These are the kind of methods he used to get his money. I find him in no way “admirable’ for the way he has run Microsoft. Those were real people’s dreams and careers that were wrecked by his company’s underhand, unethical and often illegal methods.
The irony is that Microsoft may have been just as successful without resorting to all that nasty stuff. Even though none of their products have ever been any good, really, the company seemed to have a knack of having just the right product, at just the right time, at just the right price. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke next to OS/2, Unix, Solaris and Mac OS, but nobody cared: Windows was “good enough” - as opposed to “good” - for most people.
MS Word was an appallingly bad word processor when stood next to WordPerfect. So, MS bundles Word together with Excel and Powerpoint, calls this new bundle “Office” and (crucially) charges the same price for the entire bundle as WordPerfect cost all on its lonesome. It was marketing, not technical, genius. Meanwhile, WordPerfect struggles to get its Windows version released - due partially to MS having told everybody to develop apps for OS/2. Word gets a further unfair leg-up by making use of undocumented calls to Windows, while WordPerfect has to develop the equivalent code for itself. So, WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows arrives late, buggy and dog-slow - not to mention, expensive when compared to “Office”. (I *still* preferred using it to MS Word though).
Should we then admire him, now that he chooses to give his ill-gotten gains away to help the poor and the sick? I think we should. As Charles says, he’d didn’t rob the “poor”, as such. The people that bought his products had the money to do so, and also had the choice *not* to buy them.
As to his motivations, I don’t think the man *does* guilt, somehow. And even if that *is* it, will any of the people that he helps from now on care why he’s doing it?
Cheers,
- Mike