The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates 458
theodp writes "BusinessWeek discusses They Made America, a new book which claims Bill Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall. The book attacks the reputations of key early PC era players - Gates, IBM, and QDOS programmer Tim Paterson - asserting that Paterson copied parts of Kildall's CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall, allowing Gates to prevail and depriving Kildall of untold riches and credit for a seminal role in the PC revolution. Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th anniversary of its CS program."
Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
Coulda woulda shoulda (Score:4, Insightful)
Waaaa...waaaa...waaaaaahhhh. Cry me a river!
Kildall is no Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
It's no good being a great programmer or having a great product generally if you can't communicate that or convince anyone of it.
technical brilliance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trusting IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderate this comment
Negative: Offtopic [mithuro.com] Flamebait [mithuro.com] Troll [mithuro.com] Redundant [mithuro.com]
Positive: Insightful [mithuro.com] Interesting [mithuro.com] Informative [mithuro.com] Funny [mithuro.com]
Re:Wrong person (Score:1, Insightful)
Bill Gates has programmed but had he been a programmer, he would have kept improving his art instead of becoming a manager and a negociator.
So well, he "was also"...
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
Some might view Kildall's story as being a sad one. A man driven to alcohol because his wife wouldn't sign an NDA or because he supposedly went flying. Whatever. The man had a poor business sense and he didn't see the value in doing what he needed to do to win.
It's not like he didn't make a ton of money. He ended up selling out to Novell for something like $125 million. Honestly, I think that's significant.
Quoteth a former president (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, in the case of software, commercializing, while just as important, is harder.
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Kildall is no Gates (Score:3, Insightful)
(Personally, I think we should reward the people who helped the world the most as opposed those who persuaded the world to give them the most money for the least work; but that is just my opinion.)
False Rights (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'm sorry to see them hurt, but what did they expect?
Re:Kildall is no Gates (Score:1, Insightful)
dropout gates (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally wrong assumptions (Score:2, Insightful)
Expert C Programming (Score:2, Insightful)
There are more important things than being the richest man in the world.
Technical prowess != biggest fish in the big pond (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if you're product is technically best by some measure there are other products that may be technically better by some other measure. Hindsight often tells you which benchmark was right and which was wrong but in the heat of battle it's hard to see the forest for the trees.
And all that said, oftentimes the selected product is simply vaporware (as was MS-DOS until Gates bought QDOS) when there are real running products out there. Part of it is salesmanship on one side and lack of salesmanship on the other side, but usually there's some favors being traded under the table.
And while Kildall wasn't the biggest fish in that pond, he had hooks into a number of software packages (CP/M was being sold on millions of PC's, the DR languages and tools too).
The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just another example of how the elites at the top of the hieracrchy operate as some sort of parasitic sub-society, perched above us, exploiting the rest of us, feeding off of us.
You may think that my perspective is warped, paranoid, whatever. But I think it serves as a reality check and a balance to the omnipresent messages of confomuity that society and the media flood us with every day.
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
The "theft" of something you create can burn the soul much more than any loss of money.
Re:Totally wrong assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
And most importantly, he knows what the people want.
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:3, Insightful)
I dont think so. (Score:3, Insightful)
Kildall was too engrossed with making immediate profit to, even if he had got in the door first, have prospered for long.
Re:Trusting IBM (Score:3, Insightful)
If you didn't like the details of the contract, you didn't have to sign. If you think your 'great idea' would have seen the light of day based on garage experiments in isolation, more power to you.
As for IBM 'tricking' the open source community, that's a specious comment at best. Given that the source is 'open' and avaialble to all, how can IBM steal it? That's the whole point to open source in the first place.
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates' rise to fame and power is because of his skill as a businessman - which I'm sure can be attributed to the laywer heritage he comes from.
Kildall was a programmer - pure and simple. He didn't stand a chance on the open market against Gates.
Re:Wrong person (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, poor guy. He had ethics.
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I have a choice between either unfortunately.
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, in this animal society, one way they maintain their rule is being making those at the bottom of the pack antagonist to any who seek to expose this Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites.
Re:Not entirely untold (Score:4, Insightful)
It was a fumble and mismatch of corporate cultures that Bill Gates was quick to take advantage of.
No, and I'll tell you why (Score:4, Insightful)
You see that attitude reflected in 100,000 piss-poor open source projects that noone wants to use. They've got all these cool optimizations and clever hacks, and should have been the next greatest thing. Except they aren't, because noone gives a damn about them.
What makes a program or a company successful is what you do _after_ you have the cool algorithm or hack. Like user interface. Or like usability.
The same goes for CP/M. It was barely a program loader with the most minimalistic command-line interface. Even internally it was a primitive monolythic piece of code that basically it didn't even have DOS's (or Unix's) separation between directory entry and allocation table. It would have required a complete redesign just to support bigger floppies.
DOS or CP/M were but a starting point, _not_ a killer app that turned MS into a monopoly over night. Sure, the cash infusion from DOS helped a lot to get them started. But if MS had stayed happily making just DOS, they'd still be a small company noone gives a damn. In fact, less than that, since other OSs were more advanced and Moore's Law would soon make a PC good enough to use those instead of DOS.
The story of MS is far more complex than that of DOS alone. And their monopoly isn't just the OS, it's a whole lot of interlocking pieces which make the OS a must.
It includes for starters making some damn good and _affordable_ apps for it too. When you ask someone why don't they switch to Linux, what's the ISO standard answer you'll get? "Does it run Word, Excel and IE?" They jumped on any app idea that looked like their users might need badly.
It also includes caring about the developpers. Yes, laugh all you want at Uncle Fester's "developpers developpers developpers" monkey dance. But _that_ is what kept Windows having a steady stream of apps, while for other OSs you'd have a hard time just getting any dev tools at all.
Basically while all the idiots thought "noooo, you can't take my precioussss compiler! I want to be the only one who sells apps for my OS!" and left you begging for months even for a compiler, MS almost gave away everything you could possibly want to make an app.
It also includes being smart enough to realize the importance of users and of a good UI. You know why the relationship between IBM and Microsoft went sour? Because the idiots at IBM thought a GUI was a waste of money. That MS should concentrate on just making an API for geeks, and stop wasting money on stuff like a GUI.
Etc, etc, etc.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually didn't know that stuff about Gates. I thought he was just a sleazy businessman, but it turns out he was a connected sleazy businessman. Oh well. It isn't like I care much. It isn't what you know, blah blah. Like we need to be reminded of that during an election year. The stuff I know about Bush and his family scares the crap out of me in this regard, I don't even want to find out what I don't know. I know enough to despise him, just like Gates.
People are too busy striving for success instead of striving for happiness anyway. I love this country (USA), and we do have a rich culture and heritage (good and bad). Unfortunately, that isn't the way we present ourselves to others around the world and in our daily lives. We are caught up in this manufactured image of pseudo-culture.
"Because an embittered drunk says so." isn't fact. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, the entire chapter is based on the writings of an embittered drunk after he had become an embittered drunk.
"Screw you all, I would have been Shaq if it hadn't have been for that deliberate foul that caused my knee injury!" doesn't make the washed up drunk any more of a pro basketball player. It doesn't even mean the foul was deliberate. It means an embittered person who didn't have any of the rest of the personality aspects that led to the other person's success, never put in the work, never fought as hard to get back up from setbacks, and, likely, wasn't even fouled half as deliberately as they've come to convince themselves has simply convinced themselves that their life could have been better if it wasn't for something unfair someone else did to them.
Basing an article on their embittered rantings, because it makes for a sensational enough article to sell some copies of your book and get some headlines, isn't exactly what I'd call great journalism.
wrong battle, wrong time, wrong person... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sad as it is, if it hadn't been this it would likely have been something else. We are, in many ways, doomed to our fates. He simply lived the life he had to live, and nothing more.
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft was incorporated in 1975. By 1980 it was well established and strongly positioned as a language company for microcomputers. MBASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL. It was certainly not an unknown quantity to IBM.
Re:Wrong person (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ford did not invent the assembly line.
Edison did not invent the lightbulb.
Gates did not invent the internet.
Re:Trusting IBM (Score:4, Insightful)
No, seriously, I don't mean to sound sarcastic; but, really... You worked for IBM. You came up with an idea on IBM's time. You told them about it. They own it. They can do what they want with it. Done.
As for getting credit... products from large corporations like that are usually faceless. You don't get a copy of, say, AIX, with the authors name on the front page of the manual. It MAY be embedded in the source, if you have access to the source. That's the only place you'll likely find a name.
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Insightful)
Kildall ultimately sold his company to Novell Inc. (NOVL ) in 1991 for $120 million. He went on to create some pioneering multimedia technology, but never again was an industry player.
You know, after you break the $100 million mark I stop feeling sorry for you losing out on business deals.
Re:Wrong person (Score:2, Insightful)
It is sad that usually the path to riches is one of exploiting other people's talent.
Re:Free Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
The Microsoft C# compiler is free.
The Microsoft VB.NET compiler is free.
The Microsoft C compiler is free.
The Microsoft C++ compiler is free.
A Microsoft WebForm IDE is free (WebMatrix)
Free as in Beer. Find a bug in VB.NET compiler? Good luck fixing it....
PS: Ever wonder about the Intellectual Property of Beer producers? Their secret recipes and whatnot? Would they be offended by "Free as in beer"? Funny though, that.
Re:Wrong person (Score:2, Insightful)
Bill Gates is a Criminal (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Bill Gates rose to power because he is a criminal, and nothing was done when he broke the law.
Gates had the good fortune to be working in an industry that involved a totally new technology, i.e. software. This meant that the government had no idea what to do about Microsoft's various acts of sabotage, fraud, etc. In a smarter world, the courts would have realized that you don't need new laws, rather, the same laws apply to software as apply to other property, and in other industries.
Bill Gates won because the leaders of the other companies in the software industry were basically-honest, good businessmen, whereas Gates was a criminal.
When the law is not enforced, a criminal will beat a businessman every time.
Let's look at some of Microsoft's history.
Microsoft was losing to DR-DOS at the start of the nineties, until Microsoft added a false message about the incompatability of DR-DOS (Gates knew it was false from Microsoft's own testing).
That's fraud -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail.
That's sabotage -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
WordPerfect had already beaten Microsoft in the Word Processing market. But Microsoft side-tracked Wordperfect when they promised the world that OS/2 was the new direction, then undermined WordPerfect on Windows by providing intentionally-broken API calls.
That's fraud and sabotage, ignored by the courts.
Netscape had already beaten Microsoft in the browser market, until Microsoft started doing things like paying companies to break their contracts with Netscape.
There were various criminal acts there, which were generally ignored by the courts (other than a partial invocation of the nearly-useless anti-trust laws).
And in Java, Sun provided a cross-platform language that was perfect for web-based applications, such as e-commerce. Microsoft had nothing similar to offer, and it has taken Microsoft ten years to catch up.
Once again, Microsoft stopped Java with sabotage and fraud. And this time, Microsoft's criminal acts were perfectly documented [sun.com] in Microsoft's own internal papers:
Sabotage:
"Strategic Objective . . . Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
Fraud:
"At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."
Some people point to Microsoft as an example of Capitalism at work, but it's not true. When criminals are allowed to get away with their crimes, it actually undermines Capitalism.
To repeat my initial point. Bill Gates is NOT a "skilled businessman" -- he is a criminal, whose various acts of sabotage, fraud, and so on, should have landed him in jail.
Re:Kildall dropped the ball. (Score:3, Insightful)
As opposed to implementing the CP/M API from the official programmer's reference.
Re:Wrong person (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever hear of the 15/85 rule? Its from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Those figures are from a study of engineers they conducted where they determined whether it was technical knowledge or people skills that got you ahead. The results were that its 15% technical skills, 85% people skills.
I really do get sick of the bitching and moaning on here when people get upset that they aren't getting ahead in their path because the system is broken. Guess what, in this regard the system CAN'T be broken because no one person determines what the system is. THIS IS THE SYSTEM. Don't bitch if you're not willing to play the game. Life isn't fair, nobody owes you anything, and you get ahead in life through the connections you make. Sorry to tell you that the answer isn't found in lines of code, but instead is found in conversations with actual people.
I really don't mean this as a troll mods, but there's always one person like the grandparent who posts something like this in these stories and what the parent and I have explained is one of the most valuable lessons a young techy can learn, and the earlier they learn it the better.
Re:Wrong person (Score:2, Insightful)
He couldnt have been 'Gates' (Score:3, Insightful)
I dont believe Gary could be the same sort of ruthless business man that Bill has been.
Having the product is only 1/3 of a business, the rest is how you manage 'the business'....
Re:Religion (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't is funny that I never see any indication of guilt on the part of any of "the Elite"? I can only conclude that they really don't believe!
Every time I see the words "faith-based", I feel like puking!
Re:Wrong person (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. At least that's precisely what I'm suggesting. Every example you provide (especially Saturn...for God's sake, man, that's General Motors, one of the most unethical corporations on the face of the planet) makes money by exploiting someone, somewhere. I don't let that keep me from sleeping at night, but let's at least be honest about what the nature of business is all about - someone benefits while someone else pays for it.
Geoworks? Bwaaahahahaha. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
"Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail."
Geoworks was well ahead of Windows, but Geoworks and DR-DOS were pre-installed on a large number of PCs? Maybe at a couple of swap meets, but not in the real world. . .The only somewhat mainstream implementation of Geoworks that momentarily bobbed into the mainstream was as an early GUI for America Online. Other than that it was forgotten as quickly as it was introduced.
Re:Again, Circular Logic! (Score:3, Insightful)
But there are also sub-elite parasitic sub-societies, faith-based parasitic sub-societies, scum-of-the-earth parasitic sub-societies, and internet parasitic sub-societies.
Society works this way. Nobody will invite you to join their band if they don't know that you play the bassoon. How will they find out? Either they'll see you playing on a street corner, see your flyer at the record store ("non-elite non-parasitic bassoon player seeks hammered dulcimer and timable players for new-age ska fusion band", or your mom might mention it in passing, to her hairdresser, who's daughter is the top hammered dulimaniac in town, and since your mom is a good tipper, the hairdresser gives your number to her daughter. All of these scenarios involve some person interacting with some other person. Scenario 1 is you interacting directly with somebody else, face-to-face. Scenario 2 is a time shifted version of scenario 1, and scenario three has somebody with whom you've directly interacted, interacting with somebody else, face to-face.
The human interaction is unavoidable (and inevitable) Its how society works, at all levels.
You really do need to come to grips with this, otherwise, you might end up writing a Manifesto about elite parasitic sub-societies. Then it's not a huge leap to membership in The Friends of the Hooded Sweatshirt Society.
Play golf, go bowling, join a church choir, locate a scrapbooking consultant, learn tai chi or kendo.
Your key to getting ahead is gaining the personal trust of people who can help you get ahead when they need the skills you've got. You could meet a girl. her dad might be rich an powerful, and be in need of a son-in-law to take over the firms operations so he and the missus can travel asia like they always wanted to.
Besides, it isn't the elite parasitic sub-socities you need to worry about, its the Elite parasitic sub-societies: The Bavarian Illuminati, the CIA, and Evil Geniuses for a Better fnord Tomorrow.