Bringing Up Bill 169
theodp writes "Over at the WSJ, Bill Gates Sr. describes what it took to turn an unruly 12-year-old into Microsoft's founder and the world's richest man. This included throwing a glass of cold water in the boy's face when he was having a particularly heated argument with his mother at the dinner table. 'He was nasty,' says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. 'I'm at war with my parents over who is in control,' Bill Gates recalls telling a therapist, who told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. The rest, as they say, is history. The accompanying Gates Family Album is also worth a look."
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
I have much less respect for Larry Ellison than I do for Bill Gates. Gates might have been difficult to handle behind closed doors, but Ellison is just outright arrogant all over, from ignoring San Jose Airport's landing restrictions (and eventually getting a waiver for them) to withdrawing a $115 million pledge to Harvard University just because they changed presidents. I have also heard from people who have worked at Oracle that Ellison is at least as difficult to work with as Steve Ballmer, and that Oracle's management cares much less about the technology than about the money even when compared to Microsoft.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:2, Informative)
MS Bob was managed by his girlfriend who he later married [wikipedia.org].
And actually the Search Doggy [toastytech.com] from Windows XP came from Bob
http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html [toastytech.com]
Search Doggy was a very good dog, he always found my files when I lost them.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with your sentiment on running a "tried, proven and fixed system" but Windows ME was anything but... it was still based on the broken hybrid DOS/Windows model (VXDs, cooperative multitasking... yay!), whereas Windows 2000 was essentially Windows NT 5.
If you really wanted to stick with a "proven" platform you could have stuck with NT 4 SP 6a :)
Re:Still, Mommy got him going (Score:3, Informative)
ALL early PC products had problems. The early adopters were fairly forgiving of such because they knew they were trading time for money (cheaper machine). Early Apple II's leaked so much radiation that they couldn't legally call them "comsumer products". The first TRS-80's crashed quite often. Etc.
It's not quite that simple. IBM *did* offer CPM on it's PC's along with MS-DOS. CPM just didn't know how to play the game as well as Gates. Gates was an avid poker-player and knew how to sacrifice in the short-term for longer-term gain. CPM's team didn't seem to understand this, going for the early buck. Microsoft's patience has paid off for it many times. True, when you have spare cash, you have the luxury of waiting more than other companies.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry?
VisualBasic, Windows 95, 98, ME, ActiveDirectory, Bob, Clippy, win32 API, functionally useless APIs, forced backwards compatibility, intrusive and dangerous default system services, Internet Explorer, MSHTML, and on and on goes the list of half-baked, broken, and abusive technologies which we've had to work around for the past two decades. Policy at MS has always been "we're doing what we want, and don't care about you" with regard to their products; they're brazen, like an undisciplined IT worker is in making system changes.
Re:No, hes not (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:3, Informative)
cooperative multitasking
Huh? Windows used pre-emptive multitasking since Win95. Of course, you could still disable interrupts if you wanted to...