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."
"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:5, Insightful)
My take on it (Score:5, Insightful)
He was a smart guy. He scored a near perfect on his SAT, and went into Harvard.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My take on it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:4, Insightful)
If you wanted to pitch an idea, you'd better be able to take on serious verbal abuse, sometimes simply because he didn't like the "name of one of the features" or because he didn't like some other minute aspect.
Yeah, and their stuff sucked a lot less back then, too. You wouldn't have seen Vista on Bill's watch; it took a Ballmer for that to happen.
When a company no longer has someone at the top who is willing to call bullshit for what it is, that company is headed downhill.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe now we're resorting to personal attacks on /.
Even if it's Bill... it's...
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:5, Insightful)
WinME happened on his watch. So did MS Bob, Clippy, and every internet search initiative you can think of.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:1, Insightful)
True enough. But the failures were either quickly yanked from the marketplace (WinME, Bob) or not strategic in nature (Clippy).
Re:Perfect Qualities For.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure whether to mod you insightful or funny, so I'll just post... I really think this is quite a valid opinion.
I'm probably the first to despise Bill for his tactics with regards to computers, but I can only imagine what it'd be like if he was a politician. Makes me kind of thankful that he stayed with stealing other people's software...
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:4, Insightful)
Was missing out on the Internet strategic?
(and I cringe as I write this... Imagine an internet/web based on MS software...)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's pretty clear that organizations, even big ones, tend to reflect the personalities of their leaders - especially when those leaders have strong personalities. This is very visible with Microsoft, Apple and Google. They're very different companies and I think that's largely down to the way Jobs, Gates and L&S are as people.
Microsoft and Apple are both pretty darn important, and I think Jobs and Gates have pretty darn similar personalities. They both seem to be hyper-aggressive, very controlling A-types who don't think twice about intimidating their "minions". I think that also sums up Microsoft and Apple as companies. So studying Gates can tell us more about the Microsoft of the 90s, which is an interesting topic for anyone in the tech industry.
Re:Perfect Qualities For.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, don't go giving him ideas.
Re:Perfect Qualities For.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If a control freak was president he would be very unhappy. Being president there is way to much entropy and with the checks and balances you do not have full control. So you need to get congress to go along with your ideas, the same with the judical system, and many of them do not like the fact that you are in power and will fight you every step of the way. Then you have a general population who will determine if you get an other term or not. Or to replace the people in congress with the guys who hate you. A controll freak would not be happy there as they have little control of what they do.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:3, Insightful)
Like him or not, Bill Gates is pretty high up in the list of people who had a large effect on the whole computing industry.
I have to agree. The issue I have is how much warping and damage did he cause the computing industry by his desire to win and maintain his monopoly at all costs. I've heard the arguments before that if Mr. Gates hadn't been around that Steve Jobs would have been running the show. That is not an unreasonable argument. My belief is that had CP/M been chosen for the first IBM PC, we would have had a more inclusive community, and more competition based on merits of the software and not on back room deals with crap like per-cpu-licenses or not-allowing-other-OS-to-being-pre-installed, or locking-browsers-with-the-OS. I think that it was a serious mistake of the U.S. legal system not to have broken the Microsoft monopoly into at least 2 companies:
I believe that history has demonstrated that whenever the Microsoft OS has been threatened, they have resorted to using leverage from their other software to pressure people to stick with their OS (Ex. Microsoft Exchange, Office, etc). Similarly, whenever their software has been threatened they have resorted to using their OS to put pressure on people to stick with their software (Ex. the "hidden apis" that only Microsoft developers knew about in their OS that other vendors such as Wordperfect were not allowed to have or at least not until it was too late.) By breaking the company into 2 parts it would have forced each half to compete solely on the merits of their software and certainly led to more aggressive competition and less FUD crap ("Get the Facts" campaign). I can't help but wonder if campaign contributions had something to do with Microsoft not being split up.
I for one.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Really don't care. He's an arrogant prick and i really don't care that he came from some privileged family that taught him early to bend the rules, cheat, lie and steal. He should be taken out back and shot instead of making him out to some 'geek hero', which is is not.
Now, a story about Woz's childhood, that would be interesting.
Ya, mod me down, i cant help it that i despise the man and doing it wont change my mind.
Re:My take on it (Score:4, Insightful)
This further lends itself to Microsoft' philosphy as a whole. They bought up or destroyed all competition with their monopoly wherever they could so there was no competition. Now that open source and Apple and Google are in town and ganging up on them, they are not having such a good time of it.
Yet another puff piece... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:0, Insightful)
It took a Ballmer for what to happen? For a perfectly good OS, an improvement over XP in many ways, to be killed just by internet gossips who haven't even used the damn thing?
It wasn't Microsoft's fault, it was shitty luck.
Re:I for one.. (Score:3, Insightful)
He should be taken out back and shot instead of making him out to some 'geek hero', which is is not.
Yeah, he is. Just because you hate him doesn't mean plenty of people don't admire what he's been able to accomplish. I don't always agree with the man's methods, but the fact remains that what he's done is damn impressive.
Softcard introduced Bill to IBM (Score:3, Insightful)
The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.
In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.
Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html [pbs.org]
Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" (Score:2, Insightful)
Gladwell's latest book "Outliers" has a chapter about Bill Gates. Overall the book is about how a certain very few people are able to have outrageous success. The standard American story of this is that through hard work and determination that anything is possible. Gladwell points out that in most cases it requires a lot more than grit and determination it also requires being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right skills. (I know... duh. Right? But it is a good book).
For Bill Gates... he went to a wealthy private school whose Mom's organization decided to buy a computer terminal in 1968! Bill would have been one of a handful of teenagers in the world who had access to a computer in those days (and one that didn't require punchcard programming at that.) Later he and Paul Allen were able to get access to U. of Washington computers late at night. As a result they got jobs programming during high school.
I don't remember all the details, but Gates (and a similar story for Bill Joy of Sun) had lots of very unusual, very lucky situations along the way that led to him being a young very skilled programmer at a time when virtually no other people in the world would have had that level of experience (10,000 hours).
He was a smart, tenacious kid, but Microsoft wouldn't have happened if he hadn't had access to that terminal when he 13 years old.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control" (Score:3, Insightful)
The computing industry is more than just end user desktops, you know.
Re:My take on it (Score:3, Insightful)
... and while at Harvard, he realized that EVERYONE there was smart and scored a near perfect score on their SAT's. Making him average. So he dropped out.
Given that not everyone from Harvard ends up earning a dew dozen billion dollars eventually, I'd say that he did prove his point by dropping out, no?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I for one.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My take on it (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft.... him and Paul Allen saw the Altair as "it's go time." It wasn't some three year old pouting because he was suddenly in the presence of people who were also smart (although being smart isn't necessarily the key to getting into an Ivy league school...)