Behind every great fortune is a crime.

Very approprirate quote.

Could only do one more thing: give credit to the original quoter - Honoré de Balzac

Dean,

Given the tenor of this entry about Bill Gates, I thought you'd get a kick out of this mug shot of him.

Thanks for your excellent work!

Joel

http://www.mugshots.org/misc/bill-gates.html

Such a relief to see this history mentioned. Having followed tech for trade magazines for 30 years, I still can't believe how Gates gets away not just with crime, but with rewriting history. At least the retirement hagiographies are hilarious, including reporting such as this: "it is almost unthinkable that any one human could pick up where Bill Gates leaves off when he ends his full-time tenure Friday as Microsoft's leader."

"Robber Barons" of yesteryear come to mind. Many of them, too, became philanthropic.

Another footnote on Gates and anti-trust is in order. Microsoft only exists because of a previous anti-trust ruling that IBM could not control both hardware and software ends of the business. IBM contracted work on DOS to Microsoft; that gave Gates his start. It's curious that this history doesn't get mentioned when Microsoft execs froth at the mouth about how anti-trust strangles American business.

When the IBM PC first came out, there was a choice of only two operating systems, the old one used by the 8080 family (I forget its name), and PC-DOS/MS-DOS. MS-DOS beat out the other one, but this was really the last and only time it was subject to anything like real competition, and Windows simply took over the monopoly. Microsoft collaborated with IBM on OS/2, but by the time that was nearing readiness IBM had lost control of the hardware market, and MS just pulled out of OS/2.

It is also important to keep it known that it wasn't Microsoft that developed MS-DOS. Gates, having learned through his well-connected mother that IBM needed an operating system with which to launch its PC (which it never expected to be a big deal, and handled like a "skunk works" project), bought the OS from Seattle Computer Systems, a small company that had written it as a near-clone of Digital Research's CP/M (and didn't have the inside information about IBM's need to buy an OS).

I still remember reading Seattle Computer Systems' ads for their OS back before Microsoft bought it. Until then, Microsoft's only major product was Microsoft BASIC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

Another way in which Gates benefited from the wealth and connectedness of his parents was that it was that wealth that enabled him to drop out of Harvard and live without income while writing MS-BASIC.

But perhaps we should temper our criticism of Gates -- one of the reasons he beat competitors such as Digital Research and IBM was that they were much more greedy.

Wasn't Microsoft's dominance over DOS obtained in a more nefarious way than Jack suggests? And wasn't "Microsoft's" vaunted windows programs basically lifted from one or more other companies? Microsoft's very UN-innovative beginnings, and its similarities to, e.g., Ross Perot's rise in the data processing business seem notable, though little noted.

So what's the deal will Bill be able to Buy his way into heaven with $50 billion.

Nice review of history: Gates is a pirate...like all good venture capitalists.

By the way it is his "reign" (as in king) not "rein" (as in reining in the horses)

Bad spellcheck!

Dean,

Great comments and insight into a company that becomes even more opaque as it rewrites its own history.

Does anyone remember the old ditty attributed to Microsoft,
"DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run." That reflects the unchecked anti-competitive practices that enabled Microsoft to prosper.

And this means that we're all stuck with big, clunky Vista, an overblown operating system that stores your files in the most unlikely places.

But isn't the myth of Gates and Allen the same as--in outline--the myth of Carnegie, Rockefeller and all the rest of 'em?

EconDumbo writes: "And wasn't "Microsoft's" vaunted windows programs basically lifted from one or more other companies?"

Yes. But I'm not sure how he got away with it.

Back in the mid-eighties (I think) -- before Bill Gates -- Xerox was using its own proprietary software with 'pictures/graphic images' on the screen that it called "icons" (Gates later called them "windows" in his own version). Xerox had an internal email system in place (since the was no Internet back then) and its own original version of the Internet, which it called the "Ethernet". I know this first hand, becasue I was employed with Xerox at the time and used this system for many years before the Internet (as we know it today) was even conceived.

I even wrote a paper for my sectional manager, documenting my prediction that a worldwide system (like Xerox' Ethernet network, though much more powerful and user-friendly) would be in our future. I even talked with our research librarian about possibly making some of its technical resources available to our company scientists to be shared among themselves. But I acknowledged that copyright issues could be an obstacle, as well as the need for a powerful search engine.

Bottom line, Xerox really blew it in many ways -- even granting the world free access to the domains it owned. So if any company deserved to reap the profits from its own extremely creative and futuristic application of computer networking, Xerox did. Not a pirate and opportunist like Bill Gates.

If you want to read something really funny, check out this e-mail from Gates.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Which is part of the documents available from anti-trust actions.

I find it laughable that Bill Gates is regarded as such a software guru. MS-DOS rode on the back of CP/M (destroying a very worthwhile person in the process), as Windows and Mac OS rode on the back of Xerox PARC. What seems to be missed here, though, is that Bill Gates is truly a master of something: he understood what was going to be important and how to get it, by whatever means necessary.

So one should not be surprised at Microsoft's predatory practices. Rather one should recognize that this is where their true genius lies. Even if one finds it reprehensible.

signed - a computer programmer who started in 1964

the laudatory prsise in the MSM about bill gates on his retirement proves that bill has a secure place in the establishment

a place where people are good and negative stories are not allowed

this blog is one of the few places where dubvious in teh world of business are mentioned

I said many years ago that I was quite moderate about the leadership of MS: The top two should get 10 to 25 years, the next tier 5 to 10, and so on.