One major hire that you rarely hear about is when Microsoft hired an outsider (formerly at at IBM and Boeing) to take over as President and Chief Operating Officer.
I remember in the early 2000s Bill finally sat down in front of a Windows computer to play with and evaluate the software, found out how crap Windows and some of its related products really were, and sent out some angry memos telling his lieutenants to get it in gear from a quality and usability standpoint.
He may have enabled scalability by being more hands off, but I'm still kind of surprised it took him that long to learn that software quality had fallen off that far. And I'm not even getting into the monopoly aspect of it. Maybe that was the business model all along, you can save costs by not adhering to quality standards as long as you land the right exclusivity deals with OEMs. Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
Fwiw it becomes really really obvious when companies have someone at the top pushing for initiatives like this and when they don't.
A great example is how Apple used to be great at this. These days.the.keyboard.is.practically.unusable. As in it still doesn't type out the letter you tapped and you can see this via slow motion video recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
It's not at all wrong to call out subordinates in the company for quality feel. It may seem like it leads to misprioritization (everyone in the company scrambles to fix the issue you saw) but not doing this at all is far far worse. Look at this issue BillG raised and the fact that no one cared until it was raised. Big companies are very siloed by nature. The only thing that breaks these silos is the leadership doing things like this.
> I'm still kind of surprised it took him that long to learn that software quality had fallen off that far
Isn't that to some extent (or perhaps exactly) what is going on today? All employees at MS are using the polished Enterprise edition without all the cruft and without many of the annoyances. I bet most of them have never tried to use, eg, the home edition. Few of them has probably ever tried to pick a new PC from a retail store full of trialware and "optimizations" made by the retail store.
The point is that most MS employees don't get to see the edition of Windows that we, normal consumers, do.
So the main theme of the article is that Bill Gates was a "good" manager, and it enumerates through a bunch of examples of his innovative contributions.
I've always held the belief that even though Gates may have been an effective manager, he was a terrible person. IMHO, his repeated anti-competitive, deceptive, and often illegal behavior was the main reason for Microsoft's success.
> how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it away free?
Microsoft made many mistakes, but I don't see how integrating a browser into Windows was one. I still can't fathom that we live in a world where that got Microsoft in such trouble, but acquiring Activision Blizzard was deemed ok.
I don't know where your quote is from, but trying to own the "default" web browser and tying it to your OS monopoly seems like a pretty great idea from a "making money" perspective, if perhaps not a legal or ethical one.
Legal problem, absolutely. But it is hard to spin bundling a web browser as an ethical concern - especially from MS's perspective. Everything they put in the OS is a component bundled with the OS. Some components being legally special and problematic would have been quite confusing to them when it first hit. Web browsers aren't special and there is an expectation that an OS can access the internet using a variety of protocols.
The ethical issue would be around making it technically harder for competitors to create a web browser. Eg, standard practice on mobile phones (which is worse than anything MS ever did and has always seemed fine to me).
It's from Joel Spolsky in that post linked by the grandparent, from 2006. And that's exactly what I'm saying - it was one honking great idea. Microsoft saw how central the web is becoming, and integrated it into the OS
As for legality, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not an antitrust one, but as I see it, an OS is almost by definition an amorphous collection of tools that users need to make proper use of their computer and nowadays I can't imagine an OS that doesn't come with a browser, so would argue that they were absolutely right in integrating it. If anything, I see much more merit in suing them for abusing their OS monopoly to go into the solitaire gaming space.
You're looking at it from the modern perspective. What Microsoft did was use their monopoly power to destroy a potential competitor -- the first step of the "EEE" trifecta.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I don't think that they, or anyone, should be disallowed to Embrace new technologies. There has to be a better approach to antitrust.
Even if it's true, it doesn't rule out that he was a good manager (CEO sort of). In the jungle you have to be a bad guy to fight the other bad guys. We give our own bad guys power so that we can keep our hands clean.
Or maybe "good" in the sense of effectiveness is entirely separate from moral "good", and any notion of nebulous other "bad guys" is irrelevant to an assessment of Bill Gates as a manager. I'd argue they're not relevant to assessing him morally, either, but of course that's a very old debate.
>In the jungle you have to be a bad guy to fight the other bad guys.
One of my favorite places to go in the world is jungles. I've never really encountered bad guys there, and I've never fought anyone I've met in a jungle. I think you might want to work on a better metaphor, and also question your assumptions about any of this since on this I can't agree literally or metaphorically.
The trouble with great problem solvers is that they assume everyone else is also great at solving problems, and thus understand that if they are causing trouble for other people that those other people will step in and solve the problem that was created.
But, as you point out, not everyone is a problem solver.
I was working at Groove Networks, a tiny company in Beverly Massachusetts, when I learned that Bill Gates was dropping by. Founded by Ray Ozzie after his success with Lotus Notes, Groove had been negotiating with Microsoft to sell the company, and this was, potentially, the final step.
It was 2003, and Microsoft's next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, was not doing well. On top of that, Google and the rest of the internet natives were eating Microsoft's lunch, and many analysts expected the company to fade away, as IBM had done before.
Bill Gates, obviously, didn't want that to happen, and true to his nature, was looking for a technological solution. In many ways, Longhorn was fighting the last war: it invented a new graphical subsystem and a new storage system, at a time when modern apps were happily using HTML and SQL. Groove Networks had developed a peer-to-peer synchronization technology that blended online and offline so an app could have the best of both worlds. It was a true local-first architecture that was also internet native.
Gates arrived early in the morning with one or two assistants. In 2003 he was still the wealthiest person on the planet, but he carried himself like any normal engineer. One of my colleagues, who hadn't been told he was coming, only learned about it because they rode with him in the elevator. He introduced himself and made small talk. You can imagine their shock.
At the meeting, we presented our technology and our ideas for how we could fit into Microsoft's plans. Later I learned that this was a mini-product review, like Sinofsky talks about in the OP. I pitched him (somewhat half-baked) ideas about how Windows files folders could become collaborative, shared folders. He was very engaged, but thankfully polite--he didn't tell me it was "the stupidest thing he had ever heard." I suspect he was on his best behavior because he had already made up his mind to buy the company.
The highlight of the meeting, for me, was watching him and Ray (whom he'd known for a while) riff on everything around Windows, the internet, and technology in general. It was like improv, where every idea someone came up with was followed up with, "Yes, and then you can also...". You could tell Gates was engaged because he kept rocking in his chair, a classic tell we later learned.
Microsoft did ultimately buy Groove Networks, but not for the technology. I realized much later that Gates had bought Groove mostly to hire Ray. In 2006, Gates announced that he was retiring and appointing Ray Ozzie as Chief Software Architect.
At Microsoft, Ray spearheaded a project codenamed Red Dog, which the marketing folks later called "Azure". I'm convinced that Ray doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to turning Microsoft around.
Had Bill already planned all this when he visited us in 2003? Probably not, but seeing his mind work, it wouldn't surprise me if he had a little bit of an inkling. You never know.
Just wanted to say, I really enjoyed using Groove. It was a memory hog and a bit flaky, but I thought it had tremendous potential and was conceptually really interesting. I was sad when it disappeared
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/20/business/business-people-...
But less than two years later
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/04/business/microsoft-presid...
He may have enabled scalability by being more hands off, but I'm still kind of surprised it took him that long to learn that software quality had fallen off that far. And I'm not even getting into the monopoly aspect of it. Maybe that was the business model all along, you can save costs by not adhering to quality standards as long as you land the right exclusivity deals with OEMs. Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
A great example is how Apple used to be great at this. These days.the.keyboard.is.practically.unusable. As in it still doesn't type out the letter you tapped and you can see this via slow motion video recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
It's not at all wrong to call out subordinates in the company for quality feel. It may seem like it leads to misprioritization (everyone in the company scrambles to fix the issue you saw) but not doing this at all is far far worse. Look at this issue BillG raised and the fact that no one cared until it was raised. Big companies are very siloed by nature. The only thing that breaks these silos is the leadership doing things like this.
Isn't that to some extent (or perhaps exactly) what is going on today? All employees at MS are using the polished Enterprise edition without all the cruft and without many of the annoyances. I bet most of them have never tried to use, eg, the home edition. Few of them has probably ever tried to pick a new PC from a retail store full of trialware and "optimizations" made by the retail store.
The point is that most MS employees don't get to see the edition of Windows that we, normal consumers, do.
What did he used before ? UNIX ?
I've always held the belief that even though Gates may have been an effective manager, he was a terrible person. IMHO, his repeated anti-competitive, deceptive, and often illegal behavior was the main reason for Microsoft's success.
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
An interesting spin on a "real" BillG review:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Microsoft made many mistakes, but I don't see how integrating a browser into Windows was one. I still can't fathom that we live in a world where that got Microsoft in such trouble, but acquiring Activision Blizzard was deemed ok.
The ethical issue would be around making it technically harder for competitors to create a web browser. Eg, standard practice on mobile phones (which is worse than anything MS ever did and has always seemed fine to me).
As for legality, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not an antitrust one, but as I see it, an OS is almost by definition an amorphous collection of tools that users need to make proper use of their computer and nowadays I can't imagine an OS that doesn't come with a browser, so would argue that they were absolutely right in integrating it. If anything, I see much more merit in suing them for abusing their OS monopoly to go into the solitaire gaming space.
I remember paying for Netscape 4, and I remember the pile of steaming garbage I got when I did that.
One of my favorite places to go in the world is jungles. I've never really encountered bad guys there, and I've never fought anyone I've met in a jungle. I think you might want to work on a better metaphor, and also question your assumptions about any of this since on this I can't agree literally or metaphorically.
They started the company. They were parents.
The trouble with great problem solvers is that they assume everyone else is also great at solving problems, and thus understand that if they are causing trouble for other people that those other people will step in and solve the problem that was created.
But, as you point out, not everyone is a problem solver.
It was 2003, and Microsoft's next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, was not doing well. On top of that, Google and the rest of the internet natives were eating Microsoft's lunch, and many analysts expected the company to fade away, as IBM had done before.
Bill Gates, obviously, didn't want that to happen, and true to his nature, was looking for a technological solution. In many ways, Longhorn was fighting the last war: it invented a new graphical subsystem and a new storage system, at a time when modern apps were happily using HTML and SQL. Groove Networks had developed a peer-to-peer synchronization technology that blended online and offline so an app could have the best of both worlds. It was a true local-first architecture that was also internet native.
Gates arrived early in the morning with one or two assistants. In 2003 he was still the wealthiest person on the planet, but he carried himself like any normal engineer. One of my colleagues, who hadn't been told he was coming, only learned about it because they rode with him in the elevator. He introduced himself and made small talk. You can imagine their shock.
At the meeting, we presented our technology and our ideas for how we could fit into Microsoft's plans. Later I learned that this was a mini-product review, like Sinofsky talks about in the OP. I pitched him (somewhat half-baked) ideas about how Windows files folders could become collaborative, shared folders. He was very engaged, but thankfully polite--he didn't tell me it was "the stupidest thing he had ever heard." I suspect he was on his best behavior because he had already made up his mind to buy the company.
The highlight of the meeting, for me, was watching him and Ray (whom he'd known for a while) riff on everything around Windows, the internet, and technology in general. It was like improv, where every idea someone came up with was followed up with, "Yes, and then you can also...". You could tell Gates was engaged because he kept rocking in his chair, a classic tell we later learned.
Microsoft did ultimately buy Groove Networks, but not for the technology. I realized much later that Gates had bought Groove mostly to hire Ray. In 2006, Gates announced that he was retiring and appointing Ray Ozzie as Chief Software Architect.
At Microsoft, Ray spearheaded a project codenamed Red Dog, which the marketing folks later called "Azure". I'm convinced that Ray doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to turning Microsoft around.
Had Bill already planned all this when he visited us in 2003? Probably not, but seeing his mind work, it wouldn't surprise me if he had a little bit of an inkling. You never know.
Ray has always sounded visionary to me. His comments on HN have been enjoyable to read, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rozzie