[HN Gopher] BillG the Manager (2021)
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BillG the Manager (2021)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-01-07 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com)
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| An excellent example of that:
|
| 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...
| falcor84 wrote:
| > 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.
| wredcoll wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| endemic wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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).
| ferguess_k wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| nemo wrote:
| >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.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Worst people I've ever met have all been in ornate offices
| 9rx wrote:
| Gates was an exceptionally good problem solver.
|
| 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.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| This is exactly why billg turned philantropist, in the
| footsteps of Alfred Nobel, the Merchant of Death.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Epstein really accentuated his bad side. I am interested to see
| what that was all about.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| romanhn wrote:
| I assume this is the email you mean:
| https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-
| mov.... His frustration is palpable.
| slillibri wrote:
| "So they told me that using the download page to download
| something was not something they anticipated" This has to be
| my favorite part.
| p2detar wrote:
| So anyone knows what happened to poor Dave and his team?
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| romanhn wrote:
| Love this anecdote, thanks for sharing!
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this.
|
| Ray has always sounded visionary to me. His comments on HN have
| been enjoyable to read, too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rozzie
| Angostura wrote:
| 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
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
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