Bill Gates' worst decisions as CEO, according to a longtime Microsoft exec | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates' worst decisions as CEO, according to a longtime Microsoft exec

businessinsider.com

39 pointsdavidst33 comments

>Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value for the customers. But that approach was a "disaster," he writes, as it essentially made the US government and the EU to "declare war on Microsoft."

This is bullcrap. Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla and played as dirty as they could against smaller competitors using every inch of their monopoly power.

MS had OEM's in their leach and they used blackmail and threats against them to keep them from preinstalling anything but MS sofware in PC's.

Software startups in the PC-era were routinely shafted. If their product was good and MS wanted it, they had to sell to MS or MS would attack them and build competing product that was pre-installed. They also hired engineers from competing firms without requirement to work, copied the product and bled the competitor in the courtroom, hided necessary apis from competing products. MS made so much money they could afford to lose in court if it meant that competing product did not make it.

Government was the only instance big enough to stop dirty game MS played.

I fully agree with you, but this does not contradict the article. If the lobbying effort of Microsoft was more developped, Microsoft would not have been stopped by government. It was an error for Microsoft even if it is in the benefit of whole world.

I find it bizarre that people would freely admit that a CEO should've made corrupting politicians a priority. How are we going to address corruption in politics when we're so apathetic when it shows up?

And he compares to Intel, which was much more successful. Time for more investigative journalism?

Wouldn't mind reading a story about the Intel lobbying. In terms of the next steps (in the US at least), I'd hope there could be greater awareness and support for Wolf PAC and similar initiatives.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC

> ..Or MS would attack them and build competing product that was pre-installed.

This is a myth. A typical corporation was/is so fragmented internally and have so many fires already burning that it is very difficult for them to copy something successfully - this of course applies to high stake products and not small feature sets.

Case in point from the era under discussion - Microsoft's FrontPage acquisition.

Relevant excerpt from the excellent HBR book review of 'High Stakes, No Prisoners' - the book written by founder of FrontPage and his experience around the acquisition..

FrontPage’s code was so impressive that Vermeer (FrontPage) hardly needed to sell any software before the big competitors came calling. Even a company like Microsoft, willing to commit substantial resources to win market share, may find a well-established proprietary standard difficult to dislodge. Rather than assign a team of programmers to invent a tool to compete with FrontPage, Microsoft found it expedient to pay a huge premium to acquire Vermeer directly.

Vermeer essentially beat Microsoft at its own game of lock-in. And without that aggressive software code, Ferguson admits, Vermeer wouldn’t have stood a chance. The start-up lacked even a minimally adequate distribution operation and sold only a few hundred copies of FrontPage before the acquisition.

‘Beating Microsoft at Its Own Game’ https://hbr.org/2000/01/beating-microsoft-at-its-own-game

> This is a myth.

If it's a myth, how would you describe what Microsoft did to Netscape with Internet Explorer?

My favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, and I think it was Bill Gates that also partly made the initial decision in the first place, right?

The key decision there was made by IBM previously, they'd told their legion of CIOs that the PC-AT was the last personal computer they'd have to buy for a long while. Which required the foundational OS/2 1 to run on the brain dead protected mode of the 286; much of the ensuing mess resulted from this requirement....

I know, but 32-bit OS/2 was the era most of the unethical stuff that attacked OS/2 was done by MS for example.

There is nothing in this article that isn't better read at the original Quora Q&A:

https://www.quora.com/What-were-Bill-Gatess-worst-decisions-...

The "journalist" should have just clicked the share button at Quora, it would have been more informative.

I am struggling to find a news source worse than Business Insider in the last year.

Are they a news source? They're more of an aggregator, there's certainly a space for that.

I it getting increasingly harder to find proper journalist pieces that don't seem like pure reposts, even in newspapers that one pays for.

I agree, and it's a sad thing.

I think Economist still has a journalistic spine, but most others I've stopped reading.

I really hope we can go quicker to a time when "lobbying the government" is no longer accepted as a standard business practice, but a strong signal of corruption and foul play. If that would be Gates' biggest mistake (and it ain't) then the guy would be a flesh-and-bone saint in the tech community.

I can see, however, why MS would be in a downspiral course with senior executives holding such opinions.

I started reading the article thinking that he made a lot of mistakes. Turns he just made two.

"his weak lobbying efforts and failure to take advantage of the internet early on."

Breaking up Microsoft would've created a far more competitive group of companies than what Microsoft turned into during the 00's. Nadella, to his great credit, seems to have really made Microsoft a player again. But it would've been way easier—and probably far more valuable for Microsoft shareholders—had Microsoft become Windows, Inc., Office, Inc., and Everything Else, Inc.

Well I think the synergy that Windows was developing (Phone, Desktop, XBox, Kinect, etc. unified APIs) had a lot of potential to provide developer lock-in and a very compelling alternative to the hardware lock-in of Apple and the spaghetti of half baked alternatives in the OSS world.

Unfortunately the quality has been a complete disaster. Instead of focusing on what open-source fails to deliver - quality and polish (b/c people who work for free want to work on fancy shiny new things, or do complete rewrites instead of polishing old code bases) they just kept pumping out more half baked features.

Now Nadella has gone for some strange short-term populist plan of giving away all their intellectual property, eliminating lock in, and banking the whole enterprise on the cloud (which has almost no lock in!). I think he's going to Microsoft into an early grave

Isn't the biggest mistake giving MS over to Balmer?

Probably not. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662666

Well, I have the impression he is a lot happier now. Google for "Bill Gates TED talks" to see what I mean.

Microsoft may be what Bill Gates is most famous for, but I would say it is no longer his life work.

The article mentions:

> "Top of the list for me is that Bill did not engage – either himself or the company – in the political process early enough. When Microsoft’s competitors were effectively lobbying the government, Bill’s attitude was the government should just go away and leave Microsoft alone," Silverberg wrote in a Quora Q&A session held Friday.

And then again:

> Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value for the customers. But that approach was a "disaster," he writes, as it essentially made the US government and the EU to "declare war on Microsoft."

This is totally insipid and futile news, what knowledge do we gain from this? A news company that takes an article and digest for us?

This goes on to show what it really is: just a place to exhibit their ideology, just take a look at how they use fear to instill on the (or wannabe) businessman the idea that you must lobby to be successful.

Which is the most ridicule thing in the world, as these people are just the ones that defend the neoliberal stance, which they are just refuting (which was the original Bill Gates ethos).

So his mistake was to not make the world a worse place, hampering innovation?

On the contrary, the point is that Gates did not try to own the innovation, hampering it instead. Imagine a world where IE keeps developing at the rate it was between v3 and 5, rather than stagnating as it did after it captured the market. Imagine a world where Windows became free to install and run on virtualized platforms in 2003. Imagine MS building free devops tools...

Perhaps if they didn't allow things to stagnate they could have kept up the assumption that dev tools weren't free. A lot of open source development is predicated on "I want this, why doesn't it exist?". Tools that already exist don't get as much interest (example: MS Office vs Open Office).

Gates is perhaps the best business mind of the past century. The only truly dreadful decision of his career was handing the reigns to the incompetent Ballmer. Almost overnight, Microsoft went from a great innovator to a dinosaur caught flat-footed by every new development in the tech industry.

>Microsoft went from a great innovator

What are the greatest innovations from Gates era that originated inside Microsoft? It's hard to find any.

Bill Gates was great and ruthless businessman who understood technology, but he was not good Chief Architect (it was his other position). During Bill Gates Chief Architect era MS was constantly behind others in innovations and only the usage of monopoly power allowed it to embrace, extend and extinguish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

"his weak lobbying efforts"

I really do not like lobbying - therefore I don't see that as an error on Microsofts side.

The best way to understand Bill's lobbying error is to take a look at the current 800 pound gorilla Google.

Now, imagine Google's founders remained geeks, avoided lobbying at Washington. What do you think would have happened once complaints from its competitors started pouring in?

Microsoft was hammered because it bundled internet explorer with its operating system and other anti-competitive practices.

Google mandates Google some to be installed by its OEMs. It also bars them from releasing phones with forked android versions.

Google also tried to leverage its dominance in search to cut a slice out of Amazon's biz.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-oem-requirements-unveil...

In my opinion, Google's founders would have made exactly the same mistake as Bill if not for Eric Schmidt. His two lost battles with Microsoft taught him many things two of which were:

1. How to prepare for the upcoming battle with Microsoft

2. The importance of lobbying

Politicians should serve the will of the people. Any successful lobbying that gets in the way of that should be seen as a failure, not something to be encouraged. Of course changing the system to hinder the ability of companies to lobby is the goal we should be aiming for, but in the meantime let's not give companies that do so carte blanche to continue.

Don't hate the player when he didn't even want to play. Hate the game.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. Either you lobby politicians, or somebody else lobbies the politicians and locks you out.

I can and will blame both. Not all companies lobby, not all companies have the resources to effectively do so, yet small to mid size companies continue to turn a profit. The argument that large companies have to do so just because they can is ludicrous.

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