How To Be The Next Bill Gates | Hacker News Reader

How To Be The Next Bill Gates

forbes.com

5 pointsnreece10 comments

This part seemed particularly inaccurate: "Gates demonstrated that the old-school model of an Ivy-league degree, or a pedigreed family, isn't a requirement for career success." He came from a wealthy and prominent family.

However, I think the point is correct, even if Bill Gates isn't the one who proved it. I'm always encouraged when I find out that the founder and owner of a successful company came from a modest background.

They skipped a few things.

- Receive a $1 million gift from your grandfather when you're born.

- Go to an elite private school with the same computing power as Stanford University when you're 13.

- Bully your co-founder out of his hard earned equity. Take over when he gets a life threatening illness.

- Have a mother who serves on the United Way board alongside the CEO of IBM (How's that for a network.)

- Have a lawyer father who teaches you how to resort to legal tactics when technical ones fail.

- Have a partner who commits one of the biggest blunders in business history (IBM's failure to keep DOS proprietary).

- Do whatever it takes to defeat anyone else, regardless of legal or ethical considerations, or long term effects on the industry.

Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history? Doesn't anyone remember all the evil Microsoft has wrought upon the world? They say that history is written by the survivors, but forturately, this game is still being played.

I say let the door hit him in the butt on the way out and let the market continue to correct itself so that we may finally have the long delayed technical excellence this planet deserves.

"... They skipped a few things. ..."

And the most obvious ...

"... no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM ..." ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

"Bully your co-founder out of his hard earned equity. Take over when he gets a life threatening illness."

I hadn't heard about that one. What exactly happened?

Paul Allen, who reportly did alot more programming work than Bill Gates, recieved less equity. Allen was working for another company at the time and so Gates argued that he deserved more equity as he was working on Microsoft full-time. The company he worked for was MITS and was Microsoft's only customer for BASIC at the time. So essentially Allen was contracting for Microsoft and really deserved equal if not more shares.

He resigned when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1983. His father had just died and he decided that there was more to life than work and left Microsoft permanently although he remained a member of the board until 2000. It's also said he overheard Gates and Ballmer discussing how to get back his shares if he died and that really was why he left.

I've read in interviews with IBM employees that the reason why IBM let Microsoft own the rights to DOS was that they were just coming out of antitrust litigation and were afraid of it happening again, not that they didn't understand the value of the operating system.

And be lucky enough to live at a time when a technological invention (the computer) changes the world.

How many times has that happened in history? Fire, steam, rails, oil, electricity, the telegraph, radio, computers, did I miss any?

I'm hoping biotech is next great world changer.

Thank you for pointing out the key difference between millionaires and billionaires. Billg, Larry + Sergey, Jobs, Yang, Ellison, etc, would still have no doubt been successful if they had been born +-5 years from when they were, but they would have missed the window where there was a multi-billion dollar revolution waiting to happen.

"Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history?"

I'm on the outside looking at Gates but here's the thing that troubles me with this line of ad hominem: Had MS not been so aggressive, how many proprietary OSs would there have been through the decades of the 80s and 90s and to today? Same deal with the different Office-type products or enterprise apps.

In forcefully promoting a common framework, MS penetrated PCs broader, deeper, and faster into the world. The reverberations of that reality are unknowable. But without Gates and MS, I don't see a kindler, gentler version of MS. I see lots of competing alternatives (in all their different markets) for many, many more years. Maybe that's good for more businesses and the eventual products, but as a user going through the many transitions it would have been painful.

Take something as simple (and "evil") as pre-loading Internet Explorer onto Windows machines. Sure it killed Netscape, but more importantly it flooded the market with new users. Outlook (and email) is the same deal. With the common framework, there was a Tower of Babel for us to live and work on.

In light of those results, it's very hard for me to argue with the methods. Even now, most of us own one iPod and that product line is just as "evil" as anything MS put out (though much better looking!).

> Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history?

I'm a lot less interested in MS-bashing or Gates-bashing than I was ten years ago. I once thought it was critical that Linux fulfill the destiny I thought it had, of becoming the dominant desktop OS, and that Microsoft was going to spoil that utopian future. (Instead we get a just-OK future where Apple makes BSD/NeXT a popular but not dominant alternative, and desktop OSes are rendered as irrelevant by the browser as some people once they they would be by Java.)

Gates is on his way out, and without realizing my worst nightmares of locking everyone into having to use Microsoft Everything whether they want to or not.

I do like your concise list of all his advantages -- handy for when people claim that there's no such thing as fortunate circumstance.

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