7 ms·
What happened to the 11 employees of Microsoft in the 1978 photo
- unwind 16y agoIt's just brilliant that Bob Greenberg allegedly now develops software for golf courses. I love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism. :)
- Yrlec 16y agoJust like China's richest man Li Ka-shing.
- cpr 16y agoBob was my best buddy freshman year. He's a great fellow, though I've lost track of him lately. He left Microsoft because he was never able to break into the tight "inner circle" of Gates, Ballmer and Allen, even though he was classmates of all of them. I guess I shoulda taken his advice and joined MS as #8 way back when... ;-)
- mbyrne 16y agoYou mean "nominative determinism" in like, He was good at BILLing people to get money and setting up GATES to sharing of software, and a STEVE is a crown wearer who created JOBS for the creative class? Nope, nothing there...
- kmfrk 16y agoMight want to revise the Paul Allen entry.
- iuytryuik 16y agoIt does seem to be an "official MSFT" account. Although from interviews I've read with Allen his view seems to be - I got lots of money, I'm enjoying writing cool code and I have a yacht the size of a small country - who cares about the past.
- guelo 16y agoWow, seems like Gates treated them like crap and most of them left the company within a few years.
- access_denied 16y agoI believe part of this Gates/Jobs treated their people like crap is just an American outlook on making people work hard. All this talk about having "fun" at a "cool" workplace? Nobody in Japan or Europe talks that way. Work is work and party is another thing. So Gates comes in like 'get the foo to work' and half of the Americans who see this think this is harsh. I think this is _part_ of the puzzle.
- watmough 16y agoYou don't get rich by giving money away.
- sriramk 16y agoActually, apart from the issue with Marla Wood, the article says that everyone else left in the mid-80s or 90s, ranging from 5-10/15 years after the photo was taken. That's a very decent stint in any company.
- guelo 16y agoI counted 8 people that left disenchanted, tired or in a dispute. 6 were gone by 1983.
- loewenskind 16y ago>That's a very decent stint in any company. It would be today, but back then?
- jdp23 16y agoMarc McDonald stayed for quite a while after he was reacquired ... he might still be there.
- jimbokun 16y agoSeems like there's an important lesson in here: "As Bill Gates was attempting to correct this egregious error, he was introduced to a black-haired gnome by the name of Gordon Letwin, who proceeded to chew him out in front of a group of about fifteen people. Letwin, the author of Heath's BASIC, felt his turf was being violated and by the purveyor of an inferior product to boot. Bill Gates nonetheless prevailed, selling Heath his BASIC and FORTRAN for H-DOS, a proprietary operating system Letwin had developed for Heath. But Letwin had instinctively understood how to win the favor of William Henry Gates: Stand up to the guy. By the end of the year Gordon Letwin would come to work for Microsoft and begin work on a BASIC compiler." I read a similar anecdote about Steve Jobs at Next. He was interviewing candidates for a finance position, I think, and would basically belittle their previous experience and question their competence. The first guy who told Steve off to his face was the guy he hired.
- martincmartin 16y agoI'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money. I wouldn't like working for that sort of employer. I suppose I measure success differently than many people here.
- josh33 16y agoStriving for money and happiness are both selfish. Striving for the happiness of others because your own cup runneth over is true success. Providing people with jobs is a form of charity just like going to the backwoods of Africa and building schools is charity.
- Joeri 16y ago"Providing people with jobs is a form of charity" What an odd view. Usually, an employee creates more value for the employer than he costs, through his time, effort and expertise. If the employer receives more than he gives, why is he the one being charitable?
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- T_S_ 16y agoThe title of this made me think it was the subject of the next Dan Brown novel.
- brown9-2 16y agoFor reference, the $120 in backpay that Bill Gates was screaming about in 1980 is about the equivalent of $317.56 in 2010 dollars. http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoWell, he was screaming about getting nailed for shortchanging his workers and having it in his public records. I agree that it's pretty strange he'd run that risk with only $300 to gain in the first place.
- spoon16 16y agoHow much if it were Microsoft stock?
- ck2 16y agoI love how they recreated the photo 30 years later, wow!
- petsos 16y agoIt is a shame the didn't match their exact positions though.
- VB6_Forever 16y agoI wonder if BG paid Marla Woods' expenses for the reunion photo.
- fourk 16y agoIs it just me, or is the inability to select or deselect text on the page kind of obnoxious?
- lynx44 16y agoFrom this picture, I'd actually feel quite good about the team in terms of their technical competency. I get a positive vibe from them in terms of that. I would worry about their business acumen, however. This team does not seem to have an immediate business type presence.
- steven 16y agoI was there for the 30-year reunion, where my photographer recreated the original shot. (And also, despite my pleas that people wanted it as originally posed, did a bizarre setup that confused people, too.) Then I did a group interview. The tone was very upbeat and warm, though clearly there were some underlying issues. But I think that the group was simply happy to look back at an exciting time. We were all sad that Bob Wallace was missing (I knew him and really like him--he was at the first Hacker Conference!) There was a lot of laughter and good natured fun-poking. And at the time Miriam Lubow, the office manager (den mother) of the group, knew she had cancer, but had come to terms with it, and was loving the reunion. She died not long afterward. For me, it was an amazing experience to moderate the group discussion of these people coming together 30 years after they worked at an obscure startup, and were now on the campus of an historically huge and powerful corporation they helped launch. And yes, I am under the impression that MS paid expenses for this reunion. (But I didn't confirm that explicity.)
- jeffbarr 16y agoEvery time I see the original picture my heart skips a beat. I worked with Bob Wallace before he worked at Microsoft. In his too-short life, Bob did a lot of amazing things. In addition to his graduate work at the University of Washington, he was the first editor of the Northwest Computer Club's newsletter. He was the publications manager for Seattle's Retail Computer Store (ca 1978). He conceived of the portable computer and actually built one using a motherboard and video card from The Digital Group. When asked to write some accounting software in Altair Basic, he refused. And then went on to write a preprocessor that let him use long variable names and better control structures. And wrote the accounting software in that, instead. Bob worked on Microsoft's first Pascal compiler (I wasn't there and have no idea what else he did). After leaving Microsoft he founded QuickSoft, invented the concept of shareware, and made a comfortable living off of contributions from users of his text editor / word processor.