> "Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff" This goes against claims like[1] where Bill Gates got the spec for Excel Basic (to become Visual

> "Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff" This goes against claims like[1] where Bill Gates got the spec for Excel Basic (to become Visual Basic for Applications) and read it and annotated it overnight, to grill the the author on the details, and says "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer." and "Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions made it necessary to devote way too much management attention to fighting the US government. Steve took over the CEO role on the theory that this would allow Bill to spend more time doing what he does best, running the software development organization, but that didn’t seem to fix endemic problems caused by those 11 layers of management, a culture of perpetual, permanent meetings, a stubborn insistance on creating every possible product no matter what, [...] and a couple of decades of sloppy, rapid hiring" [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...