6 ms·

> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done. > we only go

> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done. > we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier > THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS. Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive and not a thing I've seen much. It is hard to say he didn't earn it.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important basic was to Microsoft’s initial success and how much of his own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more technical interest in it than other products.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
com2kid 4y ago
I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for prime time[2]. Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really knowledgeable in the space. Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the early 2000s. Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often too early on seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of the curve can be a disadvantage. [1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved over through clever presentation to the user. [2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate, but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully confuse most sensors.
- zamfi 4y ago
  Heart rate detection?
- int0x2e 4y ago
  Lots of great insight. Thank you for sharing! Your comment about being too early is on point, though I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing. If you're a big company with scale and cash to support it, exploring new frontiers is probably worth it - you either stumble upon the next big thing, or you at least get to stake your flag through some patents, and in the process - make it so if this things does grow - you already have some kernel you can build upon to start that up without having to pay up for an acquisition... It's not perfect, but from a risk / reward perspective - I can see how this strategy could serve a large tech company well over decades...
  - com2kid 4y ago
    After a decade at MS I have come to believe that there is such a thing as a first mover disadvantage. Being too early to market is just as bad as being late. Basically a new venture at a high tech company gets a lot of enthusiasm and funding, but it if doesn't succeed within some time frame, not only does it get abandoned, but the company in general won't try again for quite some time. Something else that can happen is the early v1 product gets a bad reputation, making it hard for a better v2 to gain traction. This actually hurt Windows Phone sales. Windows Mobile 5/6 (and Pocket PC before) were miserable consumer products[1]. Sales agents in cellphone stores learned not to sell phones from Microsoft, because their device sales bonus would get clawed back when the device was returned. (Manufacturers give $$ to sales staff for each phone sold from that manufacturer, or at least that is how the market worked back when I was last in it, info is circa 2010! When Windows Phone came out, 2 bad things happened. 1. Sales staff wasn't being offered bonuses for selling Windows Phones 2. When everyone realized how big of a disaster that move was, bonuses started being offered, but staff had been burned by 7-8 years of horrible return rates on prior Microsoft smart phones, everyone knew iPhones didn't get returned, so sales staff pushed iPhones. oops! Microsoft Sync is another one. Microsoft tried to make Android Auto back in 2007! Holy shit. Just think about that. In 2007 MP3 playback was still an extra add on in many models. AUX ports were an add on! No one had smart phones! It was crazy ahead of its time. And cars just weren't designed to be "smart" yet. Heck I am pretty sure in 2007 you could still find a few cars that didn't have power windows. Oh I also used something that looked a lot like docker containers back at Microsoft. It was chained and nested VHD partitions that you could update the OS and Apps separately by just dropping in and relinking the VHDs, so the apps and dependencies were one self contained virtual hard drive image, to upgrade the apps just run some magic commands and the existing OS image had a new app image attached to it. Microsoft had a working, reportedly playable at reasonable speed (never saw it myself) XBox 360 emulator for PC around, I think maybe 2008 or 2009? To be clear, that is an insane technological accomplishment, to have it running at playable speeds on PCs of the time. I got despondent working at Microsoft because I saw so much cool technology just fall by the wayside, or get mismanaged, or get a v1 launched early and then have no one believe in the v2. Amazon Astro, their semi-autonomous robot, yeah MS tried to do that in 2012 or so. Failed because the tech wasn't ready yet (and for many other reasons!) Microsoft tried to do eBooks back in 2000. Oops, way too early. [1] Windows Mobile pre WP 7 was never meant to be a consumer product. Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. Pre-iPhone Microsoft even had a nice little report from some research firm saying consumers would never pay for a cellphone, they would only, en mass, get cell phones for free from their provider in return for the 2 year contract lock in. This was myopic as fuck. As a new college hire I felt like banging my head against the wall every single day for the horrible business decisions that I saw being made, and this was before the iPhone was announced! An example of this closed mindset: When I first started at work I got my company Windows Mobile device, and shortly thereafter I went out shopping for a new TV. I was at the store wondering which one to get when I realized I could pull out my phone and do research right there. I literally stopped in my tracks and realized that having the internet in my pocket was going to be a huge societal shift. When I told my coworkers what had happened, even the next youngest member on the team dismissed what I said as being inconsequential. Year later, same co-worker was proudly showing off the barcode scanning app on his iPhone that let him comparison shop in stores...
phillipcarter 4y ago
There's a lot of places within Microsoft that operate with an extremely high degree of attention to detail, completeness, and utter mastery over a topic. It's amazing. For example, the C# language design committee will, almost to a fault, consider every single little micro-scenario for a proposal and weight them all together to figure out if it's going to be feasible to implement, able to accomplish the goals that the proposal sets out, and if it fits in with the "spirit" of the rest of the language. I think it's a rarity in software to have such care put into the design and implementation process and it's amazing that these things are alive and well within Microsoft.
- alexklarjr 4y ago
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    I was going to have a thoughtful reply, but I looked at your comment history and it seems like you have absolutely zero nuance or objectivity in your evaluation of Microsoft software.
- kirse 4y ago
  consider every single little micro-scenario for a proposal That does sound like a lot of effort to clone the branch from the F# team.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hintymad 4y ago
Equally impressive was that Joel was hired as a product manager (I believe the official title was Program Manager, but writing product spec nowadays is done by eng or by product managers) fresh out of school, yet he was able to come up with detailed and highly technical product spec - a trait that many product managers do not have, especially in a big company. It also shows the talent density of the young Microsoft, just like in the young Google, or the young Facebook. Edit: s/Project Manager/Program Manager/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The title was ‘program manager’ which may have implied different things. He was just out of school but also older than a typical graduate so perhaps a little more wise to the world?
  - hintymad 4y ago
    Thanks! Oh yeah, program manager. I got it messed up.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
I used to know guys from Microsoft Germany. One day they were debugging some obscure issue in the memory management of Windows 2000. Gates came into their office and asked what they were doing. They explained the situation and they were surprised that Gates had a solid understanding of the issue and could discuss it on a deep technical level. They also said that Gates (and Ballmer too) has an incredible memory. He supposedly can recall who attended meetings years ago and what was said. His brain seems to operate on a much higher level from most other people.
- imron 4y ago
  One of my favorite Bill Gates stories. http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
  - helmholtz 4y ago
    Brilliant. I had to look up how to solve it, but highly recommend others spend some time on it.
  - gregvab 4y ago
    Finally figured it out. It's in the name!!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aeturnum 4y ago
> It is hard to say he didn't earn it. This is wrong, it is extremely easy to say he didn't earn it. Calculated as a salary, Bill Gates would need to be paid ~$185,000 an hour since birth to reach his current level of wealth[1]. Of course, that's a little silly, babies don't have jobs. If you constrain him to the time he actively worked at Microsoft his hourly rate goes up to ~$1,582,000. I think Bill Gates is in the top 0.01% of people for problem solving ability. He's very, very good. But let us not pretend that he "earned" his money. He did an enormous amount of very competent work well above the ability of most of us - and there is no way that his stupendous output comes close to being a "fair trade" for the compensation he received. [1] ~109 billion dollars according to google
- clircle 4y ago
  Why did he not earn his money? All you managed to say was that bill gates is wealthy and smart. Did he steal the money?
  - colordrops 4y ago
    The underlying assumption is that if Bill didn't do what he did, whatever products and value werw delivered that earned him the money would not have been created. Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field. Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund. It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.) Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something. So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important basic was to Microsoft’s initial success and how much of his own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more technical interest in it than other products.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

com2kid 4y ago

I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for prime time[2]. Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really knowledgeable in the space. Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the early 2000s. Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often too early on seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of the curve can be a disadvantage. [1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved over through clever presentation to the user. [2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate, but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully confuse most sensors.

zamfi 4y ago
Heart rate detection?
int0x2e 4y ago
Lots of great insight. Thank you for sharing! Your comment about being too early is on point, though I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing. If you're a big company with scale and cash to support it, exploring new frontiers is probably worth it - you either stumble upon the next big thing, or you at least get to stake your flag through some patents, and in the process - make it so if this things does grow - you already have some kernel you can build upon to start that up without having to pay up for an acquisition... It's not perfect, but from a risk / reward perspective - I can see how this strategy could serve a large tech company well over decades...
- com2kid 4y ago
  After a decade at MS I have come to believe that there is such a thing as a first mover disadvantage. Being too early to market is just as bad as being late. Basically a new venture at a high tech company gets a lot of enthusiasm and funding, but it if doesn't succeed within some time frame, not only does it get abandoned, but the company in general won't try again for quite some time. Something else that can happen is the early v1 product gets a bad reputation, making it hard for a better v2 to gain traction. This actually hurt Windows Phone sales. Windows Mobile 5/6 (and Pocket PC before) were miserable consumer products[1]. Sales agents in cellphone stores learned not to sell phones from Microsoft, because their device sales bonus would get clawed back when the device was returned. (Manufacturers give $$ to sales staff for each phone sold from that manufacturer, or at least that is how the market worked back when I was last in it, info is circa 2010! When Windows Phone came out, 2 bad things happened. 1. Sales staff wasn't being offered bonuses for selling Windows Phones 2. When everyone realized how big of a disaster that move was, bonuses started being offered, but staff had been burned by 7-8 years of horrible return rates on prior Microsoft smart phones, everyone knew iPhones didn't get returned, so sales staff pushed iPhones. oops! Microsoft Sync is another one. Microsoft tried to make Android Auto back in 2007! Holy shit. Just think about that. In 2007 MP3 playback was still an extra add on in many models. AUX ports were an add on! No one had smart phones! It was crazy ahead of its time. And cars just weren't designed to be "smart" yet. Heck I am pretty sure in 2007 you could still find a few cars that didn't have power windows. Oh I also used something that looked a lot like docker containers back at Microsoft. It was chained and nested VHD partitions that you could update the OS and Apps separately by just dropping in and relinking the VHDs, so the apps and dependencies were one self contained virtual hard drive image, to upgrade the apps just run some magic commands and the existing OS image had a new app image attached to it. Microsoft had a working, reportedly playable at reasonable speed (never saw it myself) XBox 360 emulator for PC around, I think maybe 2008 or 2009? To be clear, that is an insane technological accomplishment, to have it running at playable speeds on PCs of the time. I got despondent working at Microsoft because I saw so much cool technology just fall by the wayside, or get mismanaged, or get a v1 launched early and then have no one believe in the v2. Amazon Astro, their semi-autonomous robot, yeah MS tried to do that in 2012 or so. Failed because the tech wasn't ready yet (and for many other reasons!) Microsoft tried to do eBooks back in 2000. Oops, way too early. [1] Windows Mobile pre WP 7 was never meant to be a consumer product. Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. Pre-iPhone Microsoft even had a nice little report from some research firm saying consumers would never pay for a cellphone, they would only, en mass, get cell phones for free from their provider in return for the 2 year contract lock in. This was myopic as fuck. As a new college hire I felt like banging my head against the wall every single day for the horrible business decisions that I saw being made, and this was before the iPhone was announced! An example of this closed mindset: When I first started at work I got my company Windows Mobile device, and shortly thereafter I went out shopping for a new TV. I was at the store wondering which one to get when I realized I could pull out my phone and do research right there. I literally stopped in my tracks and realized that having the internet in my pocket was going to be a huge societal shift. When I told my coworkers what had happened, even the next youngest member on the team dismissed what I said as being inconsequential. Year later, same co-worker was proudly showing off the barcode scanning app on his iPhone that let him comparison shop in stores...

phillipcarter 4y ago

There's a lot of places within Microsoft that operate with an extremely high degree of attention to detail, completeness, and utter mastery over a topic. It's amazing. For example, the C# language design committee will, almost to a fault, consider every single little micro-scenario for a proposal and weight them all together to figure out if it's going to be feasible to implement, able to accomplish the goals that the proposal sets out, and if it fits in with the "spirit" of the rest of the language. I think it's a rarity in software to have such care put into the design and implementation process and it's amazing that these things are alive and well within Microsoft.

alexklarjr 4y ago
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  I was going to have a thoughtful reply, but I looked at your comment history and it seems like you have absolutely zero nuance or objectivity in your evaluation of Microsoft software.
kirse 4y ago
consider every single little micro-scenario for a proposal That does sound like a lot of effort to clone the branch from the F# team.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hintymad 4y ago

Equally impressive was that Joel was hired as a product manager (I believe the official title was Program Manager, but writing product spec nowadays is done by eng or by product managers) fresh out of school, yet he was able to come up with detailed and highly technical product spec - a trait that many product managers do not have, especially in a big company. It also shows the talent density of the young Microsoft, just like in the young Google, or the young Facebook. Edit: s/Project Manager/Program Manager/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dan-robertson 4y ago
The title was ‘program manager’ which may have implied different things. He was just out of school but also older than a typical graduate so perhaps a little more wise to the world?
- hintymad 4y ago
  Thanks! Oh yeah, program manager. I got it messed up.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

I used to know guys from Microsoft Germany. One day they were debugging some obscure issue in the memory management of Windows 2000. Gates came into their office and asked what they were doing. They explained the situation and they were surprised that Gates had a solid understanding of the issue and could discuss it on a deep technical level. They also said that Gates (and Ballmer too) has an incredible memory. He supposedly can recall who attended meetings years ago and what was said. His brain seems to operate on a much higher level from most other people.

imron 4y ago
One of my favorite Bill Gates stories. http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
- helmholtz 4y ago
  Brilliant. I had to look up how to solve it, but highly recommend others spend some time on it.
- gregvab 4y ago
  Finally figured it out. It's in the name!!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

aeturnum 4y ago

> It is hard to say he didn't earn it. This is wrong, it is extremely easy to say he didn't earn it. Calculated as a salary, Bill Gates would need to be paid ~$185,000 an hour since birth to reach his current level of wealth[1]. Of course, that's a little silly, babies don't have jobs. If you constrain him to the time he actively worked at Microsoft his hourly rate goes up to ~$1,582,000. I think Bill Gates is in the top 0.01% of people for problem solving ability. He's very, very good. But let us not pretend that he "earned" his money. He did an enormous amount of very competent work well above the ability of most of us - and there is no way that his stupendous output comes close to being a "fair trade" for the compensation he received. [1] ~109 billion dollars according to google

clircle 4y ago
Why did he not earn his money? All you managed to say was that bill gates is wealthy and smart. Did he steal the money?
- colordrops 4y ago
  The underlying assumption is that if Bill didn't do what he did, whatever products and value werw delivered that earned him the money would not have been created. Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field. Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund. It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.) Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something. So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.