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Is there any reason to believe that the founders of Microsoft, Google, etc did not have other side projects ? And that if one of those projects had succeeded,
by RobGR 18y ago
Is there any reason to believe that the founders of Microsoft, Google, etc did not have other side projects ? And that if one of those projects had succeeded, they would never mention the others, because pretty much everything writen by or about them is various forms of corporate propaganda ?
If anyone would know the answer to that, it would probably be Stephen Levy, I respect his books on the history of the tech industry a lot.
- nostrademons 18y agoThey did have other side-projects - Bill Gates and Paul Allen did the course scheduling for their high school, and they had a consulting contract for software to control traffic lights, and they each took part-time jobs at Altair before Microsoft took off. However, except for the Altair/Microsoft split (where they were working on very closely-related projects), they worked on them sequentially, finishing one before they did the next.
- breck 18y agoMy guess would be that either: 1) They had side projects outside of the company that we never hear about because they ended up being orders of magnitude less than their respective companies or 2) They had "side projects", but everything they did was under the umbrella of the company. Things like the Google Appliance; Microsoft's many lines of products besides the big ones(it was years before DOS/Windows came out) etc.
- ken 18y agoOf course the founders of Microsoft and Google had other projects: the college degree programs they dropped out of.