9 ms·

How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates

90 points by krmboya 13y ago

pedalpete 13y ago
I find this somewhat offensive for Bill Gates. Is this considered satire? Or just poor taste? Of course, this fails to take into account the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft. Let's not forget that Steve Jobs came from a much more modest background and was a great competitor to Bill Gates and Microsoft. It wasn't all about having the background of a trust fund to fall back on. I fear that people will take this article to heart without realising that it wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his instinct and drive.
- tomh 13y ago
  Also, keep in mind that this article was written in October of 1998. Pre-Gates Foundation, Pre-Windows Vista even. Most of us don't have the same view of Bill Gates (or Microsoft itself) now that we once did.
  - michas 13y ago
    After Gates Foundation I despise Bill and Melinda even more: http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/melinda-gates-family-planning-means.html http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/melinda-gates-family-pla...
    - gambiting 13y ago
      Reading posts like yours and the article you posted make me sick. Sick because of all the bs that is in there,but it only takes a few seconds to look at other articles posted there to see that it is written by a complete nut-job, and it appeals to the same audience, which you can see after reading the comments.
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        Instead of ad hominem, you could have told me why the article made you sick. Now you've forced me to read it. Edit: And I will not forgive. For anyone else: "Speaking with CNN, [Melinda] Gates gave her diatribe on how she justifies her position as part of the global Elite who are actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90%; starting in the third world nations." In order to appreciate this article, you'll have to accept that there is a global Elite with a capital 'E' actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90% as one of many premises.
        mavhc 13y ago
        And that contraception reduces population
    - enko 13y ago
      That website was so obnoxiously ignorant I at first thought it was a parody, but if so, it is profoundly unfunny. It embeds a video called Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving?. It features a chubby man on a couch (username SPUCProLife) sincerely arguing that very point, seemingly unaware of the irony anyone with an IQ over 70 could readily perceive. With his bad hair, misaligned glasses and tragic fashion sense, he reminds me of Dwight from The Office, except rather less amusing as he draws straight-faced comparisons between contraception and the nazi Eugenics program. As Obi-wan would say, michas, you should go home and rethink your life. This trash - for idiots, by idiots - has no place here.
      - rev_null 13y ago
        They also run some interesting ads on that site: http://activistpost.net/teslasecret/ http://activistpost.net/teslasecret/
      - kamaal 13y ago
        >>Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving? As some one staying in a Developing nation(India), I can absolutely attest to the fact that excess population is root of all problems. Poor people have kids when they can't afford to raise them, give them education, health care or even as simple a necessity like food. The net result is poverty, which worsens with every kid they have. If you look at it closely, many a times its due to total ignorance about contraceptive methods. So educating the poor, especially in third world nations is actually a very nice way of tackling poverty. I would have great respect for people who are involved in spreading information and educating poor people about such methods.
      - judk 13y ago
        HN, Next time you want to call something ad hominem, see if it meets this bar.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I don't think it's satire, I think it's a hack job. A lot of people were born into a similar situation as Gates. Very few achieved what he did. This was written in the time of Microsoft invincibility, where everyone was afraid that Microsoft would enter their market with a free offering. Now it's the opposite - Mircosoft's stock has been flat since then, and they're the ones more concerned about cheaper competitors. It takes a little of the hating edge off of Gates.
  - hackerboos 13y ago
    >A lot of people were born into a similar situation as Gates. Very few achieved what he did. The question is: Could Gates have achieved what he did had he not been born into a similar situation?
    - hingisundhorsa 13y ago
      Yes, a person with drive might achieve that. That said, it'd probably be massively less likely. Out of the 100 million kids in India born into poverty, probably 1 in a 100 would make it to a blue collar job, 1 in 10k to a white collar job, 1 in 100k to a professional, 1 in 1M to be a millionaire, and 1 in 100M to be a billionaire. I'm fudging the data but would I be massively wrong?
    - marcamillion 13y ago
      He wouldn't be Gates if he was born into another situation. So the person born in the current Gates' situation would prolly have achieved what Gates did - given that Gates is who he is because he won the ovarian lottery.
      - bsullivan01 13y ago
        So the person born in the current Gates' situation would prolly have achieved what Gates did - given that Gates is who he is because he won the ovarian lottery. If he had a twin brother he's be, say Larry Ellison or Warren Buffet? No doubt knowing that daddy is there for you if you fail and that Harvard will take you back is a huge relief and fall back strategy but Gates did make some amazingly good decisions. Some forty years later his company is worth close to $300 Billion and makes over $20 Billion in profit, year after year.
- Tmmrn 13y ago
  > the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft. Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal just as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653 http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107... Sure, it was "clever" and "risky" and it probably was a lot of "hard work"...
  - progn 13y ago
    > included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?
    - icebraining 13y ago
      I don't see how is Uber unethical or anticompetitive. Refusing to play by the rules created by the taxi lobbies is not anticompetitive.
    - enko 13y ago
      A little too much snark for my taste but this is fundamentally a good point. The same people who would rail against MS's rule-bending are very likely to be the same ones cheering on regulatory disobedience in startups, and frankly the latter's is often far more unambiguous. Good food for thought there, thanks.
      - e40 13y ago
        regulatory disobedience in startups is not the same thing as anti-competitive practices.
      - judk 13y ago
        I don't know. Folks who suffered under MS in the 90s have a sour taste for anticompetitive behavior and criticise Uber/AirBnB. The folks who know BillG as a malaria guy, or who cheered MS back then, are the ones who tolerate the ends by all means.
- roel_v 13y ago
  The article is untitled as far as I can see, but the first comment was from 1998. Those were very different times. It was considered 'normal' to actually, personally hate Bill Gates and the Microsoft he created, and much of the open source movement in those days was about 'we hate Microsoft, we write open source software to destroy it'. The Slashdot 'borg' icon for Microsoft is only of the few remaining relics reflecting the zeitgeist of then.
  - judk 13y ago
    The zeitgeist is around Apple, Facebook, and Google now, since they managed to topple MS. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
    - steven2012 13y ago
      Topple MS? How so? MSFT hasn't been toppled, they have just failed to increase their dominance in other areas of contemporary computing. Microsoft still makes $70+B per year in revenues. MSFT is no where near being toppled, except in mindshare, they made record revenues last year. MSFT, AAPL, FB and GOOG are the top in their own separate verticals, and none can make a dent in the other's vertical. Arguably FB and GOOG are competing for ad revenue dollars, but FB is the leader in social networking, and GOOG is the leader in search.
- gadders 13y ago
  I'm perfectly willing to put the point of view in his article to the test. Please can someone set me up a multi-million dollar trust fund and I'll do my best to become a billionaire.
- seiji 13y ago
  I find this somewhat offensive for Bill Gates. When somebody is one of the three richest people in the world, is it our job to feel offended (or anything) for them in any context? They've won. They aren't playing the game of life or society any longer. his instinct and drive. His instinct, drive, and his mother's friendship with the CEO of IBM. Nice to have.
- Sagat 13y ago
  "I fear that people will take this article to heart without realizing that it wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his instinct and drive." False. Both of things things enormously contributed to his success. There are tons of people with drive who never even got close to his achievements, and tons more with ideal situations who never created anything of value. Gates had an ideal mix of character and good fortune. There's also the sad fact that personality derives a lot from upbringing and genetics, so you could say that the "instinct and drive" Gates had was also a facet of luck. In a way, most of what we are is roughly predetermined. Our character is a throw of the dice. We don't even know if free will exists at all. This is why I tend to laugh at libertarians who believe they owe nothing to anyone. Face it, luck is perhaps 90% of any tremendous success. Just because Gladwell wrote about this doesn't mean it's not true. It's not a reason to diss Gates and his ilk and stay envious and bitter; it just means we should stop basing our self worth on whether we've changed the world or not, and stop adulating important figures or trying to derive lessons from their every move. Plenty of innately great people have failed and plenty of less than adequate people have succeeded immensely.
  - mistermann 13y ago
    > Face it, luck is perhaps 90% of any tremendous success. Just because Gladwell wrote about this doesn't mean it's not true. Could you write something to convince us that it is true? (And if not, then why do you seemingly believe it so strongly?)
    - Sagat 13y ago
      Do I really need to? I think you can come to this conclusion on your own. When you are born, there are already a ton a factors which will stay with you (well, mostly) till you die. Your health and innate intelligence will have a huge effect. Your carers and the early environment as well. As a biological creature, you can never be left untouched by your environment. You can never be truly free. In fact, is there anything you can say is the sole result of your own person? That question is impossible to answer because the person you are has been molded by a ton of different experiences, both positive and negative and is not a static object. The whole point of my post is that it's silly to to claim that some people have "deserved" their success or failure, or that you can do anything if you want it bad enough. The very fact that you are able to be deeply driven is the consequence of factors forever beyond your control. I'm not saying you should give up and do nothing, just that we should have a more relaxed, forgiving and objective view of the moral and intrinsic value of individuals.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  The thing is that most people will exhibit a very different risk profile when they have a (set for life) safety net. You dare to drop out, you dare to have a big mouth, you dare to gamble. Maybe Jobs was just a dare devil by nature (or, more likely, simply saw the world and his life's goals in an entirely different light than most of us). Most people will take some gambles when young but then rapidly revert to 'the norm' because they start worrying about the big, scary future where you need to provide for yourself and others. If that worry is not at all on your mind, you'll make vastly different decisions. And I do believe that matters a lot in business. Some people I know with those funds just got very lazy in their twenties, went on drugs etc and are either dead or doing ok now. But most are very successful in what they do and as it appears never needed the trust fund as they made more on their own. I say they would never made the companies they made without that safety net firmly in place.
gchokov 13y ago
Easy. Just do what he did.
- Mahn 13y ago
  When he did it. Good luck with that time travel.
- Pitarou 13y ago
  And do it as least as well as he did it.
Stately 13y ago
It really was quite the fashionable thing to shit on Bill Gates in the late nineties, eh?
- stinos 13y ago
  IANAP but it might very well be the way overly jealous people try to cope with their jealousy.
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    I think it's easy to forget how ruthless Bill Gates and Microsoft actually was, never mind the fact that they were convicted for antitrust violations. The history is littered with casualties from what started as well-intentioned partnerships with Microsoft. So I think the feeling was not so much jealousy, but more that they didn't compete fairly. Especially in the Linux world (where Greenspun was from), and more so after the Halloween documents leaked. That feeling was even more pronounced in 1998, when Microsoft dominated computing and it seemed like _any_ attempt to do it big in software would either have to mean getting bought by, or killed by the sheer hugeness of Microsoft. Nowadays Gates has set up a huge charity, and Microsoft has stumbled on so many things that we kind of feel bad for them instead.
- xradionut 13y ago
  Yes it was. But in the 90's we didn't have any great personal operating systems competing yet, and no one got fired for buying Microsoft products.
  - mattsfrey 13y ago
    That's important to note; linux and mac weren't really viable options in the 90's for most people.
    - judk 13y ago
      And BeOS and OS/2 In part due to MS antitrust violations, such as exclusivity deals with major PC manufacturers, buying and shuttering competitors, lying about vaporware, and stealing trade secrets frok technology partners. WinNT came about in part due to scamming IBM on OS/2 development partnership.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
Perhaps a better strategy would be to deliver a lot of value to a lot of people for money.
ck2 13y ago
Strangely I don't begrudge Bill Gate's wealth. There could have been far better examples for this article. He did have more than a little entitlement to get him going but he didn't rest on it - when he was in the right time at the right place he worked hard to make it happen. Plus he is now giving all his wealth to charity and virtually nothing to his kids as inheritance. How about the Walton children or the Koch children.
- judk 13y ago
  He isn't giving all his wealth. He is keeping more than any one else (to insignificant approximaton error) will ever hope to see in their life.
  - mistermann 13y ago
    I imagine the recipients probably have a more positive and realistic view of the matter than you.
- lifeformed 13y ago
  I agree, I think his use of his entitlement should be exemplified. Are people born into wealth supposed to feel bad about it, and not make the best of the opportunity? He made the most of it, and now he is in a prime position to do objective good. (Edited for clarity.)
  - ck2 13y ago
    Just to clarify, I meant that some people are born into wealth and don't do anything but live off a trust fund, which is the opposite of what he did.
    - lifeformed 13y ago
      Oh yeah, I agree with you, I should probably reword my response though, it sounds like I am disagreeing.
Dogamondo 13y ago
Hmmm, I enjoyed this article. Maybe its because it validated potential failure by being able to blame it on not coming from the 'right' background or having the opportunities the article uses as an argument for his success. Upon reflection it's a bit depressing too. After reading Steve Jobs biography the one ingredient in common between both entrepreneurs I seem to lack is that inherent harshness to call a spade a spade and not care about offending people in the process. I can't help but default to finding praise in mediocrity rather than coming down as a tyrant on anything less than perfect. Which behaviour is more outlierish, and is that a trait of the most successful in reality?
- mattsfrey 13y ago
  I think people that do serious business consistently over time in the single minded pursuit of wealth just tend to be megalomaniacal assholes by nature, especially at that level. In general there are good sources to point towards lavish praise and constructive criticism as being better recipes for boosting employee productivity, so any success in that arena is probably despite their character traits, not because of them. Of course when it comes down to brass tacks and making decisions, you have to be ruthlessly objective, so these traits would be useful there.
  - judk 13y ago
    Even if it would be better to treat staff well, it is likely to me that abusing external partners and the law and other externalities is profit generating.
triplesec 13y ago
This isn't one of Philip Greenspun's better articles, but it's a deliberate troll of the Gladwellian kind to make you see that your assumptions of success may not be entirely accurate. Where he makes assertions, most of them are factually correct. The rest is a trolling frame to get you to think about the question of Microsoft's management and decisionmaking as a strategy for success. Which you may be doing.
- mattsfrey 13y ago
  I read Outliers and got a similar impression. It's definitely indisputable that the vast majority of successes come from an established platform of advantage, but it shouldn't totally demerit their accomplishments.
- danielweber 13y ago
  This is from 1998, if not sooner. I remember reading it back in the 20th century. Definitely written before Gladwell was a name at all. (I remember being so edgy in 1996 that I had the Bill Gates Wealth Clock as my start page. And a few years later my screensaver was "don't touch anything in Bill Gates's half." Fun times, fun times. 1999-me wouldn't believe my current opinions of Gates vis-a-vis Jobs.)
  - triplesec 13y ago
    Indeed. he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita and I likes his photo.net too which I think may still be going, and then apparently some idiot VCs hijacked his Arsdigita and ruined it http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
    - qohen 13y ago
      he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita He still is: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/ (BTW, if memory serves, back then he didn't have an actual blog, per se, but posted essays occasionally such as the one being discussed here.)
bluedino 13y ago
Looking back at the article: 'Train your CEO' Yea, that Ballmer guy worked out really well. Do as HP does in regards to profits? Months after this article was written, Carly Fiorina took the reigns of HP. Oof.
Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
"When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail." Yep, that worked out well for them.
- seiji 13y ago
  Hotmail is still one of the top three webmail providers. Sad, but true. WebTV was just too early. It wanted to be a tablet experience on a TV with a remote keyboard. What it should have been is modern day AppleTV/Roku (which wasn't possible back then with dialup and 1.5M DSL speeds).
  - peacemaker 13y ago
    Not sure why it's "sad" that Hotmail is a top three provider? It works well and has a simple layout that is easy to use for most people, even those who are less technically minded. I'd say that was quite an achievement.
  - Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
    Microsoft's online services division (including Hotmail) has cost them millions, if not billions over the years. MS may have gained and held a foothold in assorted online spaces but they've never made money in the space as a whole and it's highly questionable whether they've gained any strategic benefit from it. From a business perspective it's very questionable whether MS really achieved anything with either purchase. Essentially the OP uses the acquisitions to suggest that you can just buy what you don't invent, but history says that that approach really didn't work out well at all for them in either the short or long term.
  - mistermann 13y ago
    Sad, because....?
    - aclevernickname 13y ago
      learn some history, junior.
seivan 13y ago
I've felt like an expendable code monkey being under utilized and shoe-horned into code only on a platform that is very visual and exploited by non devs calling the shots/ideas/features/fun. This article didn't make things better.
Roboprog 13y ago
Thank God that portable devices are chipping away at the relevance of Windows every year. May the trend continue.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  Open standards adopted by the internet and mobile devices and the have made it highly unlikely that any OS could every achieve the level of lock in that made Windows what it was. If you send me a mail you don't know where I'll be or what sort of machine I'll be using when I open it. If you write a blog post you don't want to have to care what browser I'll use. Sure there's a base level of functionality that any OS will need to provide to be a workable computing device (mail, web, maybe the ability to at least view PDF and Office-type documents, that sort of thing) but there are already dozens of OSes providing that and it feels unlikely that there could ever be anything big enough to move us all back to a single platform. Open standards rock.
ekm2 13y ago
You're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Especially working in painful low-level imperative languages such as C or Java How true is this,especially the last sentence?
exo_duz 13y ago
I really don't agree with this Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming. I agree that you cannot micromanage it but you also have to pass it on to someone who is capable. "However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job." The above point is true but the quality of code obviously leads to less bugs and security holes. I have had horror stories of my friends hiring coders in India. The work that was given back has been a mess and 90% of the time requires a whole rewrite. Point - Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.

90 points by krmboya 13y ago

I find this somewhat offensive for Bill Gates. Is this considered satire? Or just poor taste? Of course, this fails to take into account the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft. Let's not forget that Steve Jobs came from a much more modest background and was a great competitor to Bill Gates and Microsoft. It wasn't all about having the background of a trust fund to fall back on. I fear that people will take this article to heart without realising that it wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his instinct and drive.

tomh 13y ago
Also, keep in mind that this article was written in October of 1998. Pre-Gates Foundation, Pre-Windows Vista even. Most of us don't have the same view of Bill Gates (or Microsoft itself) now that we once did.
- michas 13y ago
  After Gates Foundation I despise Bill and Melinda even more: http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/melinda-gates-family-planning-means.html http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/melinda-gates-family-pla...
  - gambiting 13y ago
    Reading posts like yours and the article you posted make me sick. Sick because of all the bs that is in there,but it only takes a few seconds to look at other articles posted there to see that it is written by a complete nut-job, and it appeals to the same audience, which you can see after reading the comments.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      Instead of ad hominem, you could have told me why the article made you sick. Now you've forced me to read it. Edit: And I will not forgive. For anyone else: "Speaking with CNN, [Melinda] Gates gave her diatribe on how she justifies her position as part of the global Elite who are actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90%; starting in the third world nations." In order to appreciate this article, you'll have to accept that there is a global Elite with a capital 'E' actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90% as one of many premises.
      - mavhc 13y ago
        And that contraception reduces population
  - enko 13y ago
    That website was so obnoxiously ignorant I at first thought it was a parody, but if so, it is profoundly unfunny. It embeds a video called Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving?. It features a chubby man on a couch (username SPUCProLife) sincerely arguing that very point, seemingly unaware of the irony anyone with an IQ over 70 could readily perceive. With his bad hair, misaligned glasses and tragic fashion sense, he reminds me of Dwight from The Office, except rather less amusing as he draws straight-faced comparisons between contraception and the nazi Eugenics program. As Obi-wan would say, michas, you should go home and rethink your life. This trash - for idiots, by idiots - has no place here.
    - rev_null 13y ago
      They also run some interesting ads on that site: http://activistpost.net/teslasecret/ http://activistpost.net/teslasecret/
    - kamaal 13y ago
      >>Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving? As some one staying in a Developing nation(India), I can absolutely attest to the fact that excess population is root of all problems. Poor people have kids when they can't afford to raise them, give them education, health care or even as simple a necessity like food. The net result is poverty, which worsens with every kid they have. If you look at it closely, many a times its due to total ignorance about contraceptive methods. So educating the poor, especially in third world nations is actually a very nice way of tackling poverty. I would have great respect for people who are involved in spreading information and educating poor people about such methods.
    - judk 13y ago
      HN, Next time you want to call something ad hominem, see if it meets this bar.
mathattack 13y ago
I don't think it's satire, I think it's a hack job. A lot of people were born into a similar situation as Gates. Very few achieved what he did. This was written in the time of Microsoft invincibility, where everyone was afraid that Microsoft would enter their market with a free offering. Now it's the opposite - Mircosoft's stock has been flat since then, and they're the ones more concerned about cheaper competitors. It takes a little of the hating edge off of Gates.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  >A lot of people were born into a similar situation as Gates. Very few achieved what he did. The question is: Could Gates have achieved what he did had he not been born into a similar situation?
  - hingisundhorsa 13y ago
    Yes, a person with drive might achieve that. That said, it'd probably be massively less likely. Out of the 100 million kids in India born into poverty, probably 1 in a 100 would make it to a blue collar job, 1 in 10k to a white collar job, 1 in 100k to a professional, 1 in 1M to be a millionaire, and 1 in 100M to be a billionaire. I'm fudging the data but would I be massively wrong?
  - marcamillion 13y ago
    He wouldn't be Gates if he was born into another situation. So the person born in the current Gates' situation would prolly have achieved what Gates did - given that Gates is who he is because he won the ovarian lottery.
    - bsullivan01 13y ago
      So the person born in the current Gates' situation would prolly have achieved what Gates did - given that Gates is who he is because he won the ovarian lottery. If he had a twin brother he's be, say Larry Ellison or Warren Buffet? No doubt knowing that daddy is there for you if you fail and that Harvard will take you back is a huge relief and fall back strategy but Gates did make some amazingly good decisions. Some forty years later his company is worth close to $300 Billion and makes over $20 Billion in profit, year after year.
Tmmrn 13y ago
> the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft. Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal just as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653 http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107... Sure, it was "clever" and "risky" and it probably was a lot of "hard work"...
- progn 13y ago
  > included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I don't see how is Uber unethical or anticompetitive. Refusing to play by the rules created by the taxi lobbies is not anticompetitive.
  - enko 13y ago
    A little too much snark for my taste but this is fundamentally a good point. The same people who would rail against MS's rule-bending are very likely to be the same ones cheering on regulatory disobedience in startups, and frankly the latter's is often far more unambiguous. Good food for thought there, thanks.
    - e40 13y ago
      regulatory disobedience in startups is not the same thing as anti-competitive practices.
    - judk 13y ago
      I don't know. Folks who suffered under MS in the 90s have a sour taste for anticompetitive behavior and criticise Uber/AirBnB. The folks who know BillG as a malaria guy, or who cheered MS back then, are the ones who tolerate the ends by all means.
roel_v 13y ago
The article is untitled as far as I can see, but the first comment was from 1998. Those were very different times. It was considered 'normal' to actually, personally hate Bill Gates and the Microsoft he created, and much of the open source movement in those days was about 'we hate Microsoft, we write open source software to destroy it'. The Slashdot 'borg' icon for Microsoft is only of the few remaining relics reflecting the zeitgeist of then.
- judk 13y ago
  The zeitgeist is around Apple, Facebook, and Google now, since they managed to topple MS. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
  - steven2012 13y ago
    Topple MS? How so? MSFT hasn't been toppled, they have just failed to increase their dominance in other areas of contemporary computing. Microsoft still makes $70+B per year in revenues. MSFT is no where near being toppled, except in mindshare, they made record revenues last year. MSFT, AAPL, FB and GOOG are the top in their own separate verticals, and none can make a dent in the other's vertical. Arguably FB and GOOG are competing for ad revenue dollars, but FB is the leader in social networking, and GOOG is the leader in search.
gadders 13y ago
I'm perfectly willing to put the point of view in his article to the test. Please can someone set me up a multi-million dollar trust fund and I'll do my best to become a billionaire.
seiji 13y ago
I find this somewhat offensive for Bill Gates. When somebody is one of the three richest people in the world, is it our job to feel offended (or anything) for them in any context? They've won. They aren't playing the game of life or society any longer. his instinct and drive. His instinct, drive, and his mother's friendship with the CEO of IBM. Nice to have.
Sagat 13y ago
"I fear that people will take this article to heart without realizing that it wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his instinct and drive." False. Both of things things enormously contributed to his success. There are tons of people with drive who never even got close to his achievements, and tons more with ideal situations who never created anything of value. Gates had an ideal mix of character and good fortune. There's also the sad fact that personality derives a lot from upbringing and genetics, so you could say that the "instinct and drive" Gates had was also a facet of luck. In a way, most of what we are is roughly predetermined. Our character is a throw of the dice. We don't even know if free will exists at all. This is why I tend to laugh at libertarians who believe they owe nothing to anyone. Face it, luck is perhaps 90% of any tremendous success. Just because Gladwell wrote about this doesn't mean it's not true. It's not a reason to diss Gates and his ilk and stay envious and bitter; it just means we should stop basing our self worth on whether we've changed the world or not, and stop adulating important figures or trying to derive lessons from their every move. Plenty of innately great people have failed and plenty of less than adequate people have succeeded immensely.
- mistermann 13y ago
  > Face it, luck is perhaps 90% of any tremendous success. Just because Gladwell wrote about this doesn't mean it's not true. Could you write something to convince us that it is true? (And if not, then why do you seemingly believe it so strongly?)
  - Sagat 13y ago
    Do I really need to? I think you can come to this conclusion on your own. When you are born, there are already a ton a factors which will stay with you (well, mostly) till you die. Your health and innate intelligence will have a huge effect. Your carers and the early environment as well. As a biological creature, you can never be left untouched by your environment. You can never be truly free. In fact, is there anything you can say is the sole result of your own person? That question is impossible to answer because the person you are has been molded by a ton of different experiences, both positive and negative and is not a static object. The whole point of my post is that it's silly to to claim that some people have "deserved" their success or failure, or that you can do anything if you want it bad enough. The very fact that you are able to be deeply driven is the consequence of factors forever beyond your control. I'm not saying you should give up and do nothing, just that we should have a more relaxed, forgiving and objective view of the moral and intrinsic value of individuals.
tluyben2 13y ago
The thing is that most people will exhibit a very different risk profile when they have a (set for life) safety net. You dare to drop out, you dare to have a big mouth, you dare to gamble. Maybe Jobs was just a dare devil by nature (or, more likely, simply saw the world and his life's goals in an entirely different light than most of us). Most people will take some gambles when young but then rapidly revert to 'the norm' because they start worrying about the big, scary future where you need to provide for yourself and others. If that worry is not at all on your mind, you'll make vastly different decisions. And I do believe that matters a lot in business. Some people I know with those funds just got very lazy in their twenties, went on drugs etc and are either dead or doing ok now. But most are very successful in what they do and as it appears never needed the trust fund as they made more on their own. I say they would never made the companies they made without that safety net firmly in place.

gchokov 13y ago

Easy. Just do what he did.

Mahn 13y ago
When he did it. Good luck with that time travel.
Pitarou 13y ago
And do it as least as well as he did it.

Stately 13y ago

It really was quite the fashionable thing to shit on Bill Gates in the late nineties, eh?

stinos 13y ago
IANAP but it might very well be the way overly jealous people try to cope with their jealousy.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  I think it's easy to forget how ruthless Bill Gates and Microsoft actually was, never mind the fact that they were convicted for antitrust violations. The history is littered with casualties from what started as well-intentioned partnerships with Microsoft. So I think the feeling was not so much jealousy, but more that they didn't compete fairly. Especially in the Linux world (where Greenspun was from), and more so after the Halloween documents leaked. That feeling was even more pronounced in 1998, when Microsoft dominated computing and it seemed like _any_ attempt to do it big in software would either have to mean getting bought by, or killed by the sheer hugeness of Microsoft. Nowadays Gates has set up a huge charity, and Microsoft has stumbled on so many things that we kind of feel bad for them instead.
xradionut 13y ago
Yes it was. But in the 90's we didn't have any great personal operating systems competing yet, and no one got fired for buying Microsoft products.
- mattsfrey 13y ago
  That's important to note; linux and mac weren't really viable options in the 90's for most people.
  - judk 13y ago
    And BeOS and OS/2 In part due to MS antitrust violations, such as exclusivity deals with major PC manufacturers, buying and shuttering competitors, lying about vaporware, and stealing trade secrets frok technology partners. WinNT came about in part due to scamming IBM on OS/2 development partnership.

kintamanimatt 13y ago

Perhaps a better strategy would be to deliver a lot of value to a lot of people for money.

ck2 13y ago

Strangely I don't begrudge Bill Gate's wealth. There could have been far better examples for this article. He did have more than a little entitlement to get him going but he didn't rest on it - when he was in the right time at the right place he worked hard to make it happen. Plus he is now giving all his wealth to charity and virtually nothing to his kids as inheritance. How about the Walton children or the Koch children.

judk 13y ago
He isn't giving all his wealth. He is keeping more than any one else (to insignificant approximaton error) will ever hope to see in their life.
- mistermann 13y ago
  I imagine the recipients probably have a more positive and realistic view of the matter than you.
lifeformed 13y ago
I agree, I think his use of his entitlement should be exemplified. Are people born into wealth supposed to feel bad about it, and not make the best of the opportunity? He made the most of it, and now he is in a prime position to do objective good. (Edited for clarity.)
- ck2 13y ago
  Just to clarify, I meant that some people are born into wealth and don't do anything but live off a trust fund, which is the opposite of what he did.
  - lifeformed 13y ago
    Oh yeah, I agree with you, I should probably reword my response though, it sounds like I am disagreeing.

Dogamondo 13y ago

Hmmm, I enjoyed this article. Maybe its because it validated potential failure by being able to blame it on not coming from the 'right' background or having the opportunities the article uses as an argument for his success. Upon reflection it's a bit depressing too. After reading Steve Jobs biography the one ingredient in common between both entrepreneurs I seem to lack is that inherent harshness to call a spade a spade and not care about offending people in the process. I can't help but default to finding praise in mediocrity rather than coming down as a tyrant on anything less than perfect. Which behaviour is more outlierish, and is that a trait of the most successful in reality?

mattsfrey 13y ago
I think people that do serious business consistently over time in the single minded pursuit of wealth just tend to be megalomaniacal assholes by nature, especially at that level. In general there are good sources to point towards lavish praise and constructive criticism as being better recipes for boosting employee productivity, so any success in that arena is probably despite their character traits, not because of them. Of course when it comes down to brass tacks and making decisions, you have to be ruthlessly objective, so these traits would be useful there.
- judk 13y ago
  Even if it would be better to treat staff well, it is likely to me that abusing external partners and the law and other externalities is profit generating.

triplesec 13y ago

This isn't one of Philip Greenspun's better articles, but it's a deliberate troll of the Gladwellian kind to make you see that your assumptions of success may not be entirely accurate. Where he makes assertions, most of them are factually correct. The rest is a trolling frame to get you to think about the question of Microsoft's management and decisionmaking as a strategy for success. Which you may be doing.

mattsfrey 13y ago
I read Outliers and got a similar impression. It's definitely indisputable that the vast majority of successes come from an established platform of advantage, but it shouldn't totally demerit their accomplishments.
danielweber 13y ago
This is from 1998, if not sooner. I remember reading it back in the 20th century. Definitely written before Gladwell was a name at all. (I remember being so edgy in 1996 that I had the Bill Gates Wealth Clock as my start page. And a few years later my screensaver was "don't touch anything in Bill Gates's half." Fun times, fun times. 1999-me wouldn't believe my current opinions of Gates vis-a-vis Jobs.)
- triplesec 13y ago
  Indeed. he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita and I likes his photo.net too which I think may still be going, and then apparently some idiot VCs hijacked his Arsdigita and ruined it http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
  - qohen 13y ago
    he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita He still is: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/ (BTW, if memory serves, back then he didn't have an actual blog, per se, but posted essays occasionally such as the one being discussed here.)

bluedino 13y ago

Looking back at the article: 'Train your CEO' Yea, that Ballmer guy worked out really well. Do as HP does in regards to profits? Months after this article was written, Carly Fiorina took the reigns of HP. Oof.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago

"When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail." Yep, that worked out well for them.

seiji 13y ago
Hotmail is still one of the top three webmail providers. Sad, but true. WebTV was just too early. It wanted to be a tablet experience on a TV with a remote keyboard. What it should have been is modern day AppleTV/Roku (which wasn't possible back then with dialup and 1.5M DSL speeds).
- peacemaker 13y ago
  Not sure why it's "sad" that Hotmail is a top three provider? It works well and has a simple layout that is easy to use for most people, even those who are less technically minded. I'd say that was quite an achievement.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  Microsoft's online services division (including Hotmail) has cost them millions, if not billions over the years. MS may have gained and held a foothold in assorted online spaces but they've never made money in the space as a whole and it's highly questionable whether they've gained any strategic benefit from it. From a business perspective it's very questionable whether MS really achieved anything with either purchase. Essentially the OP uses the acquisitions to suggest that you can just buy what you don't invent, but history says that that approach really didn't work out well at all for them in either the short or long term.
- mistermann 13y ago
  Sad, because....?
  - aclevernickname 13y ago
    learn some history, junior.

seivan 13y ago

I've felt like an expendable code monkey being under utilized and shoe-horned into code only on a platform that is very visual and exploited by non devs calling the shots/ideas/features/fun. This article didn't make things better.

Roboprog 13y ago

Thank God that portable devices are chipping away at the relevance of Windows every year. May the trend continue.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
Open standards adopted by the internet and mobile devices and the have made it highly unlikely that any OS could every achieve the level of lock in that made Windows what it was. If you send me a mail you don't know where I'll be or what sort of machine I'll be using when I open it. If you write a blog post you don't want to have to care what browser I'll use. Sure there's a base level of functionality that any OS will need to provide to be a workable computing device (mail, web, maybe the ability to at least view PDF and Office-type documents, that sort of thing) but there are already dozens of OSes providing that and it feels unlikely that there could ever be anything big enough to move us all back to a single platform. Open standards rock.

ekm2 13y ago

You're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Especially working in painful low-level imperative languages such as C or Java How true is this,especially the last sentence?

exo_duz 13y ago

I really don't agree with this Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming. I agree that you cannot micromanage it but you also have to pass it on to someone who is capable. "However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job." The above point is true but the quality of code obviously leads to less bugs and security holes. I have had horror stories of my friends hiring coders in India. The work that was given back has been a mess and 90% of the time requires a whole rewrite. Point - Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.