I’ve always wondered this. I don’t know much about his history, but I’ve seen pirates of Silicon Valley. It always seemed that he and Steve Jobs really didn’t know so much about the actual technical details of how these computers operated. For instance. Would Bill be familiar with any of the code of Windows XP? If he looked at it, could he decipher what it all meant? Or maybe he knows quite a lot about all of it in a general way? I just ask, because BG never wrote DOS, but bought it, right? Also, Steve Jobs wasn’t involved in the more techincal details either, was he? How much do you guys think these two really know…
Gates may not know the technical details of how today’s computers operate–I think he works mostly on his foundation these days–but I assure you that he did in the 1970’s and 1980’s. One of the reasons why Microsoft was so successful was that Gates, unike most software geeks, had deep knowledge of and interest in hardware and understood what computer makers needed even before they understood.
Probably not; I read somewhere that Gates hasn’t written a line of code since the early 1980’s and I don’t think he’s done any serious programming since the first release of DOS. But I think it’s safe to say that he could get back up to speed quickly if he wanted to!
Yes, before DOS Microsoft was known primarily for writing programming languages, so when IBM offered the contract for the PC operating system Microsoft had to buy one. They bought an OS called QDOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, although a fair amount of customization was needed to turn it into DOS.
Well, there have been almost thirty views so far and no answers so I’ll tell you what I know. Supposedly, Gates was a programming whiz who, up until at least the mid-eighties, could clean the clocks of most of his programming staff. As I understand it, he bought DOS ready made because of time constraints caused by IBM’s wanting to rush their computer to market. I would imagine that now, since Microsoft has grown so large, he is involved primarily with the business end rather than the technical end.
Jobs, at least during his first time at Apple, supposedly knew very little (according to Wozniak) about programming and high-level electronics and the technical aspects of hardware. However, he is no slouch intellectually. Wozniak said recently that Jobs may be the brightest person at Apple. However, Jobs’ brilliance seems to be more entrepreneurially-oriented rather than technically so.
I imagine that in time people who have much more knowledge about the two will chime in, but for now I hope this will help.
Why is that important? If you design and Ipod like device that takes the world by storm, why would anyone care if the CEO didn’t have a sub-degree in plastics engineering to understand how all the details of the case were designed. The most important people in the technology world are the “visionaries” that figure out how to get technology to market from conception, design, engineering, production and marketing. You hire people to take care of the details. There are typically dozens of people that are involved in projects of that magnitude. They are the experts in modern technology. It would be ridiculous to expect the visionary to be an expert in all the details of all of the jobs that the experts that he or she hires does.
Bill Gates doesn’t write code because it is a waste of his time. Do you know how big the Microsoft Corporation is? What do expect him to do, walk into the developers area and start writing code? That would not be cost effective to say the least. I have been a developer and the most important thing is to figure out what the business goal actually is. Many trained monkeys call themselves programmers but only take very specific requests without figuring out work their work actually has on the business. The technology to get there is just a tool.
I am very sure that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would be great programmers if that was their role but their visionary work is much more important to trends in world technology.
Gates was a pretty good programmer in his day. Micro-Soft BASIC, for the 8080 and 8086 was written mostly by him.
I heard that Bill Gates killed a guy in the 80’s and paid this one dude to cover it up.
Related quote:
“Steve (Jobs) generally treated Bill (Gates) as someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style. Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn’t actually program.”
–Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution In the Valley
A reference to Antitrust?
Nope. The Onion
Gates watches the software marketplace very closely, if some piece of software is becoming a de facto standard, he summons his druids to quickly reverse engineers it, then he releases the “MS” version. When the next version of Windows is released, he does all he can to make the “outside” version not work anymore. This is what Gates calls “innovation”.
We could make a long list of MS “innovations” and the companies it inevitably ran out of business.
If you can find it, read “Barbarians Led By Bill Gates.” It’s written by one of the original Microsoft guys and details the history of Microsoft up until the IE-Netscape war. Very interesting, especially when you see how much of MS’s success was dumb luck.
IIRC there was a programming contest in the earlier days of Microsoft where Gates using VBasic took on 2-3 other other languages (and programmers) in getting a task accomplished. It was close, but in the end he one. He may be evil incarnate to some, but he’s not a poser, he’s “smart” smart.
Gates is doing what successful business men do, he’s destroying the competition. The goal of all business men should be to completely dominate their market, and the hope is of course (for the market’s sake) that never happens.
What you describe isn’t illegal as long as Gates isn’t violating copyright or patent law while he does it.
Indeed, what he did was not illegal, but perhaps ethically questionable. Most software developers pretty much agree, if you can take MY software and re-write it so it works “better”, then shame on me, you win. BUT, MS would intentionally hide
features of Windows to the outside development community to gain a competitive advantage. This is one of the current MAJOR issues being battled out in the European courts against MS, “the people” are fighting to have MS Windows source revealed to the public, so we all have a level playing field.
Gates has worked long and hard to build his Windows OS into a monopoly, I can’t fault him for that, he deserves the kudos he gets from his followers.
But let’s take a look at another example of a monopoly, AT&T 40 years ago. Let’s say AT&T would change the telephone interface every year (keeping essential interface protocols secret, to gain a competitive advantage), forcing you to buy new AT&T phones and rendering all look-alikes incompatible and obsolete. Do you think there would have been an uproar by the masses?
Back when MS released Virtual Basic, Gates got himself involved in a coding contest to show how easy it was compared to the top program of the day (for some reason I’m thinking Turbo Pascal, but I could be wrong). He was a bit nervous, given that he hadn’t coded in quite a while, but he still won the contest.
IIRC, this happened in the late-80’s.
Erp… that’s the contest that Astro referred to in his* post.
*or her. 
Well as someone that is a huge fan of free competitive markets I’m opposed to monopolies in general, you don’t have to sell me on that. AT&T though pretty much runs a utility, and utilities have long be viewed as government sponsored monopolies that are gifted to a particular company as long as said company follows the rules the Government sets out.
Also in the above post I’m more talking about the AT&T owned Bell system which was a monopoly on local calling service, not to be confused with AT&T’s core business which was long distance. Although to confuse things somewhat AT&T’s long distance service actually used to be viewed as a “utility service” (in that AT&T was given exclusive rights to it by the government.)
I read a book by a Microsoft employee, I think it was called 'Microserfs", about his time there as a programmer. He had numerous stories about how Gates would come into a development meeting, sit down, listen for a bit then getting up and procede to tear the developers and the code apart. According to the book Gates was extremely quick at figuring out what was going on and finding the flaws in the code. IIRC, the writer also meantioned getting memos from Gates that were highly critical of the code the he wrote.
I highly doubt that Gates does as much of the same kind of stuff today. I have no doubt, though, that Gates could wade into a dev project and quickly get up to speed with the code.
He is a smart man.
Slee (Who prefers BSD but runs Windows for games)
Microserfs is a fictional book written by Douglas Coupland that somewhat parodies microsoft.
As for Steve Jobs, I don’t know specifically about his programming skills, but a friend who worked on the Apple campus told me over beers once that everyone is terrified of Steve, since he has a habit of wandering the halls, picking someone at random, and just watching over their shoulder for ten minutes. Then he’ll harshly explain everything they’re doing wrong. And he’s usually right.