Overdrive

Death Marches

By January 1995, seven months before the launch of Windows 95, when Microsoft had only a handful of people working on its own Internet browser, thousands of techno-hip computer users were downloading the Netscape Navigator. Netscape had set the standard, leaving Gates to face the very real possibility of Microsoft’s demise unless the company could do a 180 and overtake Netscape’s sizable lead. Gates was all too aware of what had happened to once-mighty IBM during the last paradigm shift in the computer industry at the dawn of the personal computer revolution.

It’s important to remember just how far behind Miocrosoft was on nearly every innovation. People like to think that only the Ballmer era had this, but in reality Gates was not immune from this either.

On May 26, three months before the launch of Windows 95, Gates had issued a lengthy memo to his executive staff titled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” in which he announced: “Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is critical to every part of our business.” Even as Microsoft readied for the biggest celebration in the company’s history, it had already shifted into overdrive in the race to overtake Netscape.

This is three months before the single biggest launch in Microsoft history! Hell of a pivot. Up until now, Gates was obsessed with this idea of the ‘Information Superhighway’ - they thought smart TV’s would be the next big thing. Then a little company called Netscape showed up and changed the world. This is the only real difference between Ballmer and Gates. Gates, having realized he was late to the scene of the internet, instantly rectifies it by pivoting the entire company towards capturing the market.

The development of Windows 95 had been described by those who survived as a “death march.” Now, once again, sleeping bags would hang from the doors of many Microsoft offices for the long days and nights ahead. The party was over. But what a party it had been.

Microsoft would very much operate a series of death marches. Like Amazon, Apple, and so many other tech companies, the price of greatness is time and balance.

Over the next two months, Andreessen and Bina worked day and night, living on milk, chocolate chip cookies, Mountain Dew, and Skittles. A handful of other hungry, young, and super-smart programmers from the NCSA were recruited to help. Andreessen, the team leader, didn’t tell anyone in management what they were up to. Larry Smarr, director of the NCSA, would not find out about what would be called Mosaic until later, after the work was done, when he was visiting the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a friend gave him a demonstration. “This is going to be incredibly big,” Smarr told his friend.

Note how over and over, great work is done in a near fever state - you get completely absorbed in the flow, lose track of time entirely, and channel greatness. This is how great work is done. If you’re not willing to put in the requisite hours, you are merely cutting short your own flow state. You’re interrupting the compounding that can occur when you truly put your brain against a single problem for a long period of time. This was also precisely how Edwin Land encouraged people to work.

Mosaic contained only 9,000 lines of computer code, thus validating Bill Joy’s prediction that the next great innovation in software would be simple.

The best innovations often are - the core of the Transformer code, for example, was only twenty lines of code.

Microsoft had even been sued by a couple who claimed that the company’s relentless demands on its employees amounted to discrimination against married people.

I can only imagine how bad things were, work life balance wise. But that’s the price sometimes.

“The phone would ring late at night and my wife would say, ‘Don’t tell me that’s Microsoft again.’ It was just the Microsoft way of doing business. I don’t believe they ever really sleep.”

Yup.

Modern Day Rockefeller

The search was then on for a new chairman, a Moses who could lead IBM out of the desert and into the Promised Land. Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, was quoted as saying that Bill Gates would be the best choice to replace Akers as IBM chairman. Gates, his old rival said, had “the right combination of talent and ruthless ambition.” That take-no-prisoners attitude had made Gates the most hated man in the industry and Microsoft the most feared competitor—some would say predator.

Imagine how respected you must be as a competitor for them to nominate you as their savior. Behind all the quilted cardigans and charity appearance, we have forgotten what an absolute monster Gates was on the business field.

Microsoft paid $173 million for Fox—its biggest acquisition ever—and moved Fox’s entire 50-person technology team to the Redmond campus. At the time of the acquisition, Fox had about 10 percent of the database market; within a few months, thanks to Microsoft’s killer sales force, Fox’s unit sales increased 50 percent. By buying Fox, Microsoft was able to go after some of Borland’s customers immediately…

The strength of Microsoft’s go to market cannot be understated. People always think it’s the technology - it’s not. Once you have the distribution engine of the PC and free operating systems, you can peddle any technology to the masses and instantly get widespread free adoption.

Kahn would later say: “Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage.”

Gates is the closest thing we’ve had to a modern day Rockefeller. Absolute killer. And he’s right! What notion of fairness has a place in business?

Microsoft offered to buy Novell for about $2 billion, and Gates met with Noorda in late November to work out the details. But Gates soon had second thoughts. When Noorda did not hear anything more from Microsoft, he called Gates in January 1990 to find out whether the merger was still on. It wasn’t. Noorda was told it was not practical to merge the companies; there were too many technical problems. Ballmer would later explain to Noorda in a letter that Gates was worried about potential antitrust problems. Noorda, however, didn’t accept Microsoft’s spin on the merger breakdown. He believed the merger had been a ruse all along and that Microsoft had used the talks to gain access to confidential information about the company’s networking business.

This is a very common play Microsoft employs repeatedly. Same with Amazon, actually. Lure people in with a hope of a high acquisition; in the mean time, find out their playbook and any strategic insights they have. Then, ruthlessly copy it and steal the market out from under them.

Even Go Corporation sent a lawyer to the meeting. This tiny software company, which had developed an operating system for small, pen-based computers, had its own ax to grind. Microsoft had approached Go about writing applications for pen-based computers and had examined the company’s operating system, then said it wasn’t interested. Soon thereafter Microsoft developed its own operating system for pen-based computers, and some of the programmers who had examined Go’s operating system helped design Microsoft’s.

Big or small it didn’t matter. Bill Gates understood that competition could come from the unlikeliest of places, and if you were going to pose a threat to Microsoft, Gates was going to cut you off at the knees.

What happened? Initially, Microsoft upgraded its own version of DOS to include some of the features of Digital’s operating system; then it cut prices. And when DR DOS 5.0 was introduced in April 1990, Microsoft announced that it was about to bring out DOS 5.0 with the same features, effectively freezing sales of DR DOS as customers eagerly awaited Microsoft’s version of the product. In fact, it took another year before Microsoft’s DOS 5.0 was released. There’s a word for a product that is announced long before its time: vaporware. Although everyone in the industry plays the vaporware game from time to time, no one plays it as well, or as often, as Microsoft.

Deterrance at the business level. No different than many of the claims OpenAI is making to startups today.

[T]hese were troubling business practices by Microsoft, to be sure, but they paled in comparison to growing evidence that Microsoft had deliberately tried to sabotage the market for DR DOS by spreading the word that it would not work properly with Windows. This had become known to the antitrust investigators as the “incompatibility problem.” In fact, DR DOS did work with Windows. But Microsoft programmers had written some curious code into the beta version of Windows 3.1 that was distributed to tens of thousands of selected customers for testing in late 1991 and early 1992. When the beta version was used with DR DOS, an error message popped up on the computer screen, warning “nonfatal error detected.” The user was directed to call Microsoft for assistance. This not only allowed Microsoft to determine who might be using the rival operating system, but it scared away DR DOS customers.

Brilliantly executed. Nothing clears the roads faster than the fear of a steamroller.

Novell leveled a new charge against Microsoft, claiming that some of Novell’s code was discovered in Microsoft’s Access database product without Novell’s authorization. Microsoft denied the charge but removed the code.

We all know what happened here. Never trust a potential acquirer unless you have steep breakup fees.

Stac Electronics, a Carlsbad, California, maker of software that compressed files to save space on a computer’s hard disks, filed suit against Microsoft for patent infringement. It also supplied information to the FTC. The tiny company had tried to negotiate a deal with Microsoft in 1992 so that its award-winning data-compression software could be included in the upcoming version of DOS 6.0. Stac claimed Microsoft tried to leverage the smaller company into an unfavorable deal; and when it refused, Microsoft copied Stac’s technology and built it into its own data-compression product.

And why wouldn’t they?

Gates said of his disgruntled competitors in a Time magazine interview in June: “Lotus lost ground because it was very late in catching the two biggest technology waves: the Macintosh and Windows. Borland International is too distracted with its bad merger with Ashton-Tate. Philippe Kahn is good at playing the saxophone and sailing, but he’s not good at making money. WordPerfect is truly a one-product company. Our most successful software is for the Macintosh. We have a much higher market share on the Mac than anywhere else. How does Apple help us? Well, they sue us in court. In the future, maybe our competitors will decide to become more competent.”

I burst out laughing reading this.

“Gates wanted this business so badly that he was willing to give it [Microsoft Office] away for a while,” said Kahn. “Because of his position in operating systems, he had no problems doing that because Microsoft was making so much money. Bill was buying share and kicking everybody else from the market.”

This is precisely what I like to call a steamroller business. Standard monopoly behavior - you lower the price until you put every single competitor out of business.

“It’s just amazing how destructive he is,” said Kahn, comparing Gates to John D. Rockefeller, who created the Standard Oil monopoly. He complained that Microsoft’s “predatory pricing” of its products had crippled Borland and other software companies. “He’s made it unprofitable for the rest of us. There is no balance of power.” Gates, he insisted, would eventually control every aspect of the computer industry, from applications and operating systems to home banking and interactive television. “It will be a total dictatorship,” Kahn said. “This guy will go down in history as one of the most ruthless and powerful people of all time.”

Yup.

“Whenever you installed Internet Explorer, it effectively destroyed the other browsers on your system. And this change was made after the beta version had come out,” said Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems. In other words, it appeared that Microsoft had added the destructive code to its browser after the final beta version had been tested publicly, but before the finished product shipped. Among the browsers that were disabled or broken by Windows 95 was Netscape Navigator.

The classic Microsoft playbook. You want to take market share while using our operating system? I don’t think so, pal. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s also the clearest case of antitrust there ever was.

Anti Trust

Gates told several of his top executives that if the Justice Department wanted an all-out war, it would damn well get one. Microsoft would never allow itself to be dismembered, Gates said, no matter how long the government’s investigation lasted. He was not about to do what another Seattle magnate had done the last time a corporation in that city had come under attack from federal trustbusters: in the early 1930s, Boeing founder William Boeing had quit in disgust and sold his stock rather than watch as his company, United Aircraft & Transport, was split up.

Not to mention, Standard Oil, which is a much better comparison. Bill Gates was young and arrogant, but boy was he not very wise. These are not the types of things you want any record of having said.

During his meeting with Commissioner Yao, the easy-going economics professor told Gates that perhaps Microsoft could give advance copies of its software to Novell to prevent incompatibility problems. “Sure,” an angry and incredulous Gates replied, “if you want to be a communist, we could do that!”

And you definitely don’t want any record of having said that. Just not very tactful.

Similarly, in the office of Mary Lou Steptoe, the director of the Bureau of Competition, Gates exploded when it was suggested that Microsoft had deliberately designed code in Windows so that it would not work with Novell’s operating system, DR DOS. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about!” an upset Gates said before attorney Neukom stepped in to steer the conversation back to other issues.

Dear god man, don’t cuss out the people who could declare your whole business illegal.

Braden and others had suggested to Bingaman that she focus on something Microsoft had done that didn’t comply with antitrust laws and file a narrow lawsuit, then nail Microsoft as quickly as possible. If Gates was a big boy, the reasoning went, he’d come in to the Justice Department, say “mea culpa, mea culpa,” and sign a consent degree and get on about his business. But no one who understood the deep competitive fires that drove Bill Gates expected him to make it easy for Bingaman to get a win, however small. In the end, Gates did not lose, neither in business nor in the courtroom. He and Bingaman were like two very powerful locomotives speeding toward each other on the same track, and neither was going to move to a side track and let the other pass.

At every turn, the government and his competitors continually underestimate Bill Gates. This guy was a monster. Did you really think he was going to come crawling on bended knee to you?

Gates would later boast to friends that he told Vice President Al Gore during a meeting in May that if the government tried to break up Microsoft, he would move the company and all its employees overseas, out of reach of U.S. control.

This mean really did not want Microsoft to be broken up. And, yes, I hear you, but man this is really the type of stuff you can never say to anyone.

“When Neukom told Bill that Justice wanted to settle, and that Microsoft might escape without too much damage, Bill gave the go-ahead to start talking,” the executive said. “But Bill made it clear that he would have the final say on any settlement. He was determined to get the best deal possible. Anything else and Bill said he would fight a suit in court for as long as it took.”

Speaks for itself.

At one point, when he suggested that Microsoft consider giving away its browser on the Web, a la Netscape, Gates exploded and called him a “communist,”

Again, is this really the best way to speak to a DoJ official?

Televisions

For many years, Gates had refused to even own a television, preferring instead to spend his time reading books and magazines. Now he saw in the future a marriage between television and the personal computer, a crossover between computer and consumer electronics. The television, he believed, would become the general-purpose entertainment and information device—a newspaper, a TV guide, a phone book, and a textbook for the kids.

It cannot be overstated just how convicted Gates was that the ‘information superhighway’, aka the television, would be the next big thing.

Fortunately for Microsoft, some very bright people who worked for Gates had started to take notice and were wide awake to the possibility that the Internet just might set the course of the industry for a long time to come. It was becoming apparent to them that the Internet, not the boob tube with set-top boxes running Microsoft software, would bring the information highway into the homes of millions of Americans.

It sounds ridiculous today but this was the generally accepted view at the time!

Like Gates, the media were focused on the information highway, interactive television, and the much ballyhooed prospect of 500-channel cable systems. There was so much hype that the information highway had become hyperactive.

Gates was not viewed as a fool for suggesting this. Most people felt this way.

“We believe the notion of the information highway is the future of Microsoft. It’s the future of computing. It’s the future of communications. And it’s the future of software, because software will bind computing and communications together… . It is very important to us.”

You basically could not overstate how wrong they were.

At Microsoft, Gates was making a significant bet that the information highway would become a major growth sector for the company, and he had approved spending more than $100 million in 1993 on research and development of technology that would give it control of that pipeline through which digital information would flow.

Last one, I swear.

“After being at Costco a few times, I’ve concluded many of the things you’d be willing to do there, you’d be willing to do remotely,” he would later say in an interview.

Yes, that’s exactly right Bill. And people will do them remotely on the internet. This is precisely why Bezos would quit his lucrative job at D.E. Shaw!

They were facing a difficult, perhaps impossible schedule that required that Marvel be ready to ship with Windows 95 in June 1994. That meant beta testing would have to begin in the early part of the year. What became known as the death march had started. Members of the development team were working all hours of the day and night. Lill had meals catered in every night. “It really was a death march,” he said, “but what was fun about it was that we were doing something big. At one of the meetings, I told the guys that this was really a unique chance to create something that maybe their grandkids would recognize. I dont know how true that was, but it rang, it really did ring with people that they were creating something very, very big, very, very exciting. In a lot of ways—and this is somewhat ironic—we were building a big mainframe. We ended up with a couple hundred servers over in the lab; and in some ways, it was just a giant mainframe that happened to be in separate boxes.” But something for the grandkids was not to be. Little did they know that they were creating a product that would be obsolete before it was finished. Rob Glaser tried to tell them that, when he came over to make his Internet pitch in December, about a month after Siegelman had his aneurysm. Change your strategy, Glaser told the team leaders; the Internet has arrived, and you’d better get with it. No one was listening.

The downside of the death marches. If you do one, you better be sure it’s for a cause that’s worth getting behind.

Internet

For years, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems had been putting TCP/IP into his company’s UNIX-based computers. Allard’s job was to develop TCP/IP for Microsoft’s Windows platform. His orders had come directly from Steve Ballmer, who had discovered during an out-of-town sales trip that some of Microsoft’s best Fortune 500 customers were better connected to the Internet than was Microsoft. The nontechnical Ballmer didn’t know what TCP/IP was, but he knew he wanted Microsoft to have it. …the message he got from Ballmer about TCP/IP was: “I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know what it is. [But] my customers are screaming about it. Make the pain go away.”

This is so funny. The only reason they change is because the market ultimately screams at them as loud as possible.

Once Russ determined that Microsoft would not be able to buy off the big services like America Online, it was clear we would have to build our own.”

To their credit, they at least tried to acquire the talent.

But even though it had to start from scratch, Microsoft believed it would gain the advantage later by bundling its on-line service with Windows 95.

Exactly right. This is why Microsoft can afford to be (and should be) a late mover. You have the ecosystem and the enterprise lock-in. Why bother taking a risk?

And frankly, that is Microsoft’s forte: A competitor comes in and does something interesting, then we come in and basically clone it; do it marginally better and throw some marketing clout behind it, then relentlessly make it better over the years. That’s our strategy. And it has worked damn well.”

I really love this quote. Stop trying to be things you’re not. There are people who, even today, will swear on their life that Microsoft is this innovative company. Stop. Stop lying to the public and most importantly to yourselves. Microsoft does not have an innovative bone in its body. So what? You are the ultimate execution machine. You are the empire. Storm troopers do not need to innovate. Embrace it.

But Microsoft’s hegemony also got in the way: it was used to calling the shots, as it did with DOS and Windows. Microsoft had the band, and the industry marched to its tune. In contrast, the wild and woolly Internet did not look like an environment in which Microsoft was going to be able to call the shots. So Microsoft chose to ignore it, partly out of ignorance, partly out of arrogance. The company also was worried that the Internet posed a grave security risk across its corporate network of some 30,000 PCs. In early 1994, most employees could not get an Internet connection except on a computer that was not connected to the Microsoft corporate network. There were only two such machines at Microsoft’s library, and the company monitored their use with sign-up sheets. “Microsoft wouldn’t embrace the Internet internally because of all these concerns with security, and so none of us knew much about it,” said one of the Marvel managers who had been present in December 1993 for Glaser’s class on Internet 101. “Most college kids knew much more than we did because they were exposed to it. If I had wanted to connect to the Internet, it would have been easier for me to get into my car and drive over to the University of Washington than to try and get on the Internet at Microsoft.”

A true case of the innovator’s dilemma. I can understand why it feels like a huge distraction, at least initially.

Giggles

Shoving matches broke out among the pocket-protector crowd, some of whom had driven more than a hundred miles to hear Gates talk, only to be turned away. One woman in the crowd offered a security guard a sexual favor if he would let her boyfriend, who worked for a computer company, into the hall. Others, trying to bribe or bluff their way in, offered cash or flashed phony press credentials. “I’ve never seen so many nerdy-looking people in my life,” said Jasmine Richards, the hotels manager.

Incredible.

It was an ironic coincidence that Microsoft’s first off-site conference on the Internet was held one day after the official incorporation of Mosaic Communications.

At what point do you just throw your hands up and say “God hates me”?

One executive who attended said, “It was a very good first step, and it got everyone thinking about the Internet. But frankly, I did not see how Microsoft was going to get much of a return on any investment it made with regard to the Internet. Where would the revenue streams come from? Bill asked the same question: How was the company going to make money?”

In some ways I wonder if we’ve over-corrected. With AI, so many companies are running on insane negative margins and everyone just shrugs and says we’ll figure it out later. At what point does that stop being good advice?

Sporkin was semi-computer literate—he had learned how to use a personal computer so he could play chess—but he knew next to nothing about Microsoft or the computer industry. On the advice of his son-in-law, who worked for Money magazine, Sporkin read a book about Microsoft while he was on vacation that summer. The book was Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, by James Wallace…

The author is shouting out himself! Hard Drive was the first edition (the prequel, in a sense) to this very book!

Marriage

“it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour turnaround’—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.”

Why Gates didn’t date much. Imagine doing this for 7 days a week for multiple decades.

Winblad had founded a Minneapolis software company for $500 and sold it several years later for $15.5 million. But she was nearly 10 years older than Gates and wanted to marry and have children. Gates was not yet ready to settle down with one woman. They broke up in December 1987, at the wedding of Gates’s sister, Kristi. Winblad remained one of Gates’s closest friends, however, and he kept her picture in his office even after their romance ended. Gates and Winblad also continued to see each other as vacation buddies. Their week-long spring breaks together had become something of a ritual, one they did not want to stop even if they were no longer romantically involved.

I really feel sorry for her. She wasted her biologically best years on someone who would not return the feelings, and then ultimately she never had kids.

Gates and Winblad had such a special friendship that he sought her approval before he married French.

Can we talk a bit about how insane this is? You need your ex girlfriend’s permission? Is it any wonder he got divorced.

And before French and Gates married, French gave her approval for him to continue to take a week’s vacation with Winblad…

I’m sorry but I cannot get over this.

Though Gates began dating French in 1988, he continued to play the field for awhile, especially when he was out of town on business, when he would frequently hit on female journalists who covered Microsoft and the company industry. His womanizing was well known, although not well reported, because Gates and Microsoft spoon-fed stories to industry writers for such papers as the New York Times, and none of them wanted the flow of information to stop.

Yeah, just screams unstable relationship.

Old flame Winblad was happy for the man she, too, had wanted to marry.

It’s not getting any less weird, sorry.

Gates did, in fact, sign a prenuptial agreement with French. Gates could not ask French himself, so he talked his pal Ballmer into convincing her to sign. Ballmer, according to those sources, explained to French that the agreement was for the good of the company.

How can you be such a killer but simultaneously such a coward. This is just pathetic.

China

…its China management team was top-heavy with executives from Taiwan, which China considered a renegade province and not an independent country. But Microsoft’s most serious blunder was in developing P-Win, the Chinese version of Windows 3.0. The software was developed in Taiwan, not in China. Worse, the Chinese version of Windows contained traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but not in the People’s Republic of China.

Yikes! Feels like every American company entering China just royally screws up.

During a visit to the Great Wall, Gates tried to fly a kite, but there was not enough wind. The trip also included a visit to a McDonald’s restaurant, where Buffett paid for the meal with discount coupons he had brought with him.

Buffett paying for McDonalds - McDonald’s - with a coupon. Love it.

Netscape

Andreessen and Clark had decided to give the company’s browser away for free in order to get it onto as many computers as possible. (Those users who wanted customer support could buy the software for $99.)

Yup.

Clark and Andreessen understood that the revenue stream would come not from a browser, but from lucrative Web server software that would be used by companies doing business on the Internet.

Andreessen was definitely more visionary than anyone at Microsoft. Then again, that’s really a low bar.

Andreessen also said that Mosaic Netscape had been completely rewritten from scratch and did not contain a line of the original software code.

[sic]

It was so similar to NCSA Mosaic that it caused a conflict with his computer’s operating system. He found he could not run Mosaic Netscape and NCSA Mosaic at the same time. “The operating system would complain that I was trying to run two copies of the same program,” said Thompson. “It really looked bad in terms of copying code. The outside may have looked different, but the inside didn’t.”

Yikes.

“The whole story about how Marc Andreessen invented Mosaic and all that is a complete fallacy,”

Definitely seems that way to me!

“Marc is no fun to work with. He tries very hard to make sure that anything he touches he gets credit for,”

Definitely seems to be the case regarding Netscape and Mosaic.

Big, blond, and thoroughly unpretentious, Marc Andreessen had barely come of age when he co-wrote the program that is helping tame the Internet—the…

Wait… Andreessen was blond!?

Tyrrell believed that Microsoft changed its mind about licensing Mosaic not so much because of the threat of Netscape, but because IBM had decided to put a browser in OS/2.

Too little too late though, and AOL locks in Netscape.

Paranoid

“You would think, ‘Does Bill Gates think about OS/2? Hell no. That war has been won.’ But he was still thinking about it. When Microsoft displaces an OS/2 customer in a corporation, Bill knows about it. That’s amazing. This is the least complacent company you have ever seen. I urged people at Powersoft to emulate them. We took every little competitor seriously. We learned that from Microsoft. Microsoft always wants to win.”

Always wants to win.

Gates reportedly walked into one such meeting, threw Kahn’s picture down on a table, and said, “How can I get rid of this guy?” A product group at Microsoft passed out T-shirts that read “Delete Philippe.” Some prankster at Microsoft sent one of the shirts to Kahn.

Too funny.

…once had found Gates at an industry conference in the late 1980s sitting alone in a corner, looking at a photograph in his hands. “It was a picture of me,” said Kahn.

This is absolute psycopath shit! Maniacally competitive.

…an ex-Borland employee who went to work for Microsoft sent Kahn a photo of what allegedly was a room at Microsoft filled with pictures of Kahn.

Ooooh boy. Good luck Kahn.

For Kahn, the unkindest cut may have come not from Gates but from his former wife, Martine. When they divorced in the early 1990s, the first man Martine dated was Bill Gates. “It made Philippe a little crazy,” said Martine.

Dear god man, he’s already dead! Stop shooting.

Conclusion

“There are two camps,” Sun CEO Scott McNealy told writer Steven Levy for an article in Time in late 1996, “those in Redmond, who live on the Death Star, and the rest of us, the rebel forces.” Back in 1990, Bill Joy, one of Sun’s founders, had predicted that by 1997 a wonderful new technology would transform the computer industry, and that it would be the undoing of Microsoft’s dominance. Joy was right about the technology, but wrong about Microsoft. The company born of the personal computer revolution, had executed in amazing turnabout in response to the next great upheaval—the Internet. Like IBM before it, Microsoft could have been left behind. But driven by Bill Gates, whose burning desire to win and fear of failure compel him not only to beat his competitors, but to destroy them, Microsoft’s dominance seems secure for a long time to come.

This one’s for the rebels. RIP Sun Microsystems.

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I was a bit too young to really see Microsoft in its heyday, but man was Bill Gates an absolute killer. More than Jobs (who is a true visionary), more than Bezos (who is still innovative in his own ways). Gates is just the purest execution machine I’ve ever seen. This is the textbook example of how monopoly power should be wielded. Do I support everything he does? Definitely not. (And let’s just not even approach the topic of his personal life.) But I really do admire this type of business. When you’re just so much better than your competitors that you gain an advantage and use it to compound your economics, ultimately steamrolling them. This is very much the type of business I would want to run.