Bill Gates Farewell Thread

[venky83]

Hi guys,
Since, our dear BillG leaves Microsoft tomorrow, I thought we should have a thread talks about BillG. Please add all kinds of BillG stuff in this stuff. This is like a farewell thread.

Please feel free to go ahead and share all the stuff about BillG - great, good, bad, ugly - everything.

Let's applaud the guy who did help demystify computers to a majority of the world.

[venky83]

I found this stuff from gizmodo:

With Bill Gates saying good-bye to Microsoft this week, we're realizing more by the day how much we'll miss the guy. And when reading through the many interviews floating around this week, we came across this jewel from 2003. A leaked memo from Microsoft, it's several pages of Gates just laying into his design and programming staff for—among other issues—his personal experience when trying to install Windows Moviemaker. And it's a very fulfilling read if you've ever been frustrated by a Microsoft product.

When Seattle Pi recently asked Gates about the email, he replied, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job." There was no mention as to whether or not Gates had time to take names.

[venky83]

An article on INC which talks about how it felt to be a program manager under BillG.

When i graduated from college, in 1991, I started working for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) on the Excel team. My title was program manager. I was supposed to come up with a new programming system so users could automate Excel. I sat down to write a spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of detailed pages.

In those days at the company, we used to have these things called BillG reviews, at which Bill Gates personally went over every major new feature. At the time, he was already famous and on the cusp of being named the world's richest person. The day before my BillG review, I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office. It consumed almost a full ream of laser-printed paper.

Once the spec was printed and on its way, I picked at random one of the million little details of the spec that I still had to tackle: figuring out if Excel's internal date and time functions were compatible with BASIC, the programming language we were using on the project.

The next day -- June 30, 1992 -- we gathered in a conference room. In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management the company has today, I reported to Mike Conte, who reported to Chris Graham, who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About six layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors, with their eight layers of management.

So the whole reporting hierarchy was there -- along with, it seemed, its cousins, sisters, and aunts. Someone from my team was there, too. His job was to keep track of how many times Bill said the F-word. The lower the F-count, the better.

Bill came in. I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc. -- almost exactly like a regular human being. And he had my spec in his hand.

He had my spec in his hand!

He exchanged witty banter that made no sense to me, with an executive I did not know. A few people laughed. Then Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec.

He had read the first page!

Not only that, he had read the first page and written little notes in the margins. Considering that we got him the spec only about 24 hours earlier, he must have looked at it the night before.

He began asking questions. I answered them. They started off pretty easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because he was flipping through the spec.

He was flipping through my spec! (Calm down; what are you, a teenager?) And there were notes in all the margins! On every page! He had read the Whole Darn Thing!

As the conversation went on, Bill's questions got harder and more detailed. And they seemed a little bit random. But I didn't care. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy -- a nice guy who had read my spec. In my head, I was already thinking of how I would address his comments, pronto.

Finally, the killer question. "I don't know, you guys," Bill said. "Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is BASIC going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?"

This was exactly the question I had spent the previous day investigating. And as I had discovered, there was a discrepancy. In both Excel and BASIC, each date was assigned a numeric code. The code for any day in 1992 that I looked up was the same in both. But when I looked up a date around the turn of the last century, Excel and BASIC were one digit apart. Huh?

When I went to find someone who might be able to help, I was directed to Ed Fries, a longtime Excel programmer famous for inventing those screen savers with the swimming fish. I hadn't had much contact with Ed, but I used to see him every Friday afternoon as he played miniature golf in the hallways outside my office.

"Check out February 28, 1900," he told me.

Its number in the Excel code was 59.

"Now try March 1."

Its number was 61.

"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.

"It's February 29!" I said proudly. "1900 was a leap year!"

"Nope," Ed said, and left me pondering the problem for a little while longer. I eventually figured out, with some more guidance from Ed, that a group of programmers at Lotus had skipped a day in 1900 because it created a mathematical shortcut for them, and they probably figured that nobody would care about a mistake buried in the software's internal calendar more than 90 years in the past. The people who made Excel hadn't cared at all and built the bug into the code that the spreadsheets ran on. But the people who had written the code for BASIC had apparently been offended by the shortcut, so they set the start of their internal calendar a day earlier. That way, it would accurately reflect the actual calendar, but the solution was also practical. Because BASIC started its count a day earlier, the number that BASIC assigned to March 1, 1900, was also 61, and from that point on its date and time functions were aligned with Excel's.

So were the date and time functions compatible?

"Yes," I told Bill. "The dates are exactly the same, except for January and February 1900."

Silence. The F Counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that?

"OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked-up copy of the spec…wait! I wanted that…and left.

"Four," announced the F Counter, and someone said, "Wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, at the time, 36. Later, I had it all explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec," a colleague told me. "He just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard MO is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with, because it's never happened before."

What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.

Over the years, of course, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and the company's strategy put it at odds with the U.S. government. Steve Ballmer -- who was not a programmer -- took over as CEO, on the theory that this would allow Bill to spend more time doing what he does best: running software development. But that didn't seem to fix the problems that came with those 11 layers of management, a culture of perpetual, permanent meetings, and a stubborn insistence on creating every possible product no matter what. How many billions of dollars has Microsoft expended on research-and-development costs, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because it simply had to bring to market a free Web browser?

Oh, well. The party has moved elsewhere, and as of this month, so has Bill -- he is officially retiring to work full time on his foundation, though he will stay on as chairman. My old division has seen its share of change, too. Excel Basic became Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications for Microsoft Excel, with so many (TM)s and (R)s I don't know where to put them all. I left the company in 1994. Now, at my own company, I do the same kind of reviews, although I'm nowhere as good at them as Bill was.

And I had assumed that Bill had completely forgotten me -- just another face in the crowd -- until I noticed a short interview with him in The Wall Street Journal in which he mentioned, almost in passing, something along the lines of how hard it was to replace, say, a good program manager for Excel.

Could he have been talking about me? Naw, it was probably someone else. Still.

[noixe]

well, all i'd say is, THNK YOU FOR MAKING COMPUTERS SO COMMON, on the other hand i'd also say, THANK YOU FOR MAKING LIFE MISERABLE FOR 87% OF COMPUTER USERS WITH UNSTABLE, UNSECURE SOFTWARE, we cudnt have done anything without you

[venky83]

The difference between Apple and Microsoft according to BillG.

[fangpyre]

Its obvious that he knew what he was doing.
I don't know why he ended up with a product like Windows.
But one thing is for sure, it will surly get worse.

We have to acknowledge that there are some good versions of Windows, like XP, 2000, and 95.
Vista, I think, is the taste of things to come.
And the only one smiling about that is Jobs (and of course us Mac users).

Gates has a strong business sense, NOBODY can deny that.
What he lacks in innovation he makes up elsewhere.

Also, all personal accounts of the man were those of compliment.
He is, to our knowledge, a generous man.
His eyes glean with a soft kindness.
One that seems unfettered by his financial success.
Despite his money he seems to down to earth and nice to work with, unlike our loved Jobs.

The company will for sure be less off without him.
Apple!! Start your registers!!

[Abbas]

I'm a bit sad to see Mr. Gates not being actively involved in Microsoft any longer.

Bill Gates, is probably the best CEO a tech company could ever have. Yes, I know Steve Jobs is excellent as well but his arrogance has already lead Apple close to the grave once. I'm betting he's learned a lot from that but Bill Gates has always had his head straight and knew exactly what was needed.

Now is probably the time that Microsoft needs him more that ever with Apple (with the O/S) and Google (with the Internet) hitting Microsoft from both sides. Someone like Bill Gates is needed to put the company back in direction. Ballmer doesnt have much respect in the industry and I can bet you that Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt would constantly be on their toes if Mr. Gates was leading Microsoft.

Without him, we have "Snow Leopard" arriving from Apple. They know Vista isnt that great and thus dont need to focus on being innovative for a while. And Google is busy seducing Yahoo instead of creating something as successul as AdSense.

I will certainly miss him.

-a

[fangpyre]

I agree with your sentiment.

But I don't think Snow Leopard will be a disappointment.
Of course, its too early to say for sure.
But it isn't about frills and thrills.
Its about getting down to the core of things.
The OS will be a huge technical achievement.
It should take up 25-30% disk space as Leopard does.
This will mean it will be A LOT faster.
It will also utilize multiple cores and multiple processors in a way that now OS does.
Throw in the GPU utilization thing, and you have one fierce cat.
It will be an amazing feat if it is pulled off.

When it does come out, it will really make Vista look bad.
Once that foundation is ready, they can go back to focusing on utility and features.

The name they've chosen is amazingly proper.
A- It tells the customer not to expect much difference (since most of it is under the hood)
B- The Snow Leopard is capable of living off very limited resources and food, in environments that few animals can.

[medopal]

Bye bye BIG MAN, i used to like u, and still do.

Its true Windows is on around 90% of computers, but unfortunalety they did that the wrong way, simply by being evil (which is a M$ slogan from a long time). My opnion in Bill and M$ is, great that u did all that, but y should u be evil? Google is a dominant now in internet (lot of people think the internet is Google!!) and their slogan is "Don't be evil", its even hard to find someone who hates Google.

M$ after Bill will be very bad, and very evil, Steve Ballmer is never like Bill, like what we saw with Yahoo! few months, the guy wanted to buy the company from the shareholders, when Yahoo! rejected!!. Come on man, y should u be that evil.

Honestly, its time for Apple to rise, the air is clear, and the Apple products (iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV) are making lot of people think "if thats their phone, how the hell would be the laptop".

I will be honest and thank the man, not for OS's, but for lot of other things, like Office package, Exchange server, and others.

Good luck in your life, and charity work. My advice: "check on M$ from time to time, because Ballmer will ruin the company down soon".

[medopal]

Originally Posted by Abbas

Without him, we have "Snow Leopard" arriving from Apple. They know Vista isnt that great and thus dont need to focus on being innovative for a while.

Vista is a great success for Apple!!!. Thanks to M$, lot of people are thinking to upgrade from XP to OS X now.
If Apple took this serious and release a great product it will be a big success, and im sure it will open the eyes on Apples OS.
But, what im afraid of, is that new Leopard fails in providing a much, or have some problems, in this case, it would be better to leave M$ alone in shame, instead of sharing it.