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Paul Allen's Microsoft Experience
theodp writes "Just in case Microsoft bashers don't have enough ammo, Robert X. Cringely has a couple of interesting tales in this week's column. The first explains how Bill Gates used Paul Allen's moonlighting at MITS to justify awarding himself 64% of Microsoft's stock vs. Allen's 36% (and Gates' failure to adjust the shares after he accepted a $10/hour part-time MITS job). The second heart-warming tale concerns a conversation Allen reportedly overheard late one night (as he was finishing up DOS 2.0) between Gates and Steve Ballmer discussing how to get Allen's Microsoft stock back if the Hodgkins disease Allen was battling killed him. Yikes."
oh come on, this isnt news this is flamebate, get it off the front page!
To be fair with Bill Gates, Microsoft's success has much more to do with him than Paul Allen!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I think you need to read the penultimate paragraph of Cringely's article before dismissing this as just another personal attack. What he is suggesting is extraordinary - so extraordinary that I find it hard to believe, but it's certainly news that he wrote it. By any standards, it belongs on Slashdot.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
First of all, Cringely doesn't even attribute this information to a real source in his article, so there is no way anybody can even verify this. He just says two good sources, which mean almost nothing.
The second thing is, this sort of planning happens all the time at every big company. I know most of the slashbots probably never worked a real job, but it's good planning in the corporate world to know plan for where such a huge share of stock is going to go.
In short, this article is such a hack job looking for biters, I don't even know why it was posted to slashdot. Wait, actually this was a perfect article for slashdot.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
Try reading the article. Allen in no way "cries". Generally, he has kept his mouth shut, and the only way this article was written was based on third party information and other research. He has shown a lot of class over the years... but it is easy to take a cheap shot, isn't it?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Let's say, hypothetically, Allen had died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982, as discussed in the story. At that point, he owned 36% of Microsoft. The shares, as his personal property, would have been deeded out in his will (let's say to hypothetical party X), gone through probate, and then X would have them. How would Balmer and Gates have "gotten them back"?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Not that I like Bill or his business tactics, but to be fair to him, isn't it true that the B&MG Foundation has donated a few billion dollars to worthy causes? Not to mention Bill's public and well known intention to give away as much money as possible before his death? I mean, sure, the guy is a shark in business.. but he's not exactly Darth Vader, y'know..
Lets keep perspective before we feel too sorry for him.
From TFA:
Climb high enough in the organization, and it becomes clear that Microsoft's success has not always been based on legal or ethical behavior.
I have to admit, we need more of these articles out there. Here in Slashdot we know all about it, so we'd get the typical captain of the obvious or "no sh*t sherlock" responses, but we need the general public to read more of them.
I'm about as anti-Microsoft as you can get. I hate them. I hate them for making bad software and forcing zillions of people to use it instead of letting those people make a choice. I hate them for essentially undermining the best qualities of capitalism.
Many times I've wanted to believe "this is the end" and Microsoft is finally going to have the reputation in the general, non-techie public eye that they deserve to have. Heck, I'm still hoping the Vista debacle will be that trigger.
But to believe that one lawyer in Iowa is going to bring them down, when the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice couldn't do it, and the E.U. is still trying to do it, is wishful thinking. Maybe Cringely just had to end with something dramatic.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Now we'll speculate as to why he would position himself this way, about how anti-establishment he implicitly is, how visionary and rightous he is about the computer industry. By stooping so low, he is only hurting himself and attributing intent to people who obviously have better things to do. Whatever, most of us already take his pieces as entertainement anyway. Doesn't mean he didn't cross a line and isn't responsible for his actions. I don't think he's important enough anymore to be noticed by the mainstream press, but his opinions are not merely disparaging, they can be attributed to plain and simple mischief. What's infuriating is not that he wrote it, it's that people will link to it and discuss it while it's not deserving of any attention. Fool me once, you can't fool me twice as the post-modern saying tells us.
I know some will disagree with this, but being an owner of serveral technology companies, one of which doing classified work, ownership is something I have to worry about. If, God forbid, something does happen to one of my partners, and that ownership is given to the family, or lands in probate court for years, it has a chance of seriously hampering operations of the company. For one thing, the family is not involved in the operations, and could make incorrect decisions, or worse, sell off their ownership to anyone with the finances. Now, I do have some say in the sell of ownership, as a clause of the original agreements, and they do too, but these kinds of things really are a problem to fight. It sucks having to entertain those thoughts, but it is necessary. I think Cringley is always looking for fodder on Bill any chance he can, myself, I could care less. I use Macs as my primary machines, but have a Dell/Windows for games (if I ever have time for them) and my database sandbox is on Redhat AS 4.
that would be exactly what a capitalist society deems successful. Take a look at their stock if you doubt this.
Well, I once heard it said that a psychopath is someone who doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, and a socipath is someone who does know ... but just doesn't care. Balmer is probably in the latter category, which puts him right up there with the rest of corporate leadership worldwide.
... which doen't say much for either Gates or Ballmer.
Besides, you can tell a lot about a man from the caliber of his friends
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If I shot someone yesterday, but I gave an old lady on the bus my seat today, would that make me a good person? Or would I have to give a million seats away.
Trying to cast Bill Gates as a 21st century Robin Hood (takes from the richest and gives to the poorest) to defend the various critisms of him is suspect at best. In fact, I like calling it, the Gates defence, being a subset of the chewbaca defence.
Giving money away, if you have enough of it, is easy. Being truely forgiven for past sins (and in this case, personal attacks), isn't. As much as your wife/gf/etc. would like a diamond ring everytime you fuck up, it doesn't cut it (unless the fuck up was buying a terrible gift, then the new one also acts as an "I'm sorry."). That and they would eventually run out of fingers. Of course, there are always gold diggers as the exception.
In summary, you can't buy forgiveness, only earn it.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
If the point is to get people to subscribe, well, (1) this kind of juvenilia makes me even less likely to subscribe, (2) it stinks to let people pay money and thereby get the privilege of vandalizing the site, and (3) if they want people to subscribe, they might want to do a more professional job of running the site (eliminate dupes, and get people to select science articles who actually know something about science).
Find free books.
Yes, I'll believe that Allen is disenfranchised with the executives in ms, but there was no evidence that the stories he told was the reason Allen sold his stock and quit.
The ambiguous line in my mind was:
"but it didn't go over well with Paul Allen"
Is Cringley asserting that, or is that what he heard?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Yes microsoft's success stems entirely from how well they have managed the monopoly that IBM granted them. Gates has proved to be very good at monopoly.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
From what I've studied of Microsoft over the years I'd have to say that if Paul Allen was still the guy in charge I might not be using Linux as my primary OS today. What originally drove me away from Windows and commercial software in general was the attitude that companies had when you had problems with their product. This all stems from the attitudes of the owners of these companies and most of all Bill Gates who is largely the founder and role model of the commercial software industry.
This bad attitude is at the center of the poor customer support, poorly designed and implemented products, and general lack of concern for what effect they're having on their customers and society at large. If Paul Allen had kept the reigns of the PC revolution the entire world could be a very different place now.
By being so extremist in his position Bill Gates created his own worst enemy in the form of free opensource software. It was his influence that created the need for a counter-influence. Someone more centered would never have created such a strong counter-culture.
Apple had a similar experience between Jobs and Woz though so maybe it's just something that was bound to happen.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How ignorant (or perhaps downright legally retarded) do you have to be to consider questionable business tactics on par with the holocaust, Cultural Revolution, the gulags, etc.? I'm not sure what's more disturbing: that one person was dumb enough to actually say it, or that a number of people agree with it. Not making a good show of intellect for Slashdot here, guys.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Or they could have had multiple classes of stock. Like Google. Where Larry and Sergey and other insiders have special stock which gets 10x votes.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I just want to point out to anyone who wasn't following the (pre-2001) anti-trust suit that it is not a crime to have a monopoly. It is perfectly legal and what all companies aim for. What Microsoft got in trouble for (before the Bush administration basically dropped it) was that they were using their monopoly power to limit competition and leverage their way into new monopolies, i.e. Windows-->Office, Windows-->Browser, Windows-->Internet Provider...
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
To Mud, or not To Mud, that is the Question?
Is Cringley throwing mud?
Or is Cringley reporting corroborated facts?
Or is reporting facts equivalent to throwing mud when the facts are ugly.
I don't know.
You don't know.
But I'm not the one concluding that because the purported facts are ugly that they are automatically equated with Mud.
Given Bill Gates access to lawyers, and Cringley's relative poverty and valuable reputation, I'd say RXC is certainly erring on the side of caution and has good reason to have said what he has said. Bill Gates, and Paul Allen who is also party to this, may not be as litigious as, say, Tom Cruise, but who wants to find out first?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is such trash.
I mean other than the fact that the article is information from a friend of a friend whos like really really good friends with the friend of Paul Allen but it also sounds suspiciously made up.
Ahh hes sold shares that must mean he hates Microsoft. Nooo Bill Gates has also sold shares a hell of a lot of them. His total stake in Microsoft was less than 10% in 2005 thats been dropping for a long time and hes still selling. Doesnt mean he despises his company now does it.
What about the punishing work while ill? Maybe he actually got Hodgkins in 1982 but he was diagnosed in 1983 DOS 2.0 came out in March doesnt exactly leave a huge amount of time for his aparent slave labour and his heroic completion of the O/S.
Oh but he left the company forever, he must have had a bad experience at the hands of evil Bill. Not quite. He is still an advisor to MS to this day. Now sure that isnt exactly a large role in the company he created but how many people with billions of dollars would stay in any position at a company that, according to this site, drove you near to death and conspired to destroy you when you were there?
I mean his leaving couldnt possibly have had anything to do with the fact that he had to work really hard before, but was now a rich man recovering from a life threatening disease. Yeah I can imagine he was raring to jump back in to long shifts at MS, but theres no chance of that with evil Bill standing guard.
Finally, the oh so familiar, Microsoft is going down, comment. Take a quick look at just about every article that guy has ever written involving Microsoft. Nearly all of them contain some way of Microsoft going down. Nearly all of them are speculatory trash often including a list of 'funny' scenarios.
This is pure flamebait from someone clearly biassed against the company. I mean trying to get me to feel sympathy for the 6th richest man in the world who has spent a large portion of his entire life living off the company this site claims crushed him...
Oh and unlike his hearsay you can do a quick search in Google and youll find information backing up every point I made. (Some of which actually came from the site he used to support him, forbes.)
I think that pretty well reflects MSFT's corporate character. Petty, greedy, and paranoid.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And here I thought capitalism was an economic system. Silly me! It must be the defining term of my society. My bad.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I am going to examine each of these points one at a time. Some of them just make me cringe.
Disclaimer: I was a PC user up until a couple of months ago, when I got a powerbook. I've barely used another computer since.
10. Apple II Forever: The 1984 introduction of the compact Apple IIc, at a boisterous celebration in San Francisco's Moscone Center, is interrupted by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake. The party, called "Apple II Forever," doesn't miss a beat because loyal Apple II users are already shaken up by their belief the company is focusing too much on the Macintosh, even though the Apple II is generating the bulk of sales and profit.
Unfortunately, nothing is forever, not even the Apple II -- although it comes close. On Nov. 15, 1993, more than 16 years after it was introduced, and with over 5 million units shipped, Apple quietly drops the last of the line, the Apple IIe. As a gesture to the faithful, Apple continues offering Apple II technology through an expansion card for some early Mac LC and Performa models.
What type of computer
sells well
for 8 YEARS?
I mean, seriously, am I the only one that thinks that's one hell of a long time for them to be selling what's essentially the same computer? It most likely got too expensive for them to keep selling it, and they dropped it.
9. Portable predictions: Apple chief Steve Jobs is lauded for his forward thinking, but he misses the boat on notebook computers. "(Smaller portables) are OK if you're a reporter and trying to take notes on the run," he tells Playboy magazine in February 1985. "But for the average person, they're really not that useful, and there's not all that much software for them, either."
He eventually changes his tune but Apple's first stab at a laptop, a 15.8-pound behemoth dubbed the Macintosh Portable, isn't much to write home about. Apple finally gets it right in 1991 when it introduces the truly portable PowerBook. Despite the PowerBook's popularity, a dozen years pass before Jobs declares 2003 "the year of the notebook" for Apple. "Many users are going to wonder why they even need a desktop computer anymore," he says then.
I'm not that old, and I can't really remember 1985, so I can't say for certain. But I gather from his quote that all the "portables" in that day resembled somewhat different hardware and software configurations to their desktop equivalants. I doubt that the macintosh in that form could be minaturized to a "portable" in 1985, either.
By the 1990s, there were companies selling laptops with 68k processors, that, with the addition of a ROM chip ripped from a mac, could run Mac OS. This arrangement was, obviously, very expensive for anyone who wanted an apple laptop, yet these clones were still selling. Did apple really have a choice about it?
8. Consumers cool to Cube: Never one to shy away from hyperbole, Jobs pronounces the G4 Cube as "simply the coolest computer ever" at Macworld New York in 2000. Apple gushes over its latest creation: "An entirely new class of computer, it marries the Pentium-crushing performance of the Power Mac G4 with the miniaturization, silent operation and elegant desktop design of the iMac. It is an amazing engineering and design feat, and we're thrilled to finally unveil it to our customers."
It doesn't turn out to be all that cool. Although praised for Jonathan Ive's innovative industrial design, the Cube fails to catch on with creative professionals because it's too expensive ($1,800), not powerful enough (450 MHz) and hard to upgrade. The Cube is put on ice in July 2001.
The cube was cool. Admit it. It had problems. I can admit that. It wasn't selling, so it was cancelled.
I will take a break at this point to point out that two of these three are nothing other than apple discontinuing products because they weren't selling. Yeah, shocking, isn't it.
What's next? Oooh, a real one.
7. Death to CRTs: Introducing the flat-panel iMac at Macworld San Francisc
Maybe it's just me, but I partly do the work I do because I enjoy it, but also because it pays the bills. If the bills disappeared, I would make different choices in my work.
I don't even think that Microsoft have the "purpose" of companies like Google. At least when those companies release something, you can sense the excitement, that the Google guys are into making what they make as good as possible.
I don't know why Bill bothers doing what he does any more. There's little exciting coming out of Microsoft, just lots of "me too" products. I personally wouldn't bother doing it if I had Bill's fortune. I'd be either just enjoying myself, or trying to make a difference.
Almost all rich people run a charity or two, and they're not running them for the good of others.
Donating money to charity is a good way to buy good publicity, and you get a good tax writeoff on money you donate. There are also a thousand and one other scams people can pull, like charging their expenses back to their charitable foundation.
Also large corporations donate their own products (microsoft is especially guilty of this) and claim tax breaks based on the retail prices of those products. In the case of software, the production cost is minimal, and in any other industry it will still cost the company less to produce than the retail cost, just that the margins are much higher with software.
Donating of products serves as self-promotion, increasing brand awareness and market share, while costing the company significantly less than they claim to have donated.
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