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Bill Gates' Management Style
replicant108 wrote in to give us Tom Evslin's fascinating account of working for Microsoft in the early 90s. "So you're in there presenting your product plan to billg, steveb, and mikemap. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he's rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you're saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don't know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn't looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on.
At some point in your presentation billg will say "that's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can't really let it faze you. Moreover, you can't afford to look fazed; remember: he's a bully."
This is usually the problem within any organization - people with good ideas but bad presentation skills can either develop the ideas and ask forgiveness later or forget about the whole idea unless they can get the idea to someone that's a good presenter.
It will be far better management style to actually give constructive criticism, but that is also a lot harder.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Maybe you should've spent less time on the PowerPoint slides and more time thinking about how your idea was going to (figuratively) grab Billg around the throat and shake him until he said, "That's the best idea I've ever heard since I've been here at Microsoft."
I mean, shit, do you really think you're going to impress the CEO of Microsoft with a PowerPoint presentation, of all things?
I've worked with bosses like that. Presuming you could impress them, they'd never let you know it. They still tell you your idea sucks and that you suck and that they don't understand why they hired you in the first place. They wish you were dead, sock you in the gut, etc. They're bullies. That's the point of the article, I think.In general, however, I don't know if this story is an example of 'billg' so much as it is an example of asshole bosses, of which there are legions.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
msshill: "So Bill, this world wide web thing is really starting to take off in the academic world. I think it's time we started making our own browser and include it with all installs of Windows."
billg: "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Yep, sounds about right...
This guy's the limit!
But not everyone can be a champion. You have to have followers to have leaders. Just because you are a follower doesn't mean you aren't smart, or not worthy of working on X project. You know what happens to corps where the leader/follower ratio is skewed? DOWNSIZING.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Sounds like he handled it like a teenage girl meeting her pop idol.
Only, being naive and not realising this was just challenge #101, I left, joined a small company which just grew and grew, then left after a difference of opinion with the CEO, then joined a startup which just grew and grew. Interestingly, our CEO is able to motivate people without a single swearword.
It's nice for Microsoft that it is so big and all, but (as Scott Adams notes somewhere, I think) all the really smart people prefer to live in Switzerland as compared to the US, i.e. to live somewhere where even politics is truly local and individualism is valued versus somewhere where the driving forces in society are completely out of your control and individualism is just having a different alignment of ballpoints in the pocket protector.
It must have been really exciting and creative to work for Microsoft - once. Perhaps some of the pent up anger in the founders, if it is reported accurately, is simply because, even for them, it's no fun anymore.
Pining for the fjords
There's a distinct difference between expecting someone to champion their project and being a bully and abusing them verbally. Telling every person that their project idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." is just being downright mean. Especially when you just glare at them coldly after they defend themselves (as the article points out).
And then you get people who'll imitate the behavior without the smarts to back it up, so it becomes nothing BUT abuse. (Middle management for example.) I think Bill's management technique explains a lot about Microsoft's behavior over the years and why they're so disliked in the technical community. In fact looking back at how MS acted during their two biggest trials (the US anti-trust and EU anti-trust) you can see this "bullying" all over the place. Acting like a bully when you're the defendant in court is not a good idea. It'll just piss the judge (and possibly the jury) off, and they're the ones passing judgment on you.
Besides, it's not like this technique has worked incredibly well for MS, especially in areas like security. MS has also put out some really lousy stuff over the years, like MS Bob, that were apparently "championed" all the way to release, then bombed. Maybe if Bill had developed a culture less focused on bullying they could have avoided some of those things, and saved money. When you force every one of your employees to defend their projects in such a manner then how many are going to be willing to listen when people point out problems with them? You can't have any second doubts if you have to defend your projects constantly, so people will stop listening to any criticism, leading to lower quality all around.
Read TFA. "That meant that I and the other product managers...". Not everyone has to walk into a meeting like this with billg and stand this trial by fire. If you're a product manager, you should be the ultimate champion of your product.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." --Bertrand Russell
That story of the Flood-fill rewrite makes Billg sound like a great manager. So does being the richest guy in the world...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter.
Or he could just be an asshole.
It's not just mean; it's stupid. (And not just because being mean to people when you don't have to is stupid, although that's also true.) Kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing -- if your boss tells you every single thing you come up with is stupid, sooner or later you're going to stop paying attention to his judgement at all, and just go ahead and do your own thing regardless of what he says. OTOH, if he tells you that your smart ideas are smart, then when he tells you that one of your ideas is stupid, you'll pay attention.
... and also the general bug-ridden bloat of pretty much all their software, even the stuff that (unlike Bob) succeeds on the market. If no one has any yardstick by which to judge their work, then course most of their work is going to be crap.
Yes, I think this explains Microsoft's behavior in court
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There's a world of difference between telling everyone that their idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and testing potential hires on how they'd fine-tune a bubble sort. One's belittling and demeaning along with being untrue (and known to be untrue by the person saying it) most of the time. (You simply can't say this and it be true every time, also it's not just saying it's a bad idea, but the worst idea he's ever heard, making it much more difficult for the statement to be true.) The other one is seeing how creative someone is technically. In Google's case they're using this to judge the quality of potential employees before deciding whether to hire them or not. They're not alone in testing potential hires in such a manner, although they do seem to go above and beyond what most companies do.
As far as adapting, Google seems to adapt better than Microsoft, at least so far. MS tends to ignore certain markets/new directions until it's completely obvious they were wrong and missed the boat. (The infamous move to go after the Internet is one good example of this.) MS also seems to be better at following others than leading, for example in Internet search and online advertising most recently. This is not to say that MS isn't ever innovative (I think their Live service for Xbox has been innovative at least in some areas), but that that they seem to follow other's innovations more than they innovate themselves. Google has a big advantage for adapting because of their letting employees spend 20% of their time on personal projects. When those projects become useful they can be launched as a company project/product and more people assigned to them. That allows them to try out tons of different directions continually. Also they keep improving their products and do so at a quicker rate than MS does, although MS is more hampered with their traditional release cycle for products like Office and Windows. Gmail is a good example there, new features still get added even though it's no longer considered beta, and the product today is far more useful than it was at launch.
As far as Google Apps goes the whole point is that it's an online app, I wouldn't expect to see an offline component anytime soon. I do expect to see them offer servers that you can run on your local LAN/WAN with versions of Google Apps on them that'll address some of the concerns about losing access to the apps if your Internet connection goes down. You can get a local search appliance now, so I think it's just a matter of time. I suspect they've not worked out all the details yet on how they'll maintain those Apps Appliances and keep them updated and that's why they aren't offering them already.
>> Exchange Server did more to make email a reality for corporates than any other product.
Not at all.
Many companies had unix-based email WAAY before Exchange even came out. Then when it did, some non-technical higher-up usually decides the company should 'upgrade' to Microsoft exchange.
I've been at several companies where exactly this happened and exactly the same result too: Before the upgrade, we had an email system that just worked, and never needed any maintenance. After we switched, we needed to hire a whole office of support staff to deal with the day-to-day issues of ongoing Exchange problems.
I'm always surprised how long its taken them to come round to moving back to Unix/Linux solutions, but they all did in the end.
This isn't comparable to what Gates is doing in the article. According to that Gates would tell everyone that their idea was "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and didn't really mean it. He was saying it simply to make the presenter defend their idea, not saying "you're wrong and we're not going to do it that way". In both of the above quotes Linus is seems to be saying that he's right and that they will be doing it his way.
Linus could certainly be more tactful with how he worded those things, but I do note a distinct lack of cussing and (at the least) less drastic hyperbole. And how about some context to those quotes? On the second one at least I found you left off a bit before that that makes the whole thing much less worse than it sounds: "In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." I don't think it's unreasonable for Linus to be taking that attitude about the mascot that will define the OS that he created. He was apparently listening to input on it anyway, more than you can say for most people in that situation.