Bringing Up Bill

theodp writes "Over at the WSJ, Bill Gates Sr. describes what it took to turn an unruly 12-year-old into Microsoft's founder and the world's richest man. This included throwing a glass of cold water in the boy's face when he was having a particularly heated argument with his mother at the dinner table. 'He was nasty,' says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. 'I'm at war with my parents over who is in control,' Bill Gates recalls telling a therapist, who told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. The rest, as they say, is history. The accompanying Gates Family Album is also worth a look."

Comments

Re:How is this news?

[Martin Blank]

I have much less respect for Larry Ellison than I do for Bill Gates. Gates might have been difficult to handle behind closed doors, but Ellison is just outright arrogant all over, from ignoring San Jose Airport's landing restrictions (and eventually getting a waiver for them) to withdrawing a $115 million pledge to Harvard University just because they changed presidents. I have also heard from people who have worked at Oracle that Ellison is at least as difficult to work with as Steve Ballmer, and that Oracle's management cares much less about the technology than about the money even when compared to Microsoft.

Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control"

[CAIMLAS]

Sorry?

VisualBasic, Windows 95, 98, ME, ActiveDirectory, Bob, Clippy, win32 API, functionally useless APIs, forced backwards compatibility, intrusive and dangerous default system services, Internet Explorer, MSHTML, and on and on goes the list of half-baked, broken, and abusive technologies which we've had to work around for the past two decades. Policy at MS has always been "we're doing what we want, and don't care about you" with regard to their products; they're brazen, like an undisciplined IT worker is in making system changes.