Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is kind of tabloid territory here, but I am reminded of numerous accounts of "Bill Rage" in MS meetings. If you wanted to pitch an idea, you'd better be able to take on serious verbal abuse, sometimes simply because he didn't like the "name of one of the features" or because he didn't like some other minute aspect.
There have been so many reports of this over the years that you could really see a pattern forming around his behavior, and people around him had to "adapt" to his eccentricities.
For the most part, however, these outbursts didn't occur outside of closed doors. You don't see any videos on youtube with gates losing it in front of a camera.
(not even in the pie incident, really)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I agree with your take on why this is interesting, but I especially think the "our enemy" remark hits the nail on the head. If this was about Larry Ellison, it probably wouldn't have made it in. If the article were about Steve Jobs, it would have made it in for completely different reasons.
Yes, he's very influential, but it's his *controversial* nature that makes this especially interesting.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Ah, the old human interest story. So which particular PR company is being paid to humanise the face of Gates? And why?
Personally, I'd replace the word "respect" with "acknowledgment". The MS/WinTel strategies (if you can call them that) were effectively an implementation of organized crime behavior. It's been a while since it's been in the news, so people forget just how severe, and numerous, the allegations were.
Here's a brief reminder.
I wouldn't place the word "respect" in the same paragraph as him. This scale of abuse of power doesn't occur by accident.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Steve Jobs ain't no polyanna to work for either :P If anything, his fits, rage, pressure, and 'reality warping field' are legendary and well known traits. He alienated people. He rejected people sitting for job interviews because he considered them too square to work at Apple. He was fired from his own company for his behavior, for his mismanagement. He screwed over entire project-teams, even playing them off against each other inside the company. Just go watch "Pirates of Silicon Valley". Gates's claim to fame is his extreme competitive edge. That's not so bad. He was a card shark in college, a truly great negotiator, etc.
Would I have been better off growing up the son of a wealthy parents? I feel like most of my life thus far has been spent catching up to where the wealthy are right out of college. Sure, it's not exactly comparable -- time has given me more experience and perspective than almost any 22 year old -- but were all those years of figuring out how to afford to do what I wanted to do really beneficial to me? I've been reasonably wise in hedging my bets and am now able to afford trying to create and sell software on my own, but did being poor give me anything worthwhile or is it just fate's way of giving me (and others like me) the shaft?
I always think its funny when I hear or read interest pieces on a Celebrity's life. Bill Gates, according to the article synopsis, was a fiercely independent child, possibly even a brat, that was at odds with his parents. How many people in the world are there like this? And yet, its Bill that we write and read and care about because Celebrity drives and organizes social patterns....In the words of Robert M. Pirsig:
...
...
...
... And so Bill Gates is a big enough celebrity to have his personal life dug into by the media. His social patterns and examples will be passed on from generation to generation. Funny, I would rather have Larry Wall be in a role that big instead....
"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.
Even a policeman's uniform is a kind of celebrity device so that you will do what he says without questioning him. Without celebrity nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you could get society to work.
Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired as twin forces in the Dynamic generation of social value. Both fame and fortune are huge Dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning. We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? What exactly is the mechanism by which the cultures controls the shapes of the mirrors that produce all these different images of celebrity? Would analysis of that mirror-changing force enable the resolution of ethnic conflicts? Phaedrus didn't know..." - Lila, Chapter 20, Robert M. Pirsig.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Like him or not, Bill Gates is pretty high up in the list of people who had a large effect on the whole computing industry.As a nerd, and a parent, I'm interested in what makes him tick, so I don't make the same mistakes with my kids :)
His parents must do all right at christmas/birthdays/mothers day/fathers day/etc though... maybe there's something in that.
I wonder if, deep down, Microsoft Windows was just a way to rebel against his parents? eg "Fine then! I'm going to go and start a computing empire and make my products suckier and suckier and by the time people notice it will be too late for them to use anything else. And it be all your fault! :p :p :p"
Oh, FFS. I have Aspergers and am disorganised beyond belief to the point where I have to automate payments to take care I don't end up in arrears. I had a crap father (have, but to me he's dead), but I rank in Mensa tests in the top 1% of the country. So IQ doesn't impress me much - it's EQ you need and starting with some money in your pocket isn't a bad idea either, something that wasn't exactly a problem for young Gates, but will be a HUGE problem for all the kids whose dads will be thrown out as a result of the crisis. How are they going to eat, let alone go to school?
Anyway, I'm getting sick of the continued canonisation of those who have been consistently breaking the law and f*cked society for their own benefit as "enlightened" and "examples". I've seen people being listed as examples of good corporate coaching as well, where in reality they were simply screwing their customers left, right and centre (in some cases literally - whatever it took to get money). Knowing these peopel is a bit of an eye opener to the realities of what's behind an interview. I've seen someone interviewed in the FT who stated "modestly" that his Rolls was a economic investment because it served him so well over the years. He (and the journalist) just "forgot" to mention he's got more than one.
Bleagh. If this is the sort of example you want to give to the world, no wonder it's in such a f*cking mess. Next up: how Bush's upbringing made him become president?
Some of us remember when M$ was just producing crappy CP/M-80 compilers and assemblers. How crappy? It took me years to get out of the habit of writing "&array_name[0]", instead of "array_name", since C80 didn't use the latter correctly. (I understand that about version 6 of the M$-Windows "C" compiler they finally got it working; 5 didn't handle "if ((do_input) && inb())" correctly, since it would do the inb() first, at least in some circumstances).
After IBM was stupidly (as it turned out) snubbed by Digital Research, Mary Gates happened to meet an IBM exec at the club, and when he mentioned that they were looking for an operating system for little computers, she made the connection between him and Bill.
We all have her to "thank", first for bearing him, then for putting him into position to bully us.
As entertaining as that made for TV movie was for people who already knew some of the history, I think it would be better to recommend the movie's source material, Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley . The movie strips the whole colourful story of 1970s Silicon Valley down to Gates and Jobs, leaving out the many other important personalities involved.
For another perspective on Bill's success, and a deeply interesting look at success in general, check out Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers .