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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."
His life achievements notwithstanding, obviously Bill never outgrew this mentality, from his "open letter to hobbyists" on the antics of Microsoft, especially from the 90s onward...
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He grew up in a family with a moderately oppressive mother and a caring yet distant father, who valued intelligence. He talked like a lawyer (he was one), and while he cared about his son, if you wanted his respect you needed to be able to verbalize a coherent and logical argument. These combined to be a powerful motivation for Mr Bill to try to learn everything about the world, since that's what it took to get respect.
He was a smart guy. He scored a near perfect on his SAT, and went into Harvard.
Qxe4
Isn't he dreamy?
Really? How is this not 'news for nerds'? Love him or hate him, he's been one of the most important 'nerds' in the world for the last couple of decades. While I've have only gone over the summary; I believe that it's fairly clear that it's an frank account of his childhood. Also, most of the time when people think of 'nerds' the seem to believe that we're mild, or focused; when in reality we struggle with our 'gifts', perhaps more than most.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Because it's a chance to look at Bill Gates (our 'enemy') from a side we've never seen him. A lot of us can probably even relate to him. If you read the article, you'll find out at least five things you didn't know about him, and if you are perceptive you will gain a new view of the man. It's an interesting article (though apparently not to you), that's why it's on slashdot.
Qxe4
Believe it or not, there's an awful lot of nerds that honestly have no idea how Gates got his start. I'm old, but many people around here aren't.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
It sounds like the perfect qualities and personality for conquering an industry. Maybe we should be glad that he stayed out of law, or we could have ended up with a real control-freak president here.
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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 guess ultimately Bill Gates, is just this guy, you know?
expandfairuse.org
I'm sorry. To show how sincere I am with my apology, here is a totally non-related picture.
I think it's pretty clear that organizations, even big ones, tend to reflect the personalities of their leaders - especially when those leaders have strong personalities. This is very visible with Microsoft, Apple and Google. They're very different companies and I think that's largely down to the way Jobs, Gates and L&S are as people.
Microsoft and Apple are both pretty darn important, and I think Jobs and Gates have pretty darn similar personalities. They both seem to be hyper-aggressive, very controlling A-types who don't think twice about intimidating their "minions". I think that also sums up Microsoft and Apple as companies. So studying Gates can tell us more about the Microsoft of the 90s, which is an interesting topic for anyone in the tech industry.
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:
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... 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.
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It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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.
Trying to put a soft human side to the person who stole innovation and profits from the PC industry, who used illegal leveraging of a monopoly to build his wealth.
He should be taken out back and shot instead of making him out to some 'geek hero', which is is not.
Yeah, he is. Just because you hate him doesn't mean plenty of people don't admire what he's been able to accomplish. I don't always agree with the man's methods, but the fact remains that what he's done is damn impressive.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.
In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.
Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Gladwell's latest book "Outliers" has a chapter about Bill Gates. Overall the book is about how a certain very few people are able to have outrageous success. The standard American story of this is that through hard work and determination that anything is possible. Gladwell points out that in most cases it requires a lot more than grit and determination it also requires being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right skills. (I know... duh. Right? But it is a good book).
For Bill Gates... he went to a wealthy private school whose Mom's organization decided to buy a computer terminal in 1968! Bill would have been one of a handful of teenagers in the world who had access to a computer in those days (and one that didn't require punchcard programming at that.) Later he and Paul Allen were able to get access to U. of Washington computers late at night. As a result they got jobs programming during high school.
I don't remember all the details, but Gates (and a similar story for Bill Joy of Sun) had lots of very unusual, very lucky situations along the way that led to him being a young very skilled programmer at a time when virtually no other people in the world would have had that level of experience (10,000 hours).
He was a smart, tenacious kid, but Microsoft wouldn't have happened if he hadn't had access to that terminal when he 13 years old.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
For another perspective on Bill's success, and a deeply interesting look at success in general, check out Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers .
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Wow. You just compared Bill Gates to brutal, genocidal dictators. You officially have no sense of perspective. Good day.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Except he did, at one point, help code the products.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard