Rating: 8.0/10.
Biography of Bill Gates and Microsoft, from the earliest founding days until around 1992, when this book was written. Bill Gates, being the founder of Microsoft, quickly became one of the wealthiest people by making personal computers, and how his both technical ability and business savvy deals made him so successful.
Bill Gates was born in 1955. He was seen as a restless kid who disliked following rules and had rather had his own ideas. In 1967, during middle school at Lakeside, Bill got early access to a timesharing system (along with Paul Allen and several others who became notable tech figures); they spent many hours writing programs with it, getting familiar enough to hack into the system’s accounting records, and eventually were banned for a few months. The company that ran the system went out of business, and soon after they made their first money by writing computer programs for local organizations in exchange for computer time and money. First was a payroll program, and then a scheduling program for his own high school.
He started at Harvard as a freshman and discovered the Altair 8800 in 1975, and was uniquely positioned to write programs for it given his early experience, as at that time almost no high school student had any computer experience at all. Then came one of the most impressive technical accomplishments in their history: Gates and Allen programmed a version of BASIC for the Altair without access to the actual machine. They built an emulator from available documentation before writing the BASIC interpreter, and miraculously it worked the first time it ran on an actual machine when demoing to the founder of MITS in Albuquerque.
Altair BASIC gets traction and becomes widely pirated, since the price was quite high, and Microsoft was founded in 1975 and soon they expanded to other programming languages like APL, Fortran, and COBOL, and newer processors like the 6502. Around this time he makes friends with Steve Ballmer and drops out of Harvard. The tense legal moment was with the contract with MITS (the makers of the Altair); Microsoft wanted the right to sell the program to other parties, therefore being able to write it once and sell it many times. The contract at the time was exclusive but they took it to arbitration and won, on the grounds that MITS didn’t make a strong attempt to sell it. Soon the revenues grew quickly once they were free to sell it to different systems and it became a common standard.
In 1978 when they moved the company to Bellevue, which at that time was far from any tech activity and was mainly home to the founders. Some anecdotes about Bill from this time include losing his credit card multiple times and getting numerous speeding tickets on his Porsche, both in New Mexico and Washington. The company grows and hires more programmers, and revenue surpasses $1 million.
The next big leap came in 1980 when IBM was launching its personal computer and they approached Microsoft for software like language interpreters and the operating system. Gates adapted QDOS to 16 bits (based on CP/M and originally bought from Seattle Computers for $50,000) and negotiated a license with IBM where the price was low, but they kept the right to re-license the software to others, which turned out to be a forward-thinking play in the coming years. They hire key personnel like Steve Ballmer and Simonyi, and IBM gives them a prototype to develop DOS; the first version is fairly primitive but is considered good enough and shipped quickly. IBM was wary of the startup’s security posture, especially since the details of the not yet announced machine were leaked before its announcement.
At this time, rivalry begins with Apple and Steve Jobs, and VisiCalc gains traction as a spreadsheet application, and Microsoft enters application development, with a deal with Apple to provide a spreadsheet, word processor, database, etc. In the early 80s, demand for all of Microsoft’s products, including the operating system and applications, continues to grow with the new system on different machines and expansion to Japan and Europe. The company is known for celebrating 80-hour weeks, with many people developing health problems, including Paul Allen, who gets diagnosed in 1982 as the company expands to over 200 people.
Next was the rise of visual operating systems. In 1983, VisiCorp demoed a graphical windowing system, and Microsoft worked on its own version, first called Interface Manager but then renamed to Windows on marketing advice. They launched the Microsoft Mouse to control the pointer rather than using a command line interface, and Lotus 1-2-3 was considered a killer app and achieved its speed by circumventing DOS. A crucial technical limitation was that applications based on DOS formats could run on multiple systems but tended to be slow.
However, at this time (around 1984) Microsoft made many promises, selling software that didn’t exist yet products tended to be buggy and late (although IBM’s graphical OS TopView was not much better), and the company started to land a reputation for not getting things done. Windows 1.0 finally shipped after two years in development with almost no applications, but they did successfully navigate a lawsuit with Apple that claimed it was too similar. Still, the company IPOed in 1986, leaving many executives and early employees with a windfall.
As the language business declined and applications dominated, Microsoft attempted to enter the home media space, including CD-ROM, but the technology was too new at the time and had not yet been standardized. They later produced a still image database with limited success. 1987 is when they released Windows 2.0, bundled with Excel, and warning signs of antitrust violations emerged, as Microsoft made both the applications and the underlying operating system, therefore giving an unfair advantage over competitors. Apple alleged that the Windows system looked and felt too much like the Mac, even though no source code was copied, and this dragged on for years. He breaks up with his girlfriend Winblad when he’s not ready to settle yet.
Over the next several years, a long collaboration with IBM to deliver the OS/2 operating system which promised more advanced features like multitasking, memory protection, networking capabilities, etc. than DOS. After numerous delays, it shipped in 1987, but demand for OS/2 was weak because of the lack of available software on release. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to work on both OS/2 and Windows at the same time, with IBM seeing Windows as temporary, but Microsoft was promoting Windows as the simpler OS that is good enough for most purposes. When Windows 3.0 launched, the third time it was “good enough” and achieved widespread adoption; soon after they split with the IBM team which continued working on OS/2 for some time, but the sales continue to be weak.
When the book ends in 1993, Windows continues to grow and leverages its operating system dominance to boost its own applications, and the NT system incorporates most of the features of OS/2. They win the legal battle with Apple about look and feel, and Bill Gates becomes the wealthiest man in America by 1992. In his personal life at this time, Bill Gates dates and eventually marries younger employee Melinda French and constructs the Xanadu home in Medina. As he approaches middle age, in the epilogue he worries about getting too old and slow while still priding himself on being technical, and starts giving wealth to charities.
Overall, this biography of Bill Gates is quite comprehensive and has a lot of research done on the business deal mechanics and numerous lawsuits. However, there is fairly limited explanation of the technical details, often glossed over in a sentence or two. It is quite dense and a slog in the middle sections so it took a few weeks to get through, and some of the personal anecdotes felt odd right next to serious business discussions; overall it was a good read for understanding early Microsoft history and the earliest major tech company in the Seattle area.
