Programmers At Work - Bill Gates (1986)

http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

by prakash • 18 years ago

40 17 18 years ago

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mattjung3• 18 years ago

Very interesting, many of his answers are still prevailing. And you also find the reason why Microsoft slept away the Internet, Gates believed in CD ROMs:

"One of the new areas we’re focusing on at Microsoft is compact-disk applications. CD ROM is the technology we’re going to use to get personal computers into the home."

During the whole interview, he didn't mention a single time the word: communication.

dhouston• 18 years ago

he was only talking about the next 5 years or so. the internet wasnt terribly useful (at least to the masses) in 1986, nor for the next 9 or so years until mosaic/netscape came out. until the early-mid 90s you could only really access the internet by logging into a BBS or some mainframe (the first TCP stack for windows emerged around 93 or 94.)

i'd say history showed that focusing on productivity apps and the OS from ~1986-96 was a winning strategic move :)

mattjung3• 18 years ago

But the technology that was able to connect computers existed already even though it was still in research phase. Gates was surely aware of the ARPA net at that time, but he didn't consider it a technology with impact on Microsoft (by the way, that was even still the case in the middle of the 90s).

volida• 18 years ago

"But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you’ll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really knew what they were doing."

ComputerGuru• 18 years ago

I think this is directly applicable to the current situation at Microsoft.

The number of contributors to the Windows codebase has risen dramatically over the last couple of years, while some other teams have remained at a fixed size (such as the XBox team and the Office team). It could be a (highly-unlikely) coincidence, but the end-user satisfaction with both the latter products is far greater than for Windows Vista.

Obviously a correlation does not imply causation, but it's certainly food for thought (even if slightly rehashed/redundant).

TrevorJ2• 18 years ago

The book "the tipping point" (an old fad, I know) made a comment on this as well. Teams are exponentially harder to manage over a certain threshold. I believe there are a few companies who actually go so far as to arbitrarily limit the size of teams for this reason with some good success. (Goretex was the example in the book as I remember)

michael_dorfman2• 18 years ago

I heartily recommend the book this is drawn from-- it has a lot of great interviews with some pretty impressive folk. It's sadly out of print, but should be fairly easy to get used, I imagine.

ambition• 18 years ago

Only a few copies on amazon.ca, unfortunately, with astronomical prices. But it sounds as if the author is gearing up for a reprint, or at the very least will post a large number of the interviews over time.

michael_dorfman2• 18 years ago

Ouch! I guess I spoke too soon. Glad I held on to my old copy, then.

mdemare• 18 years ago

"You’re seeing a lot more cases where people can afford to use C, instead of using assembly language."

Wow! How far we've come.

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

I love the dumpster-diving part. "In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system" is deeply enlightening.

brfox• 18 years ago

Don't you ever view source code to learn something?

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

Well... Not in the dumpster.

TrevorJ2• 18 years ago

I built a kick ass table for my kitchen out of stuff I found in a dumpster.

Programmers At Work - Bill Gates (1986)

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