
Professor who knew Gates at Harvard: He was the smartest person I've ever met - rmason
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-story-about-bill-gatess-intelligence-2015-11
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ncmncm
Intelligence is not the most important quality.

Indulging Gates's appetite for monopoly has set back progress in computation
by, literally, decades. Every application program coded for MS-DoS and, later,
MS Windows, took several times the time and attention as if it had been
developed for well-designed platforms of each era.

Imagine what we could have had, had not the best of each generation beat their
brains out on Microsoft's wall, just to get the most basic features to work
just well enough to ship. Imagine where we would be without a whole generation
in thrall to Java, which took off solely because it was the only hope of ever
getting off the Microsoft treadmill.

We have had progress this past decade because of the shift to actually-
competing iOS and Android ecosystems, and multiple server-side platforms. We
could have had it twenty years earlier, were laws on the books governing
monopolies enforced as written.

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Madmallard
I would say that high standard deviation intelligence largely takes the luck
out of entrepeneurial success

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sunstone
"The Road Ahead" speaks for itself on this topic.

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zozbot123
Ah... the book that managed to entirely miss the rise of the Internet (and
needed a from-scratch rewrite to fix the issue in the second edition!) Also:
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to
factor large prime numbers."

