
Bill Gates' worst decisions as CEO, according to a longtime Microsoft exec - davidst
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-worst-decisions-as-ceo-2016-4
======
Nokinside
>Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early on
because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value
for the customers. But that approach was a "disaster," he writes, as it
essentially made the US government and the EU to "declare war on Microsoft."

This is bullcrap. Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla and played as dirty as
they could against smaller competitors using every inch of their monopoly
power.

MS had OEM's in their leach and they used blackmail and threats against them
to keep them from preinstalling anything but MS sofware in PC's.

Software startups in the PC-era were routinely shafted. If their product was
good and MS wanted it, they had to sell to MS or MS would attack them and
build competing product that was pre-installed. They also hired engineers from
competing firms without requirement to work, copied the product and bled the
competitor in the courtroom, hided necessary apis from competing products. MS
made so much money they could afford to lose in court if it meant that
competing product did not make it.

Government was the only instance big enough to stop dirty game MS played.

~~~
webreac
I fully agree with you, but this does not contradict the article. If the
lobbying effort of Microsoft was more developped, Microsoft would not have
been stopped by government. It was an error for Microsoft even if it is in the
benefit of whole world.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I find it bizarre that people would freely admit that a CEO should've made
corrupting politicians a priority. How are we going to address corruption in
politics when we're so apathetic when it shows up?

~~~
Gravityloss
And he compares to Intel, which was much more successful. Time for more
investigative journalism?

~~~
ZenoArrow
Wouldn't mind reading a story about the Intel lobbying. In terms of the next
steps (in the US at least), I'd hope there could be greater awareness and
support for Wolf PAC and similar initiatives.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC)

------
stickfigure
There is nothing in this article that isn't better read at the original Quora
Q&A:

[https://www.quora.com/What-were-Bill-Gatess-worst-
decisions-...](https://www.quora.com/What-were-Bill-Gatess-worst-decisions-as-
CEO)

The "journalist" should have just clicked the share button at Quora, it would
have been more informative.

~~~
gcatalfamo
I am struggling to find a news source worse than Business Insider in the last
year.

~~~
cylinder
Are they a news source? They're more of an aggregator, there's certainly a
space for that.

------
tie_
I really hope we can go quicker to a time when "lobbying the government" is no
longer accepted as a standard business practice, but a strong signal of
corruption and foul play. If that would be Gates' biggest mistake (and it
ain't) then the guy would be a flesh-and-bone saint in the tech community.

I can see, however, why MS would be in a downspiral course with senior
executives holding such opinions.

------
kakakiki
I started reading the article thinking that he made a lot of mistakes. Turns
he just made two.

"his weak lobbying efforts and failure to take advantage of the internet early
on."

------
aaronbrethorst
Breaking up Microsoft would've created a far more competitive group of
companies than what Microsoft turned into during the 00's. Nadella, to his
great credit, seems to have really made Microsoft a player again. But it
would've been way easier—and probably far more valuable for Microsoft
shareholders—had Microsoft become Windows, Inc., Office, Inc., and Everything
Else, Inc.

~~~
optforfon
Well I think the synergy that Windows was developing (Phone, Desktop, XBox,
Kinect, etc. unified APIs) had a lot of potential to provide developer lock-in
and a very compelling alternative to the hardware lock-in of Apple and the
spaghetti of half baked alternatives in the OSS world.

Unfortunately the quality has been a complete disaster. Instead of focusing on
what open-source fails to deliver - quality and polish (b/c people who work
for free want to work on fancy shiny new things, or do complete rewrites
instead of polishing old code bases) they just kept pumping out more half
baked features.

Now Nadella has gone for some strange short-term populist plan of giving away
all their intellectual property, eliminating lock in, and banking the whole
enterprise on the cloud (which has almost no lock in!). I think he's going to
Microsoft into an early grave

------
manojlds
Isn't the biggest mistake giving MS over to Balmer?

~~~
johnloeber
Probably not. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662666)

------
badosu
The article mentions:

> "Top of the list for me is that Bill did not engage – either himself or the
> company – in the political process early enough. When Microsoft’s
> competitors were effectively lobbying the government, Bill’s attitude was
> the government should just go away and leave Microsoft alone," Silverberg
> wrote in a Quora Q&A session held Friday.

And then again:

> Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early
> on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough
> value for the customers. But that approach was a "disaster," he writes, as
> it essentially made the US government and the EU to "declare war on
> Microsoft."

This is totally insipid and futile news, what knowledge do we gain from this?
A news company that takes an article and digest for us?

This goes on to show what it really is: just a place to exhibit their
ideology, just take a look at how they use fear to instill on the (or wannabe)
businessman the idea that you must lobby to be successful.

Which is the most ridicule thing in the world, as these people are just the
ones that defend the neoliberal stance, which they are just refuting (which
was the original Bill Gates ethos).

------
geon
So his mistake was to not make the world a worse place, hampering innovation?

~~~
toyg
On the contrary, the point is that Gates did not try to _own_ the innovation,
hampering it instead. Imagine a world where IE keeps developing at the rate it
was between v3 and 5, rather than stagnating as it did after it captured the
market. Imagine a world where Windows became free to install and run on
virtualized platforms in 2003. Imagine MS building free devops tools...

~~~
slededit
Perhaps if they didn't allow things to stagnate they could have kept up the
assumption that dev tools weren't free. A lot of open source development is
predicated on "I want this, why doesn't it exist?". Tools that already exist
don't get as much interest (example: MS Office vs Open Office).

------
smitherfield
Gates is perhaps the best business mind of the past century. The only truly
dreadful decision of his career was handing the reigns to the incompetent
Ballmer. Almost overnight, Microsoft went from a great innovator to a dinosaur
caught flat-footed by every new development in the tech industry.

~~~
Nokinside
>Microsoft went from a great innovator

What are the greatest innovations from Gates era that originated inside
Microsoft? It's hard to find any.

Bill Gates was great and ruthless businessman who understood technology, but
he was not good Chief Architect (it was his other position). During Bill Gates
Chief Architect era MS was constantly behind others in innovations and only
the usage of monopoly power allowed it to embrace, extend and extinguish.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

------
chinathrow
"his weak lobbying efforts"

I really do not like lobbying - therefore I don't see that as an error on
Microsofts side.

~~~
vezycash
The best way to understand Bill's lobbying error is to take a look at the
current 800 pound gorilla Google.

Now, imagine Google's founders remained geeks, avoided lobbying at Washington.
What do you think would have happened once complaints from its competitors
started pouring in?

Microsoft was hammered because it bundled internet explorer with its operating
system and other anti-competitive practices.

Google mandates Google some to be installed by its OEMs. It also bars them
from releasing phones with forked android versions.

Google also tried to leverage its dominance in search to cut a slice out of
Amazon's biz.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-oem-requirements-
unveil...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-oem-requirements-unveiled/)

In my opinion, Google's founders would have made exactly the same mistake as
Bill if not for Eric Schmidt. His two lost battles with Microsoft taught him
many things two of which were:

1\. How to prepare for the upcoming battle with Microsoft

2\. The importance of lobbying

~~~
ZenoArrow
Politicians should serve the will of the people. Any successful lobbying that
gets in the way of that should be seen as a failure, not something to be
encouraged. Of course changing the system to hinder the ability of companies
to lobby is the goal we should be aiming for, but in the meantime let's not
give companies that do so carte blanche to continue.

~~~
Decade
Don't hate the player when he didn't even want to play. Hate the game.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. Either you lobby politicians, or somebody else
lobbies the politicians and locks you out.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I can and will blame both. Not all companies lobby, not all companies have the
resources to effectively do so, yet small to mid size companies continue to
turn a profit. The argument that large companies have to do so just because
they can is ludicrous.

