
How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates - krmboya
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
======
pedalpete
I find this somewhat offensive for Bill Gates. Is this considered satire? Or
just poor taste?

Of course, this fails to take into account the damn hard work, risks, and
clever strategies used in growing Microsoft.

Let's not forget that Steve Jobs came from a much more modest background and
was a great competitor to Bill Gates and Microsoft. It wasn't all about having
the background of a trust fund to fall back on.

I fear that people will take this article to heart without realising that it
wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his
instinct and drive.

~~~
Tmmrn
> the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft.

Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical,
anticompetitive and illegal just as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation)
[http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107...](http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653)

Sure, it was "clever" and "risky" and it probably was a lot of "hard work"...

~~~
Permit
Maybe it's because I was born in 1990 and wasn't old enough at the time, but I
can't understand how shipping IE with Windows lead to antitrust litigation.
The closed systems that we're seeing on mobile seem much, much worse.

Reminds me of: [http://xkcd.com/1118/](http://xkcd.com/1118/)

~~~
lmm
Yeah, you didn't live through it. You don't remember when the world was
windows-only; no tech company nowadays has anything like their dominance back
then. You don't remember what a great product Netscape produced, how much
better they made our lives, and how quickly they were destroyed by MS's
dumping.

~~~
Permit
My understanding is that Netscape failed for a variety of reasons, a major
reason being they decided to rewrite their entire product. Joel Spolsky
cataloged it as one of the "Things you should never do".[1]

[1]
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html)

~~~
mathattack
The counterfactual we don't know is "would they have survived anyway?" The
deck was stacked against them before the self inflicted gunshot.

------
ck2
Strangely I don't begrudge Bill Gate's wealth. There could have been far
better examples for this article.

He did have more than a little entitlement to get him going but he didn't rest
on it - when he was in the right time at the right place he worked hard to
make it happen.

Plus he is now giving all his wealth to charity and virtually nothing to his
kids as inheritance.

How about the Walton children or the Koch children.

~~~
judk
He isn't giving all his wealth. He is keeping more than any one else (to
insignificant approximaton error) will ever hope to see in their life.

~~~
mistermann
I imagine the recipients probably have a more positive and realistic view of
the matter than you.

------
triplesec
This isn't one of Philip Greenspun's better articles, but it's a deliberate
troll of the Gladwellian kind to make you see that your assumptions of success
may not be entirely accurate. Where he makes assertions, most of them are
factually correct. The rest is a trolling frame to get you to think about the
question of Microsoft's management and decisionmaking as a strategy for
success. Which you may be doing.

~~~
danielweber
This is from 1998, if not sooner. I remember reading it back in the 20th
century. Definitely written before Gladwell was a name at all.

(I remember being so edgy in 1996 that I had the Bill Gates Wealth Clock as my
start page. And a few years later my screensaver was "don't touch anything in
Bill Gates's half." Fun times, fun times. 1999-me wouldn't believe my current
opinions of Gates vis-a-vis Jobs.)

~~~
triplesec
Indeed. he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita and I likes his
photo.net too which I think may still be going, and then apparently some idiot
VCs hijacked his Arsdigita and ruined it
[http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/](http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/)

~~~
qohen
_he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita_

He still is:

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/)

(BTW, if memory serves, back then he didn't have an actual blog, per se, but
posted essays occasionally such as the one being discussed here.)

------
Tyrannosaurs
"When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based
applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail."

Yep, that worked out well for them.

~~~
seiji
Hotmail is still one of the top three webmail providers. Sad, but true.

WebTV was just too early. It wanted to be a tablet experience on a TV with a
remote keyboard. What it should have been is modern day AppleTV/Roku (which
wasn't possible back then with dialup and 1.5M DSL speeds).

~~~
mistermann
Sad, because....?

~~~
aclevernickname
learn some history, junior.

~~~
mistermann
I'm well aware of history, and I'm likely older than you, you obnoxious little
twat.

I asked, why is it sad? Care to enlighten us with some words of wisdom?

------
Stately
It really was quite the fashionable thing to shit on Bill Gates in the late
nineties, eh?

~~~
xradionut
Yes it was. But in the 90's we didn't have any great personal operating
systems competing yet, and no one got fired for buying Microsoft products.

~~~
mattsfrey
That's important to note; linux and mac weren't really viable options in the
90's for most people.

~~~
judk
And BeOS and OS/2

In part due to MS antitrust violations, such as exclusivity deals with major
PC manufacturers, buying and shuttering competitors, lying about vaporware,
and stealing trade secrets frok technology partners.

WinNT came about in part due to scamming IBM on OS/2 development partnership.

------
bluedino
Looking back at the article:

 _' Train your CEO'_ Yea, that Ballmer guy worked out really well.

 _Do as HP does in regards to profits?_ Months after this article was written,
Carly Fiorina took the reigns of HP. Oof.

------
kintamanimatt
Perhaps a better strategy would be to deliver a lot of value to a lot of
people for money.

------
Dogamondo
Hmmm, I enjoyed this article. Maybe its because it validated potential failure
by being able to blame it on not coming from the 'right' background or having
the opportunities the article uses as an argument for his success. Upon
reflection it's a bit depressing too. After reading Steve Jobs biography the
one ingredient in common between both entrepreneurs I seem to lack is that
inherent harshness to call a spade a spade and not care about offending people
in the process. I can't help but default to finding praise in mediocrity
rather than coming down as a tyrant on anything less than perfect. Which
behaviour is more outlierish, and is that a trait of the most successful in
reality?

~~~
mattsfrey
I think people that do serious business consistently over time in the single
minded pursuit of wealth just tend to be megalomaniacal assholes by nature,
especially at that level. In general there are good sources to point towards
lavish praise and constructive criticism as being better recipes for boosting
employee productivity, so any success in that arena is probably despite their
character traits, not because of them. Of course when it comes down to brass
tacks and making decisions, you have to be ruthlessly objective, so these
traits would be useful there.

~~~
judk
Even if it would be better to treat staff well, it is likely to me that
abusing external partners and the law and other externalities is profit
generating.

------
exo_duz
I really don't agree with this Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming.

I agree that you cannot micromanage it but you also have to pass it on to
someone who is capable.

"However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java.
And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked
simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job."

The above point is true but the quality of code obviously leads to less bugs
and security holes. I have had horror stories of my friends hiring coders in
India. The work that was given back has been a mess and 90% of the time
requires a whole rewrite.

Point - Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.

------
seivan
I've felt like an expendable code monkey being under utilized and shoe-horned
into code only on a platform that is very visual and exploited by non devs
calling the shots/ideas/features/fun.

This article didn't make things better.

------
ekm2
_You 're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Especially working in
painful low-level imperative languages such as C or Java_

How true is this,especially the last sentence?

------
Roboprog
Thank God that portable devices are chipping away at the relevance of Windows
every year. May the trend continue.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Open standards adopted by the internet and mobile devices and the have made it
highly unlikely that any OS could every achieve the level of lock in that made
Windows what it was.

If you send me a mail you don't know where I'll be or what sort of machine
I'll be using when I open it. If you write a blog post you don't want to have
to care what browser I'll use.

Sure there's a base level of functionality that any OS will need to provide to
be a workable computing device (mail, web, maybe the ability to at least view
PDF and Office-type documents, that sort of thing) but there are already
dozens of OSes providing that and it feels unlikely that there could ever be
anything big enough to move us all back to a single platform.

Open standards rock.

------
gchokov
Easy. Just do what he did.

~~~
Mahn
_When_ he did it. Good luck with that time travel.

