

Bill Gates’s Favorite Business Tales, in The New Yorker - prostoalex
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/07/bill-gates-favorite-business-book.html

======
paul
It's worth reading the Xerox story:
[http://www.gatesnotes.com/media/features/books/Bill_Gates_Jo...](http://www.gatesnotes.com/media/features/books/Bill_Gates_John_Brooks_Business_Adventures_Xerox_Free_Chapter.pdf)

Xerox was essentially the hot startup of the 1960's, and it's interesting how
similar many of the issues and attitudes were back then, including fears that
copying would destroy the publishing industry, struggles with no longer being
a startup, and resentment from older industries.

 _In the opinion of some commentators, what has happened so far is only the
first phase of a kind of revolution in graphics. “Xerography is bringing a
reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every
reader can become both author and publisher,” the Canadian sage Marshall
McLuhan wrote in the spring, 1966, issue of the American Scholar. “Authorship
and readership alike can become production-oriented under xerography.…
Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a
total revolution in this old sphere.”_

...

 _Dr. Dessauer threw a retrospectively distracted glance at the ceiling and
went on, “Hardly anybody was very optimistic in the early years. Various
members of our own group would come in and tell me that the damn thing would
never work. The biggest risk was that electrostatics would prove to be not
feasible in high humidity. Almost all the experts assumed that — they’d say,
‘You’ll never make copies in New Orleans.’ And even if it did work, the
marketing people thought we were dealing with a potential market of no more
than a few thousand machines. Some advisers told us that we were absolutely
crazy to go ahead with the project. Well, as you know, everything worked out
all right — the 914 worked, even in New Orleans, and there was a big market
for it. Then came the desk-top version, the 813. I stuck my neck way out again
on that, holding out for a design that some experts considered too fragile.”_

...

 _McColough said that since he came to Haloid, in 1954, he felt he’d been part
of three entirely different companies — until 1959 a small one engaged in a
dangerous and exciting gamble; from 1959 to 1964 a growing one enjoying the
fruits of victory; and now a huge one branching out in new directions. I asked
him which one he liked best, and he thought a long time. “I don’t know,” he
said finally. “I used to feel greater freedom, and I used to feel that
everyone in the company shared attitudes on specific matters like labor
relations. I don’t feel that way so much now. The pressures are greater, and
the company is more impersonal. I wouldn’t say that life has become easier, or
that it is likely to get easier in the future.”_

~~~
larrys
"Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing,
because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,”"

One of major issues with publishing was distribution. Merely having the tools
(back then) to create printed content was not the same as being able to put it
in the hands of people that would want to read the content. Without the
distribution (or the money to advertise) it didn't matter that you could run
off copies or even if you owned your own printing press and bookbinding
operation. You still had to get the product in the hands of the public.

~~~
dennisgorelik
> One of major issues with publishing was distribution.

Distribution is still a major issue.

Cost of making a copy is ~$0 now, but it's still hard to distribute your
information.

~~~
superuser2
>t's still hard to distribute your information.

It's not hard to distribute your information. Wordpress.com, Youtube, etc.
make this extremely easy.

It's hard to get people to _care_ about what you have to say enough that they
keep reading it, but making text available to people (well, people with
internet access) who want to read it has been entirely solved for more than 10
years.

~~~
Turing_Machine
It's not even hard to distribute if you want to sell it. You can upload it to
Amazon and it'll be for sale anywhere on the planet in less than a day (they
claim 12 hours or less). Likewise for Barnes & Noble, Apple, and the rest
(Apple is the slowest...it can take up to a couple of weeks, but that's still
amazingly fast compared to the year or more of lead time for old-school
print).

------
jonahx
_“To set high goals, to have almost unattainable aspirations, to imbue people
with the belief that they can be achieved — these are as important as the
balance sheet, perhaps more so,” Wilson said once, and other Xerox executives
have often gone out of their way to emphasize that “the Xerox spirit” is not
so much a means to an end as a matter of emphasizing “human values” for their
own sake_

Funny how this philosophy has become a prerequisite in the startup world, to
the point where even trivial apps with best-case success scenarios of modest
profitability must be sold with promises of changing the world (or at least an
entire industry), and backstories in which their hyper-focused product, based
on 3-year-old technologies, has been the founder's passion since he was 10
years old....

------
shrike
A link to the Amazon listing - [http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-
Twelve-Classic-Str...](http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-
Classic-Street-ebook/dp/B00L1TPCKW/)

------
kristianp
Discussion from yesterday, article with a similar title, but in the wsj.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020621)

------
menriquez
"All the evidence suggests that communication between people by whatever
means, far from simply accomplishing its purpose, invariably breeds the need
for more.)"

hmmmmn...ya think?

------
funkyy
I see lately a lot of buzz about Bill Gates. Is he coming back as CEO? Is this
marketing campaign?

imho Bill Gates is not the person to follow when talking about business. He
missed multiple big chances calling them a bubble like internet, mobile and
much more. He get where he is out of stealing Windows from Apple, bullied
software programmers and created extremely closed environment.

He was person non grata decade ago, but recently people make him a legend... I
wonder why the retreat of majority of web society...

~~~
walterbell
Gates Foundation is involved in many non-tech areas, e.g. education & health.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=gates+foundation+investment+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=gates+foundation+investment+policy)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-
pulled...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-
the-swift-common-core-
revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html)

\---

"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of
what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200
million, the foundation also built political support across the country,
persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for
states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual
collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut
every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration."

\---

~~~
kissickas
I have never been a hater and respect the man, but knowing that he had a role
in promoting Common Core actually lowers my opinion of him considerably.

Have you seen what ridiculous methods they're requiring children to learn in
math? No longer can teachers be reasonable by allowing you to solve a problem
your own way, as long as you show your work and get the right answer. All this
has done is remove parents from the teaching process. I only know about math
from my younger cousins and friends who are teachers, but I'm sure some of the
other subjects have their own issues.

~~~
walterbell
Doesn't sound good. What age groups are affected by Common Core? I wonder if
this helps or hurts the homeschooling crowd.

~~~
nmrm
> Doesn't sound good.

It's overblown hype. Kids should understand multiple algorithms for
addition/subtraction/multiplication/division for the same reason that we teach
CS undergrads multiple sorting algorithms.

The point isn't to be able to pound out a sorting algorithm on the spot, but
that learning about sorting algorithms provides a good "prototype" of thinking
about algorithms more generally. Ditto for mathematical operators.

The problem is that parents never really had a deep understanding of even
basic arithmetic. It's a self-reproducing cycle, and the USA will continue to
lag behind the rest of the developed world in mathematics if our primary
standard is "how the past generation did things".

>What age groups are affected by Common Core?

K-12

> I wonder if this helps or hurts the homeschooling crowd.

Ostensibly helps, because more teaching aids/material will be available, and
knowing several algorithms to achieve the same thing helps you understand the
concept in a much deeper way.

Actually it doesn't matter, because home schoolers aren't obligated to follow
CC standards, and are likely to treat anything CC-related as pure
unadulterated evil without actually evaluating pedagogical evidence.

