

Programmers At Work - Bill Gates (1986) - prakash
http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

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volida
"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
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).

~~~
TrevorJ
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)

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mdemare
"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.

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

~~~
rbanffy
Well... Not in the dumpster.

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mattjung
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
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 :)

~~~
mattjung
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).

~~~
cpr
Exactly. I was at school with Gates (used to see him hunched over the PDP-10
TTYs late at night writing his Basic), and we all used the ARPAnet for mail,
ftp, etc (though it was pretty new in '73), but we didn't think it was
anything that would affect our entire lives much later.

I also remember working with Len Bosack later (1980-ish) on a consulting
project at HP and hearing about Cisco, and wondering who in the world would
buy IP routers?

It just wasn't obvious back then. It was simply "part of the air", as Gates
has said in interviews.

~~~
mattjung
I wouldn't blame him for that, But it seems to be part of the explication why
Microsoft was so passive towards the Internet and still is quite clueless.
Apparently, it was a technology Gates had no passion for (in contrast to PCs)
and he always considered rather a threat to his company than a chance to
extend its position.

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

