If you read, at the very least, the public accounts of the people who worked with him, you'll find that he came across as a very technically-able, detail-oriented person with pretty sane management style -- certainly far better than Jobs' tantrums.
"And how much do you think a really good programmer should get paid? Around here we pay our best programmers around two thousand dollars per week. Do you think you should be paid more than that?"
"I don't know," I replied. I was finally beginning to see where he was coming from. Bill was trying to get me to brag that I could write the application switcher really quickly, so he could justify paying me a lower price for it.
"Well, I don't think that you could expect to get more than four thousand dollars per week, tops. Actually, I think that's too much, but let's go with that. If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it."
$40,000 didn't sound like very much to me, especially if it was as strategic to Microsoft as it seemed to be. I think Bill was expecting me to make a counteroffer, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about selling it to Microsoft regardless of compensation, since it really should eventually be part of the Mac OS.
