My First BillG Review (2006)

I see someone added the vintage 2006 dateline.

This really does stand the test of time, one of the gems;

>Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

>Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.

>“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.

This part is more about Ballmer than Gates.

This is probably one of the reasons why Elon Musk makes a great CEO. He has the 30,000ft to 3mm view in his head. He can simulate the entire company and different pieces of product in his head, run Monte Carlo simulations with different future variants and gauge their tradeoffs.

There are many folks who like to be hard and harsh leaders but don’t have those mental simulators. The other side is soft and nice leaders who also don’t have the mental simulators. Seems there is a fine line of assertiveness which leads to good bets.