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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

That story sure brings Gates down another few notches in my book, as a programmer at least. Predicting how long it will take to implement a totally new program with lots of unknowns is crazy in itself. Trying to estimate how many LOC it will take _another_ programmer and then estimating a schedule on the fly like that is just pure fantasy. It's also unbelievably aggravating to be on the receiving end.

John Carmack's permanent answer on projects is "When it's done". The only truthful answer when developing anything new and interesting.

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That story sure brings Gates down another few notches in my book

It seems he was a bully, too, at least in the early days: http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/05/microsoft_memor.html

Then again, most people probably don't care, given Microsoft's financial results.

Hmmm I cannot really claim to read Bill Gs mind. But the man was an accomplished programmer and knew that great software gets built when a hacker commits himself to doing nothing else but working on it for a couple of weeks. I think he was just trying to edge Hertzfield into working on the Switcher. Another interesting take away from the story is how Gates focuses on what is good for the users and not on M$ controlling the Switcher

> I think he was just trying to edge Hertzfield into working on the Switcher.

He was trying to get him to do it really quickly so he could justify paying him as little as possible. He got it for $0, so that made him happy.

> Gates focuses on what is good for the users and not on M$ controlling the Switcher

He wanted to take advantage of the fact that his apps had very low memory footprints. Switcher was the way to do it. He had no need to control Switcher itself. The fact that he wanted the project done quickly to save money says to me he didn't really care about quality, which users obviously do.

This is an amusing lesson in how different people interpret the exact same thing so differently.

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