The man who could have been richer than Bill Gates | Hacker News Reader

The man who could have been richer than Bill Gates

freeenterpriseland.com

89 pointsacangiano41 comments

Maybe Gary Kildall would have had more success if he had a relative on the inside. Any treatment of the IBM/Microsoft deal without any mention of Mary Gates is misleading and incomplete...

http://www.virtualaltair.com/virtualaltair.com/mits0026.asp

"Fate smiled on Microsoft twice in these proceedings. First, IBM was somewhat leery of dealing with what they considered a somewhat flakey tiny software company, but it turns out that in addition to Microsoft's proven reputation as a viable language vendor, Mary Gates - Bill's mom - had served on the national board of United Way with one of the involved IBM senior executives - providing the validating social reference that they were working with "Mary's Gates' boy Bill".

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-h...

"Mary Gates, a prominent Seattle businesswoman who helped her son, William H. Gates 3d, get the contract that led to a lucrative relationship with I.B.M. for his fledgling Microsoft Corporation..."

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

"Mrs. Gates also figured in her son's success. She helped cement Microsoft's early connection with IBM, which led to development of the IBM PC with DOS, an operating system supplied by Microsoft. When someone mentioned Microsoft to IBM President John Opel in 1980, Opel responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." Opel served with Mrs. Gates on United Way's national board at the time."

Contingent on the story at the link being effectively true, it sounds like your first paragraph is just a bad lead in to airing a pet peeve of yours, because the logic does not follow. While that explains why IBM contacted Bill first for no apparent reason, the story says that Bill did the right thing and redirected them to Kildall. Kildall had a fair shot at the deal, but passed it up.

Again, contingent on the story being effectively true, there is no way Kildall was going to get that deal, family relationship on Bill's part or no family relationship. He saw it more as a distraction than an opportunity.

(It's a pity he became bitter because it sounds like he already had "fuck you" money; I certainly don't have a yacht or personal airplane or any of the several other things he had. If you ask me the truly sad part of the tale is that Kildall was owned by his possessions.)

Frustrating that even if you make more than 100 million dollars, you can still be bitter because somebody else made a couple of billion dollars.

I hope I wouldn't be like that. There is the aspect of recognition (who was the first to invent X), but in these modern times it is probably a good idea to realize that the concept of the sole inventor is overrated.

Nope ... it´s not about the money, it´s about yourself, the opportunity that you lost. Money, after some stage, is just a reflex of your ability to make more money. The ability of making money was probably the reason that bring him down. After all he is a business man ...

If i was him, i would be bad too, but my life is not based on that, is based on God ... so i could survive. After all, i guess the best lost for him was his wife, what, probably, screwed with him.

Title is misleading but story is very interesting.

Gary Kildall sold his company to Novel for $120 million so he did fine financially.

Even if Kildall had made the deal with IBM, it is questionable what would have happened. After all, he eventually did make a deal with IBM and it didn't matter.

The end of the story is a stretch. It is hard for me to believe that all the bad things happened to him because of the IBM deal.

Exactly. He had great business at the time, so he had a lot to lose. Gates had nothing, so his bet made a lot more sense. With what they knew, they probably both made the best choice.

The moral of the original Kildall Story is that you must always agree to be nice to big important companies like IBM. I love that this isn't true anymore.

I wish you luck getting anywhere on the Internet without the help of a major company, Google in particular. It may not be Microsoft or IBM, but there are still clear powers.

Why is he being down voted? Surely you may disagree, but it is not so far away from reality that it is more democratized now than a few decades ago.

I remember the first time I ran DR-DOS. It was so superior to MS-DOS it wasn't funny. It's a shame it didn't have the strategy to kill MS-DOS off.

A similar story by Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_...

The BW story reads like an unsourced reduction of the freeenterpriseland article.

The author of the FEL article sells an ebook made up of similar stories, which you can read a lot of on the site homepage. The ebook costs $5. http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/MAG.html

It's an interesting technique for writing and selling an ebook, but with no links to sources it is worse than the linkjack, it is plagiarism.

Obviously, he couldn't have been richer than Bill Gates because he isn't. From this story it seems like he had many of the same opportunities as Gates, but didn't know how to leverage them into something more. If he had Gates's intuition and insight into the early software industry he might have made the same moves.

But then again, if he had Micheal Jordan's skill in basketball he could have won more championships than others as well.

"could'a should'a would'a"

That hardly seems like a fair assessment, given all the work Kildall has done.

Now there is some argument bait--who is the better programmer, Bill Gates or Gary Kildall.

Bill Gates and early Microsoft were revered for their ability to commercialize software - not their ability to write the best code.

Gary was probably a better programmer. Bill is undoubtedly better from a business standpoint.

Gates is rumored to have scored a perfect 800 on the math portion or his SAT. He was studying Math at Harvard and published a paper in 'Discrete Mathematics' despite having dropped out before finishing undergrad:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (pay wall, but you can see the abstract)

I think there's reason to believe he could have been an outstanding programmer. Has anybody read the source code for a program verifiably written by Gates? Was Donkey.bas really written by him?

I do not know enough about his background to say one way or another whether he was a great programmer, but getting an 800 on the SAT math section isn't exactly a legendary achievement. It is weighted so that the number of people getting an 800 is not insignificant.

That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800. This wasn't true when Gates took it - perfect meant perfect then.

At my undergrad, something like 1 in 10 incoming freshmen had perfect SAT scores, and I know a couple of folks at Google with perfect scores as well.

"That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800."

Not true, for the math anyway. You can get a few wrong on the verbal section and still get an 800, and don't ask me how the writing works.

In any case, the effects of the 1994 recentering on higher-end scores (for whatever they're worth) are greatly exaggerated.

He was an outstanding programmer: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wri...

And this is what I had in mind when I suggesged "Argument bait". My own opinion is that they were both very good, with skill in different areas.

IMHO, Bill seems to be a borderline psycho that could do anything as a businessman.

His DoJ deposition tapes are amazing to watch.

got any link to that tapes?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-415786940752241012&...

Bill: Best all rounder.

Which is more important - good programming or good business skills?

How are you defining importance?

Define 'defining'.

Are you kidding us with the semantic gymnastics? What do you think 'important' in this case means?

Well, if the goal in mind is to get rich, the clear answer in my eyes is that business skills would be more 'important'. But business people can't make tools out of scratch like programmers can.

Sorry but I think I was valid.

The question should have been important for what goal, not how do you define importance. The latter is unclear, since it seems to be asking for the definition of the word itself.

In the context of "argument bait", business skills are not part of the question.

"Bill Gates greatest skill is to give people what they want."

Well, actually his greatest skill is to give people something and make them believe it is what they want.

Isn't that the same thing? What's the difference between wanting something and believing you want it? Doesn't one imply the other?

(Note: we're talking about wants here, not needs. It's quite possible to believe you need something and be mistaken. But wants are subjective beliefs, so almost by definition, wouldn't believing you want something mean that you do want it?)

Snake oil. False advertising. Advertising that stokes and intensifies desires far beyond the point at which they would exist sans advertising. Wanting a marshmallow now vs. two marshmallows later. Pepsi doing better on one-off taste tests, Coke doing better when consuming a 12-pack. Buying into the hype for something and deceiving yourself into believing it delivered. Misinterpretation. Projection. Insufficient information.

Correction:

"Bill Gates greatest skill is to give people something which makes them feel they NEED it" :)

That is a good point. I've been in computers since '79 and never have I wanted (or witnessed someone wanting) an MS product. Rather, everybody felt the needed it because "it's compatible," "it's the way the industry is going", "it's the defacto standard"... Actual desire is nowhere to be found. The only time I can think of where Microsoft attempted to create actual desire recently was that god-awful Songsmith commercial.

he also has great skills on Public Relations, doesn't he?

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