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Comment by barista | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it would matter much to Microsoft if he leaves. It's not that he had a say in the day to day operations and even when it comes to long term strategy I think Steve needed him because Steve himself was not a technologist. If another CEO like Mulally takes over then he would benefit from a Bill's inputs but if they get a tech savvy CEO which I think they should then Bill would be more of a hindrance than help.

The arguments made in the article seem logical too. He's an icon and it'd be sad to see him step down but nothing that's impact the company.

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heh. i just watched Pirates of Silicon Valley the other day. Such a good movie. Gave me a lot of perspective on both Microsoft and Apple.

would suck to see Bill go. But I guess it will have to happen sooner or later. Idk how much he influences direction any more anyway.

I second your comments on Pirates of Silicon Valley. I always thought it was a spoof, but it's actually quite a good film - it's definitely a lot better than the new Jobs movie ... it gives you much better insight to what sort of man Steve Jobs was (good and bad).

One of the things that stood out from the movie was just how much Microsoft "stole" from Apple. I'm not making that comment as flame bait - it's common knowledge that Microsoft copied Apple ... but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all.. It gives you an understanding of just how much copying actually happened.

Two sides to the same coin: Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills - he bested Steve Jobs who was much more of a visionary, but let his guard down with Bill Gates, and paid the penalty.

Gates, who kickstarted Microsoft by personally implementing a full BASIC interpreter in 1024 bytes of ROM, had infinitely more tech skills than Jobs, who if recent biographies are to be believed went to his deathbed still believing the Apple II invented the switch-mode computer power supply.

I believe Paul Allen had a much larger role in Microsoft's BASIC development than you imply.

I'm also unaware of any 1024-byte full BASIC interpreter.

Sorry, I did not mean for it to sound so much like it was a one-man show.

And yes, I misremembered, it was more like 4096 bytes. http://web.archive.org/web/20011211233332/www.rjh.org.uk/alt...

what's often overlooked is that jobs copied a lot from xerox parc. jobs undoubtedly was a visionary who knew how to package technology and appeal to the masses, but let's also fairly state how much of apple's initial innovations originated from elsewhere.

Xerox made a lot of money in pre-IPO investment in Apple, which is why Jobs was given a tour o PARC. If you ever have the chance o playing with a Star and compare it to a Lisa or a Mac, you'll clearly see how much Apple improved over the original ideas.

no question. this is why the Star never succeeded -- much like tablets from microsoft. the macro point is that jobs, like gates, often found tech inspiration from elsewhere. jobs' superpower was infusing geeky products (potentially pioneered elsewhere) with mass market appeal.

> Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills -

Did you just really say that Bill Gates had little tech skills?

That might be the first time I've ever seen someone make that claim. he's widely recognized as being someone whose "tech skills" dominated practically everyone else.

See "My first BillG review" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

> _but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all_

Microsoft was by far the biggest software developer for Mac OS and had more programmers working on it than Apple (and feeding stuff back to Apple). Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch to promote it, and Gates and Jeff Raikes (ex Apple) tried to get Apple to license Mac OS with Microsoft's support.

Like Apple, Microsoft also hired ex-Xerox programmers, so the two companies were both collaborating closely and drawing on a common source.

Otherwise, as others have noted. Gates was a nerd and had vastly better technical skills than Jobs, who basically had none at all. Jobs was a marketeer who capitalized on Woz's technical skills.

I liked Gates' quote about both of them getting stealing from their rich neighbor Xerox. To be fair, that's all Apple really ever did -- take existing ideas and refine the hell out of them.

I would also recommend you to watch Triumph of the Nerds.

I am a bug fan of this three-episode documentary. Also I would recommend Accidental Empires which was the book on what the documentary was based.

It kind of sounds like the sort of move you'd read about in a novella about power struggles... makes me think the board members in question here are plotting something, not simply trying to give the new CEO "breathing room".

Gates has for sure been propping up Ballmer for far too long. That has kept the status quo going long past effectiveness. The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released. The whole industry ceded "desktops" and invented new cheese Microsoft entirely failed to chase.

> The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released.

This is a bit of historical revisionism. Without the DOJ settlement, I think Microsoft wouldn't have played ball by licensing ActiveSync to Apple (and later, Google).

This single event (2008, I think) drove many people to the iPhone from Blackberry and sealed RIM's fate. iPhone+Exchange wasn't better than Blackberry+BES+(exchange/domino/groupwise), but it sure was cheaper and easier to maintain.

IBM came under a similar consent decree (European, late 80's IIRC) requiring them to document all their mainframe protocols to enable with 3rd party vendors to produce interoperable peripherials. I think it ultimately saved their business.

Except that Microsoft was doing phones and tablets long before the iPhone.

What were they missing?

As a previous windows mobile device owner I would have to say: the touchscreen devices needed a pen to dial properly (no-go), the keyboard-driven devices were painful to do email on and had tiny screens, and both classes had horrible browsers (roughly IE4-level before the release of the iphone).

They also suffered from being too early in the smartphone / tablet market, having to make hardware/software trade-offs that precluded bringing a proper (desktop-like) OS to the mobile devices. Apple as a late entrant could reuse OS X and have developer API's with good forwards compatibility. Microsoft's only option was to ditch the whole OS and start over based on a new architecture, and it took them too long to swallow that bitter pill.

I think it is a symptom of MS being a software company. They lived with the hardware they had and supported any old crap compaq wanted to put into an iPAQ. Since Apple controlled the hardware their low end hardware was much better than MS's lowest supported hardware. It allowed Apple to do more in software, and jump past where MS was. MS's big problem is that they let that kind of thing continue for far too long.

TLDR Embedded systems need tight integration between HW and SW MS doesn't have it because they only do the SW and let others do HW.

They key change they dragged their heels was creating a new UI toolkit centered around touch interaction. That created a huge third party software gap vs iOS and made their devices look hampered.

A consumer focus.

Makes me think they are trying to pull off a HP or a Yahoo.

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