Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire 9

My reading of the Hard Drive today takes me to one of the pivotal moments of Microsoft’s history where Microsoft seized the deal to supply the operating system for its project with IBM to develop the personal computer. It was a feat as they had to beat Gary Kildall from Digital Research, a competitor who was then the market leader of the operating system with his CP/M, and how Microsoft managed to do it was nothing short of an entrepreneurial sleight of hand. This deal cemented Microsoft’s dominance in the operating system market that we see today and in the process, made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.

The representative from IBM, Jack Sams, had met up with Gates to talk about the operating system for the new PC. IBM wanted Microsoft to supply it with not only BASIC but also languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal. Stand-alone BASIC could function without an operating system, but Microsoft’s other languages could not. IBM had initially desired to deal only with Bill Gates, but in the end decided that they needed the 16-bit CP/M and arranged for an appointment with Gary Kidall of Digital Research whose firmed owned the CP/M which was the dominant operating system in the market at that time.

The book describes the background history of the business relationship between Bill Gates and Gary Kildall, which started off well but soured. Initially the business relationship between Bill Gates’ Microsoft and Gary Kidall’s Digital Research was synergistic and cooperative in nature. Microsoft started off as a language company, and supporting different microcomputer operating systems was a business nightmare. Each operating system had its own way of doing things, such as managing memory and file systems. If Microsoft’s programmers could write software for the same operating system on each computer, all they would have to do was modify their code slightly for whatever specific devices a customer’s computer might have. Gates hence supported Kildall’s CP/M to become the industry standard, and would refer hardware customers who wanted to run BASIC or any of their products to go licence CP/M and get that up on their machines so that Microsoft’s stuff would run on it. And Gary would do likewise. If someone went to him to licence CP/M and they were looking for languages, he would refer people to Microsoft.

At page 176 - “In fact, there was an unwritten agreement between Gates and Kildall that Microsoft would stay out of the operating system end of the business, and Kildall would not get into microcomputer languages.”

But in the late 1979, the synergistic relationship between Microsoft and Digital began to unravel after Kildall packaged his operating system with a BASIC that had been developed by Gordon Eubanks, one of his students at the Naval Postgraduate School. Eubanks’ CBASIC had been on the market for about two years, and it represented the only real alternative to the BASIC offered by Microsoft.

Gates was not happy. In reaction, he went to AT&T and licensed its UNIX operating system, which Microsoft sold at a discount under the name XENIX.

At page 178 – “Such was the state of affairs between Microsoft and Digital Research in September of 1980 when Gates picked up the phone and called Kildall. Once again, he was sending business to someone he now considered a competitor, but now he had no choice. IBM wanted CP/M as an operating system for its first personal computer.

The popular tale amongst the computer industry that has become the stuff of legends is how Kildall squandered his chance by flying in his twin-engine plane while the men in blue suits from IBM were waiting on the ground. At page 182 – “Regardless of what really happened that day, most of those in the computer industry believe Kildall’s actions helped make Microsoft the software giant it is today.”

Moreover, the IBM personnels were not pleased with Gary Kildall’s lack of ability to develop the operating system according to their tight schedule. Jack Sams of IBM says that he and others at IBM could not get Kildall to agree to spend money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. They thus threw the operating systems problem in Gates’ lap.

At page 182 – “Luck once again would shine on Bill gates. An operating system for the 16-bit Intel chips had just been developed by Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, not more than a twenty-minute drive from Microsoft.” Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50,000, renamed it DOS, improved it, and licensed it to IBM for a low per-copy royalty fee. And the rest was history.

In this businessweek article here, there is an interesting inquiry into the counterfactual about how the computer industry could have been if Gary Kildall had succeed instead.

“Would history have taken a different path if Kildall triumphed in those early days? "I'm convinced," says John Wharton, a tech consultant and Kildall pal. He believes the industry would have been more collegial and innovative if Kildall rather than Gates sat at the crossroads of computing. But others say Kildall didn't have what it took to lead an industry. "Bill succeeded because he was a tenacious businessman," says lawyer Davis. "Gary was not tenacious."”

Your first girlfriend

While at the library, I came across a book titled Your First Girlfriend by Bridget Heos which is a juvenile nonfiction written for guys in their middle school years featuring relationship advice for their first girlfriend. I am way past middle school years, but I haven’t had a girlfriend before, so I figured that it might perhaps provide a helpful tip or two.

It does seem to provide some interesting advice. One advice caution a guy to not be too enthusiastic in the way he approaches girl he likes and thereby give himself away. The book says something about not to comment on the girl’s facebook post too often and thereby make it seem that you like her. Another interesting comment from the book was regarding the popular boy-girl relationship question – “Why do girls like jerks?” According to the book, girls like those guys for their confidence, and not so much for their bad behavior, but that after a while, these bad behavior becomes uncool, and girls gradually fall out with these guys. So it’s advice is to be a good guy, but to be confident as well, and that after a while, the girl will see that you are kind, considerate, and caring, and come to like you after all.

Seem like sound relationship advice to me. I am always interested to know about female perspectives when it comes to a relationship, but I don’t really have any female friends in real life who I think I can talk about such issues openly. But I figure that there are probably a lot of information out there in the internet, and all I need to do is to go out there and look for it in order to know. And there are also such things as online dating sites where it might be a more comfortable setting to ask girls about such things.

So indeed, I have many questions about relationships that I don’t know where to start. We can start with the basic questions such as “What makes a girl like a guy? How should a guy approach a girl that he likes? How can a guy tell whether a girl likes him? Etc” From my understanding, girls do not like to be approached too directly regarding such issues. They would be taken aback if a guy were to confess to them straight in the face that he likes her. There are more gradual way of doing things, such as finding out whether the girl likes you first, or hinting that you have interest in the girl and observing whether she reciprocates. Is it a wild goose-chase to go after a girl who expresses no interest for you? I am kind of in a dilemma regarding this question. For one, I think that it can seem like a little too headstrong approach to take if one is too persistent, and it might be the case that a girl may not like a guy for whatever reason, and he will just be futile in his efforts. However, I have heard a female law professor commenting how she fell in love with the guy who became her husband after he pursued her, and according to her, people find themselves liking the person who like them first. I guess that with any other thing, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I am not sure about guys in general, but I have read a guy’s response on his approach to finding the right girl for himself. ‘It’s easy’, he says, ‘she just needs to be 1)someone he finds attractive, 2) can hold a decent conversation with, and 3) share about the same religious values and practices as him, and then he would be willing to pledge his entire loyalty to that girl for his lifetime. A guy probably simplifies things more easily than a girl I think.

Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire 8

For my write-up from my reading of Hard Drive – Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, I shall write about the following points in the book.

1. Microsoft was eager to leverage on the growth of the burgeoning Apple company from the sales of its newly developed computer, the Apple II, which had taken off, especially since it was the only computer licensed to run the extremely popular VisiCalc application program. The Apple II, however, had its own unique chip, the 6502,, and a proprietary operating system. Apple didn’t want anyone else to “clone” its computer. Microsoft faced a dilemma. Most of its programs and languages, comprising more than a quarter of a million bytes of code, had been developed for Intel’s 8080 chip and the CP/M operating system of Digital Research. Programs and applications written for CP/M, which had become an industry standard, would not work on the Apple operating system.

At page 158 – “Gates badly wanted a slice of the rapidly growing Apple software market. But it would be a major effort to translate all of Microsoft’s 8080 code into 6502 code. One day, while sitting in the back of a pickup truck in the company’s parking lot, Allen, brainstorming with Gates about the Apple problem, came up with an idea. Why not try a hardware solution to the software problem? His ingenious suggestion was to design an expansion card that could be plugged into the Apple to run programs and applications written for CP/M. With this card, Apple II users could run any of Microsoft’s programs written for the 8080 chip and Gary Kildall’s operating system.”

Microsoft decided to call the new product the SoftCard. The SoftCard was released in the summer of 1980. Allen had hoped Microsoft could sell 5,000 of the cards. It sold that many in a couple of months. By the end of the year, more than 25,000 had been snatched up by Apple II owners. In all, more than 100,000 were sold.

2. Gates turned to a friend for a key management job in the company when the Steve Wood decided to leave the company. In June 1980, he brought in Steve Ballmer as assistant to the president. Unlike the other professionals at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer knew a lot about business and not much about computers.

The son of Swiss immigrants, Ballmer grew up in Detroit, where his father worked for the Ford Motor Company. After getting his applied mathematics degree from Harvard, Ballmer worked for a couple years as assistant products manager at Proctor & Gamble before heading off to Standford’s business school. He had been there about a year when Gates called.

At Proctor & Gamble, Ballmer had become known for redesigning the company’s Duncan Hines cake mix box so that it sat on store shelves horizontally rather than vertically to grab more shelf space. Ballmer would later say that’s what he wanted to do at Microsoft – help Gates squeeze out the competition.

3. IBM wanted to create a personal computer to compete with the existing Apple II in the market. Lowe, director of the Boca Raton lab, was sent back to Florida with orders to do what ever had to be done to develop IBM’s own personal computer. He was to assemble a task force and bring back a prototype of IBM’s “Apple” in 30 days.

The task force agreed the new computer should be an “open architecture” system. In other words, critical components of the machines, such as the microprocessor, would come from existing technology in the market place and would not be proprietary like components in the Apple. It was decided that the machine’s software, including the vital operating system, would also come from an outside vendor. In the late July 1980, Jack Sams of IBM plced a call to Microsoft and asked to speak with Bill Gates.

At the second meeting, Gates and his team were asked to sign the non-disclosuree agreement, and after this formality they were then told what they already suspected: IBM had a top secret project underway to develop a personal computer.

It was there that Gates leveraged on the 16-bit 8086 chip that his company had developed which was faster than the 8-bit 8080 chip in the market to convince IBM to base its machines on the newer and faster chip. At the end of this meeting, Sams and his group returned to Boca Raton with a proposal for the development of a low-end, 16-bit business workstation. The venture was named Project Chess.

IBM has a different account on how the idea to use a 16-bit chip came about. Jack Sams says that the IBM group had already decided to use a 16-bit chip before Gates was contacted. But he said Gates was not told this at the second meeting, because of the IBM secrecy protocol, so Gates may well have believed he was making a recommendation that IBM acted on.

Criticisms of orginalist methods of statutory interpretation

Excerpt from Thinking Like a Lawyer by Kenneth J.Vandevelde. criticism of intentionalism and purposivism in interpretation of statutes at page 162

“Intentionalism is the theory that a statute should be interpreted so as to further the intent of the drafters, and it permits examining the history of the statute, including statements of the legislators, to discern that intent. Intentionalism, in other words, seeks to look beyond the text of the statute to ascertain intent.”

In Singapore, the process of statutory interpretation allows for a method resembling intentionalism. The method is called purposive interpretation enshrined under section 9A of the Interpretation Act which allows for reference to parliamentary readings at the second motion of the Bill to obtain the intention of the Minister moving the Bill.

“Intentionalism is subject to a number of criticisms. First, the record may be silent because the issue was not anticipated (and thus the drafters had no intent with respect to it) or because the only way to obtain a consensus was to remain deliberately vague about the statute’s intended effect. Some legislators may have had no intent at all, only motives, such as getting reelected or repaying a favor from another legislator. Other legislators may have voted for a law that they opposed, hoping to avoid enactment of a more extreme measure or, if this law was the extreme measure, hoping to prompt a popular backlash or constitutional challenge that a less extreme measure would not have triggered. The history will be partial, because complete records of every relevant incident leading to enactment of the law will certainly not exist. It may be misleading, because some expressions of legislative intent may have represented the position of only a few of those voting on the statute or because legislators opposed to the legislation may have engaged in strategic behavior, inserting comments in the record, hoping to influence later interpretations of the statute inconsistent with the intent of the supporters. And, of course, under even ideal circumstances, all historical accounts are shaped by the perspective of the historian. The problem of inferring intent is compounded by the fact that the statute probably was a compromise among conflicting interests and thus among competing intents”

Indeed, one of the problem of the method of intentionalism in statutory interpretation that I have encountered as a law student is that the parliamentary reading frequently provide no aid in curing the ambiguity of the statute because the Minister says nothing pertaining the issue that is to be resolved. It is doubtful whether the Minister had conceived of the possibility of the statute resulting in the ambiguity.

“Because of these difficulties, some instrumentalists proposed a purposivist theory of interpretation in which a law is interpreted so as to promote its ostensible purpose. Purposivism is distinguished from intentionalism in that purposivism avoids inquiry into the minds of the drafters and looks at the apparent object of the law. For example, the purposivist may ask simply what the mischief was that existed when the law was adopted, on the assumption that the purpose of the law was to remedy the mischief. In a sense, purposivism is an objectivist theory of intent, whereas intentionalism is a subjectivist theory. The purposivist eschews all the difficult empirical questions that arise concerning the actual thoughts of the legislators and looks simply at the language and setting of the law to determine the purpose it appears to serve.”

Although this book which is written by a American Professor has called this approach purposivism, it is conceptually different from what Singapore legal professional has called as the purposive approach which I have mentioned above. In the English commonwealth common law countries, this approach is described as being a canon of statutory interpretation, namely the mischief rule. Essentially, it serve the same purpose as this purposivism approach that has been mentioned by Professor J.Vandevelde/

“Purposivism, too, has been subject to criticism. By divorcing interpretation from the actual intent of the framers, purposivism seems to license the interpreter to infer almost any purpose that can be reconciled with the language of the statute. Moreover, the broader the range of circumstances from which the interpreter may infer purpose, the less constraining purposivist interpretation is. At the same time, if purposivism seeks to constrain interpretation by limiting the range of circumstances from which the purpose may be inferred to the text of the law, then purposivism seems to add very little to textualism. That is, under a text-bound version of purposivism, the interpreter will infer that the purpose of the statute is to do whatever it is that the statute appears to do. Determining what the statue does, however, is the very issue to be resolved. Thus, in using the language of the statute to determine its purpose, one ends where one began: with the language of the statute.

Purposivism is also flawed in its assumption that a law has a single purpose or a set of consistent purposes. In fact, statutes represent compromises among multiple conflicting purposes. In applying a statute, a court must decide which of these purposes to further at the expense of the others. Given that the statute was drafted, however, so as to accomplish all of the purposes in some measure, the court has no basis on which to decide to what extent one of the purposes shall prevail over the others in future applications of the statute to unforeseen circumstances.”

Concerning the disputes on matters pertaining to faith, and the notion of the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit

Why are there disputes on issues concerning matters of faith amongst the international Christian body when the doctrine of Christianity features the notion of the existence of an omniscient Holy Spirit that guides individual believers to the appraisal of truths pertaining to matters of faith? Does this necessarily connote that one believer or the other is lacking in certain access in his communication with the Holy Spirit, thereby leading to the divergence of perspectives? And indeed, there are some believers in various sects or denominations who would stake their position on matters of theology as the correct one by virtue of its culmination by divine guidance from God or the Holy Spirit, and dismiss other school of thoughts on the matter with impunity.

Again, I have seen cases where a believer asks a question on Christian matters that confounds him, and he is replied by another that he should asks God about it, which will resolve all uncertainties to the matter.

My common sense tells me that the matters of interpretation of scripture and on perspectives given to matters of faith, is as much a human endeavor which bears from itself divergences of thoughts, as much as such human inquiries are made into other domains of knowledge like the sciences. But I could see myself being countered by the objection that the Holy Spirit is a resource from which all disputes can be resolved equitably, and that my way of thinking about interpretation of scripture estranges the concept of divine guidance in matters of faith.

I guess I shall not deny divine guidance when it comes to forming one’s own view of matters pertaining to faith or biblical interpretation. But I would also be careful about claiming for myself, or claims by others asserting divine guidance onto the matter, as imputing an incontrovertibility of truth to the perspective on the matter.