Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire 10

I finished reading Hard Drive – Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. What stuck out to me in my reading was how Bill Gates directed Microsoft in trouncing his various opponents in the computer industry. It is quite a feat for what was once a small company with less than a hundred employees that dealt only with computer languages to dominate entire markets in other areas of the computer industry. In my last post on the book, Bill Gates came to control the market on operating system by beating a competitor to a successful joint venture with IBM to develop the personal computer. In my further reading of the book, Bill Gates subsequently came to seize markets that lied initially within the dominance of other companies.

1. The author wrote about the project at Microsoft to develop Multiplan, the predecessor Microsoft spreadsheet application to its current day Excel. This was in competition to a rival application named VisiCalc developed for the Apple II. There were some improvement features that Gates added to Multiplan which resembles the features of the Excel spreadsheet that we use today.

At page 221 – “Gates did not like the way the VisiCalc spreadsheet worked, and he intended to improve not only on its performance but its looks. A spreadsheet is made of many different “cells,” and in VisiCalc these cells were referred to by a coordinate, such as “A10”. Gates wanted to use English names for Multiplan’s cells, such as “Sales.June.” Simonyi made further enhancements to Multiplan. Drawing from his work at PARC, he incorporated user-friendly menus into the product.”

However, it was not Microsoft’s Multiplan that knocked out Visicalc, but another competitor’s spreadsheet product. Lotus’ 1-2-3 spreadsheet appealed to the market for its faster processing speed than any of the other spreadsheet applications available on the market. The plan to wrest control over from Lotus for the spreadsheet market was an unscrupulous one.

At page 233 – “According to one Microsoft programmer, the problems encountered by Lotus were not unexpected. A few of the key people working on DOS 2.0, he claimed, had a saying at the time that “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run.” They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to break down when it was loaded. “There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done,” he said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.

There was subsequently a branding strategy to make Microsoft identifiable with its products. At page 244- “Hanson wanted to make Microsoft the Sara Lee of the software industry. Everyone knew the Sara Lee brand, regardless of whether they were shopping for apple pie or pound cake…Gates immediately saw the logic of Hanson’s argument. As a result of Hanson’s efforts, the Multi-Tool names were thrown out. Taking their place were Microsoft Word, Microsoft Plan, Microsoft Chart, and Microsoft File.

I didn’t find anything in the book about how Microsoft and these other software companies were able to develop their spreadsheet application without contravening some copyright law. But there is this writing by Dan Bricklin, who came up with the idea for VisiCalc, explaining that he was not able to obtain a patent back in those days – “In 1979, when VisiCalc was shown to the public for the first time, patents for software inventions were infrequently granted. Programs were thought to be mere mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms, as laws of nature, were not patentable.”

In fact, there were allegations that Tim Paterson who developed the QDOS operating system for Microsoft stole the concept for his operating system from Gary Kildall’s CP/M. I do think that it would be a chilling effect on further innovation in an industry if people are getting ripped off their ideas without being paid or credited. I am looking forward to studying intellectual property law in university to examine whether the current laws on copyright are adequate.

2. The authors detailed Microsoft’s recruitment strategy for its firm. At page 259 – “Crisp thinking and a high IQ were essential to landing a technical job at Microsoft. Except in very rare cases, Gates wanted young people right out of college with a background in science, math, or computers. Usually, candidates were interviewed on campus and later flown out to Microsoft for a brief visit. Though the company did not pay well, Microsoft usually was able to hire anyone it really wanted by promising generous stock options and a chance to work in a free-spirited environment…Microsoft’s favourite recruiting grounds were Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, and a little college near Toronto named the University of Waterloo.”

As a law student, I don’t think it is going to be within my objective in life to work for a tech company like Microsoft. But I believe that the sentiment for computer engineering or computer science graduates is that Microsoft is one of the big firms to aspire to work for. I wonder what would be the local equivalent of a big tech company that graduates want to work for.

What do I think about entrepreneurship after reading the biography of Bill Gates? It intimidates me. It does take quite some tenacity to compete. I don’t think I share that same competitive drive as Bill Gates to want to drive out all his competitors out of business. And it also takes business intelligence as well to know how to go about seizing the market. And I am not sure how feasible being an entrepreneur in Singapore is. Do we have the talent pool to drive an industry? I suppose there are limitations to what field what one can be an entrepreneur in, and it also depends on the discipline or field that the government wants to develop by educating its talent pool. I guess I should read up more on what these disciplines or fields are.