Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is out with his autobiography and Vanity Fair has an excerpt available online. As the Nth richest man in the world, Allen isn’t doing this for the money. Maybe it’s for posterity. Maybe to settle old grudges, and he certainly does that in Vanity Fair.
The part of that excerpt everyone will be talking about this week is Allen’s story of overhearing Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer plotting to recover Allen’s Microsoft shares or dilute him into insignificance, this at a time with Allen was dying of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It’s a great story, that’s for sure. But if you are a longtime follower of this column or its predecessor you’ve read it before.
Tell your friends, “Oh that. Cringely covered it back in 2006.”
Bob,
Love to hear about this kind of gossip. Maybe it makes my own faults seem less significant.
Speaking of my own faults, I’m sure you are getting tired of me asking about the status of the second phase of the Cringely Startup Tour. So here’s the deal — just tell me to bug off and I won’t mention it again. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Regards,
Charles
PS: You can buy my ebook at the Amazon Kindle Store.
Forget the Cringely Startup Tour! What about Nerd TV??
Come on — Nerd TV is just entertainment. The Cringely Startup Tour was supposed to jump-start the US economy. Isn’t that right, Bob?
Yup.. I came to know about it in 2006 via cringely. 🙂 … It made me think I have been following your writings for that long. Your book is awesome.. I hope there will be sequel to it…
This was my first reaction when I saw the WSJ excerpt. Have been passing on your 2006 post, usually to skeptical reactions.
I’m still trying to figure out why the hell Paul Allen is pursuing this weird lawsuit http://bit.ly/gQCRWu. Is he trying to make some quixotic point that only historians will later understand or appreciate?
Notice that he’s not suing Microsoft.
Bill and Steve tried to squeeze Paul out of his founder share of Microsoft.
Cisco runs out its founders Leonard Bosack and his wife Sandy Learner.
Mark Zuckerberg runs out his partner and cofounder of Facebook.
I’d bet Bob knows of a dozen other examples of founder squabbles.
It is a shame that these people had great ideas, created great businesses, and couldn’t play well with others.
I don’t quite remember the details, but I believe something similar to this happened to Steve Jobs in the early 1990s.
When he re-took over the helm in the late 1990s, I thought he was going to ransack Apple buy buying out all his assets at Next et al. The original Imac seemed uber-gimicky to me, but it held down the franchise until better stuff started coming along, – specifically, the ipod. The rest is well known history, of course.
Corporations, and their shenanigans, are all about the jousting of uber-egos. But, I would argue, we’ve all benefited from Jobs work at the helm – even if you don’t like Apple products, half the world is or will be using Iphones or android phones which are really a software clone – and I think that is a very good thing.
I was racking my brain on how I knew about this already. Was sure it wasn’t in Hard Drive.. Nice one Bob. Thank you.
The writers for the Simpson’s TV show hinted at Mr. Gates’ true nature back in 1997. Homer attracts the attention of the cartoon version of Bill when he(Homer) starts up a computer company. Bill shows up at Homer’s house and declares, “I didn’t get to be the richest man in the world by writing a lot of checks.”
The chairman of my company just retired, a very wealthy guy. He gave a speech during his retirement party that focused on his luck, not his intelligence (he’s a very sharp guy) or skill (he’s the best salesman I’ve ever met). The humility in the speech really moved me because so much of life and wealth is based on luck. He went through a number of very important turning points in his life to show how much luck was involved.
Paul Allen is a very lucky man. Yes, he is intelligent and certainly skilled but from the Vanity Fair piece (which i realize is just a snippet) he comes across as someone still quietly fuming about the credit and/or wealth he feels he deserves from his MSFT efforts. Really?
Hopefully the book is more balanced. Or maybe I just don’t get it…which happens quite often.
As I understand it, Gates came into MicroSoft with a multi-million $$$ trust fund. As I understand it, Allen wasn’t so blessed. Without Kildahl’s and IBM’s stupidity, M$ would still be a small time tools company. Luck had more to do with M$’s wealth than any other single factor. They sure haven’t turned out stellar software.
Just re-read the 2006 post. So what happened in the Iowa-based anti-trust suit against Microsoft ?
First the nuke plants, now this. You’re on a roll. “Oh that. Cringely covered it back in XXX.” is going to become a catch phrase.
I’m pretty sure Microsoft would not have existed without Bill Gates. I don’t know enough to say if it would have existed without Paul Allen. And Ballmer? 🙂
re: Gates & Ballmer try to scam Allen story
I also have shown the Cringely column tens of times to individuals none of whom have ever commented back to me on it one way or another. To me the story hit me like a rock because it jolted me into understanding a great deal on how MicroSoft grew and grew under Gates. I would greatly like to learn the real story of Gary Kildall and Microsoft. One can hope, perhaps Cringely will have one of his sources feed him the straight dope on this in the future.
Dan Kurt
If you want to know the most accurate account of the story Gary Kildall, IBM and Bill Gates, I suggest you read the chapter on him from Harold Evan’s book “They Made America”. He and his researchers conducted several interviews with friends and family to uncover a very different story than the one commonly told.
Additionally, Tim Paterson, who wrote QDOS, sued the author for defamation and lost because he was unable to show that Evans was incorrect in his assessment that Paterson’s QDOS was largely copied from Kildall’s CPM.
Bill started off in life with a million dollar trust fund…..set up by his maternal granddaddy the banker. A million from Bill’s birth year…1955…is worth about $8 million today….adjusted for inflation. His daddy was a wealthy and connected lawyer. His father’s side of the family were politicians/lawyers. On his mom’s side, they were bankers.
Bill attended an exclusive(and expensive) prep school. He scored a perfect 1600 on his SAT….only a few kids in the entire country make a perfect SAT score each year. He was accepted to Harvard.
So Bill started off in life with money, connections and brains….quite the combination of advantages. He was already ahead of 99% of the people on this planet. Hell, I would have settled for just one of those advantages. Bill also had a couple of other very important advantages in life: Drive and a single minded will to conquer. Had I been born with money/connections….I would have gone off to college and majored in getting laid with a minor in dope smoking, and then I would have gotten a job in my daddy’s law firm.
Yes, Bill was born lucky, and luck just seemed to follow him around his entire life. My grandmother, a tiny Eastern European peasant woman, use to say to me, “Better to be born without a nose, than born without luck.” It was luck that brought IBM to Bill’s door, but Bill was smart enough to know opportunity when he saw it, and ruthless enough to pounce immediately. Most other people hear opportunity knocking and can’t be bothered to switch off the Jersey Shore and get off the couch. When Bill saw opportunity at his door, he grabbed it by the throat, dragged it into the back room, and chained it to the radiator.
As for little Paulie, I have no sympathy for patent trolls. Isn’t he accusing Google of doing now what others have accused Microsoft of doing in the past? Kind of ironic, no? Actually, no. The more I find out about the hyper-rich , the more it seems they are all borderline sociopaths.
Speaking of sociopaths, go have a look at the maker of those products that are so coveted by sorority girls, and wannabe sorority girls (both male and female): Steve Jobs. Jobs refused to share any of his Apple stock with early employees and even went out of his way to try and screw people out of pay that they had earned. He used his squillions to jump the organ queue when he needed a new liver. For years he refused to acknowledge his own daughter. The girl’s mother was forced to raise her on food stamps while Steve’s net worth was measured in the billions.
As for Bill Gates’ philanthropy, Fred Nietzsche, a buddy of mine who hangs at the local biker bar says, “Altruism is the most mendacious form of egoism.”
I don’t care what Bill’s motive for philanthropy is. The Nobel prize isn’t a prize for thinking good thoughts, good looks, or a charming demeanor. It’s a prize for actually making the world a better place, and Bill Gates had done that.
I highly doubt Nobel Prize is of any meaning anymore… Especially in some areas. Some of the choices lately seem to be dictated, or at least influenced politically.
“Better to be born without a penis, than without luck. If you’re lucky, you’ll grow a new one, anyway”. That’s the original Eastern European saying :-).
On TWIT, Jerry Pournelle told an interesting fact about his ability to get Bill Gates on the phone anytime he needed to. He said “I just called the main number at Microsoft any evening and Bill answered the phone”. That explains why it’s not just who founded the company but who did the work that’s important.
In the movie version, Gates takes a job at MITs without taking an equivalent shares adjustment and years later does the ethical thing by offering Allen the dollars he would have should have gotten. Not too little but pretty much too late.
Allen does the ethical thing by turning down the money, suggesting that without Gates Allen would never have made as much as he made. This is — however flawed — an ethical universe. . . that exists only in my head.
And of course I haven’t written the movie yet.
The stuff that comes from the Courtiers of MS is always amazing.
This one is hilarious….
https://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/tablets/tablets-might-be-a-flash-in-the-pan-microsoft-global-chief-strategy-officer-20110330-1cfv2.html
So as a young man Bill Gates was efficient and ruthless . . . but I don’t think anyone has ever said he was unethical. And now, later in life as a billionaire and philanthropist, he has done a great deal of real good in the world. I’ve come around to Bill Gates. I like the man.
You know, Bill Gates is actually more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it. I suppose he leaves it to lesser men to buy sports teams and write catty memoirs . . . he’s got bigger things in mind – saving lives, curing disease . . .
…cure disease…
Too bad he doesn’t know how. “I” know how. There are a lot of researchers who know how. Their work gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile by corrupt administrators who just want a pay check. If you’d heard the impassioned radio plea from our local research organization begging for donations. The message came out as “save our jobs”, not as “help us cure disease”. And their major area of study is “weight loss”. This from a research facility affiliated with a major public university. Pathetic. But the fact is that degenerative disease, as opposed to infectious disease, could disappear as we know it within our life times.
Don’t believe it? Here’s why.
Heavy metals are carcinogens. In fact, lead was declared a carcinogen in 2005. As for sources they abound endlessly, from our water, food and air, to the products we buy and use daily. If this is so, why isn’t a $300 rbc minerals assay which could detect heavy metals in a person done on a regular test?
Heavy metals also screw up the immune system and can be the cause of any degenerative disease you can think of. But as we would be led to believe, disease x (insert name here), has no known cause but if you just keep giving money for research we’ll eventually find a cure.
To give this some guidance how could this work? Young women should be tested for heavy metals before giving birth.
Why women before giving birth? Because the mother can transfer her heavy metals to the fetus, poisoning it, that’s why. This poisoning eventually manifests itself as some type of disease, like cancer. The body does a bad job of distinguishing between good minerals and heavy metals. During conception the mother’s body gives what it has available to the fetus.
If the test results are positive they would go through chelation. This would take for majority treated 6 months to a year. More serious cases would take up to 5 years. Some, about 1-3 % tested, would be found to have so much heavy metals in their body that it could not be chelated in their lifetime. That last group would have obvious health problems and would face increased likelihood of a shortened lifespan through what we now call degenerative disease, not heavy metals poisoning. Maybe that should be changed. Anyway…
So there you have it. Elimination of a major cause of degenerative disease in one generation.
“I” know how to cure cancer. I kid you not.
According to Wikipedia “…A professional is a person that is paid for what they do. Qualifications have little to do with being a professional…” We all pay professionals to do stuff we’d rather not do, or learn to do, ourselves. That explains the medical profession as well as all others. I’ll bet even you hire a lot of professionals in your day to day life. So why just criticize the medical profession? “I” too know how to do lots of stuff better than the professionals…but I’m not being paid for it.
Yea, but don’t you interact with your hired professionals and try to learn what they know. So you don’t need them any more if at all possible?
Ask the secretary at your local cancer treatment doctor’s office. She’ll probably tell you about the endless procession of patients that present themselves, do two chemo’s, then die. Two chemotherapy sessions is about what it takes to destroy whats left of a cancer patient’s immune system. This also jives with my own personal experience. The victim, er, patient would be better off with no chemo and save themselves however many tens of thousands of dollars the treatment costs and the agony they and their families go through.
Chemo is futile, especially if it is caused by heavy metals that aren’t addressed in the process of treatment.
But this is all controversial and we won’t solve the problem here.
There is also the issue that we have evolved to not live forever. Mortality is not a flaw, but an unimprovable strategy through which Life keeps itself maximally efficient. But if we can extend our own lives merely by making better decisions–“don’t eat, drink, or breathe that” and “wash those tools before using them” and “wash your hands often” being low-tech and straightforwardly lifegiving whether or not a power grid is or ever was available–I’m all for it.
The joke has many variants depending on the discipline, so you may have heard it differently: “Every Eskimo family consists of a man, a woman, a child, and an anthropologist.” Only nowadays in developed countries, that one-liner has become asymptotically impossible to tell because bolted onto every family is a panoply of technology and technologists, including–at the individual level, as a person moves into ages before which without the prosthesis of modern medicine they would long since have died–cardiologists, oncologists, neurologists and the medical and pharmaceutical entities with which they are symbiotic (and for medial aesthetes, the invocation of such fluffy confections as a nuclear reactor or three to manufacture the occasional piquant jot of technetium-99m).
Mortality is an essential strategy of Life, but we have other ideas. Technology for life extension is a picture-tube brightener writ large. Remember picture-tube brighteners?
Well, you may be right, in general, about the heavy metals. Completely different topic of course . . . but ever wonder why reproduction begins with one cell (the egg) and two half sets of chromosomes? Having a life cycle stage of just one cell after a stage of having billions represents a moment of extreme vulnerability. But that one cell will become two, then four, then eight . . . each time, it’s payload of residual minerals and heavy metals is halved. By the time it reaches billions of cells the payload is negligible and the organism can function – for a while, until the background level of cellular debris again reaches dysfunctional levels – ashes from a dying fire. Also consider that organisms that never stop growing live the longest: trees, giant tortoises, fish . . . And one celled organisms that divide rapidly, like the amoeba, are probably immortal.
Hey Thinking, do you know how to get heavy metals out of our bones? Yes circulating heavy metals like lead can be chelated. Heavy metals sequestered in cells is harder to get at. And our bones? Decades I would think. And most of us do have high levels of lead and cadmium in our bones . . . leaded gasoline and all that. It slowly leaches out and poisons up. Actually there was a recent study of drugs to prevent osteoporosis (bisphosphonates). Researchers in Australia notice they had the unusual effect of promoting longevity by about 5-10 years. For a drug taken very late in life to get a 15% lifespan boost is pretty incredible. Even calorie restriction can’t do that, as it must be started and adhered to early in life for full effect.
http://healthmad.com/conditions-and-diseases/taking-bisphosphonates-for-osteoporosis-treatment-may-prolong-life/
Another link about this treatment:
https://www.medindia.net/news/Osteoporosis-Treatment-Boost-Longevity-80328-1.htm
What ever happened to that “a lady lawyer from Des Moines” and her state’s money!
And notice how William the tird likes to strut the world stage!
Off topic: Mr. Cringley, just finished reading ‘Accidental Billionaires’ (A$2.50 at a used bookshop in Sydney). Best book ever written on the IT industry. AND, all your predictions came true! Sequel, please! 😉
re:”Off topic: Mr. Cringley, just finished reading ‘Accidental Billionaires’ ”
Do you mean: Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely (1992)?
Dan Kurt
Yes. Thanks, Dan.
No honor among thieves and immoral mercenaries.
If the banksters have a similar code of conduct, why shouldn’t we expect anything better of other Titans of industry. Heck, there have been unsubstantiated rumors for years that at least one IBM CEO died mysteriously and one beloved candidate was taken out. Why is it so many up at the top in Armonk die of exotic diseases? Life in the corner office has no morals, despite the PR from many firms. To quote the quite “moral and law abiding” Bob Moffatt in Austin, Texas in 1999: “If you want loyalty, go get a dog!” I did and I trust the moral compass of my dogs more than that of any Fortune 500 CEO, especially those of information technology companies. My hero in this regard is Larry Ellison. Everyone knows he is a snake and he’s fine with that. At least you know where he stands the moment you meet or confront him. He has aptly molded his public persona to meet the reality of how he operates.
The Harvard Business Review once wrote a nice treatise of the quantification of the expense and cost of risk of unethical behavior. This confirmed to a generation of business people that ethics is not a moral decision, but a financial one and one that can be measured and assessed as just another business transaction factor, morality be damned. Check out the article “Why Be Honest if Honesty Doesn’t Pay?”by Amar Bhide and Howard H. Stevenson, Page 121, September-October 1990 HBR issue.
Well carping on Bill Gates and calling him a thief may be fun, but it’s untrue, and really unfair. Get a truer picture of the man: go anywhere in the world where the Gates Foundation is at work . . . go to Africa and ask a kid who is alive and in school today, who would be dead of some trivial disease where it not for Bill Gates, what kind of man Bill Gates is !
I said it above: lesser men buy sports teams and write catty memoirs. Great men change the course of world history.
It didn’t only start when he got married either. There are kids in Science and Engineering and Environmental programs in my daughter’s college who say that what got them interested in the sciences was watching Magic School Bus. If you’ll remember, he funded that too.
I stand 100% by what I said above: Give him the Nobel Peace Prize.
that’s NEW Gates. he really developed a different focus after Warren Buffet made a project of him.
Ok. Perhaps that’s true. And he still deserves the Nobel, however he got there.
Tim Berners-Lee first.
OK.
As the old saying goes: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
i just found your site at much higher rank . so keep it up your best work. WELL DONE.
best of the best post good luck
What is is interesting about both the book and the patent troll suits is the timing. It feels like Allen is trying lever his place into the stage and is running out of time. The real question is why now? And how much time does Allen have to complete his plan?
In ten years Gates won’t be linked in consumer’s minds with Microsoft, the environment around Microsoft is shifting fast. The internet is constantly changing. Allen could have done this stuff years ago whilst he was playing with his guitars and yachts – not that there is anything wrong with it, but he could have leveraged himself into the limelight and the story much more easily by writing and publishing this book in the early noughties when he had already detached himself from the firm and Gates’ personal reputation reinvention as the 21st century version of Mother Teresa with a black Amex hadn’t gone into overdrive.
Well the Nobel is not about good intentions, good looks or charming demeanor. Bill’s motivation for philanthropy is irrelevant. He’s made the world a better place in spades. So he should get a Nobel. Fair is fair.
Mother Teresa was no saint – unless atheists pretend piety can be saints – but who cares? She still did good deeds.
Time ran an article on some of her letters to confessors, which the Vatican released as part of her bid for sainthood. It’s pretty powerful stuff:
https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
>> “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.”
>>
Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
Children who are terribly and protractedly abused–and who cannot neutralize their abusers in real time–have four options, one of which is healthy and three of which are not. The healthy option is to learn to mourn and do so as necessary (and mourning will be necessary now and again for the remainder of the abused’s life, for we have Memory and what happened cannot be undone). The remaining three options, all unhealthy, are (a) abuse yourself (as proxy for your abuser[s], the memory of whom you may well protect as blameless through the fantasy of denial); (b) seek victims who remind you of yourself and abuse *them* (as proxies for your abusers, and/or in self-anger at your inability to have neutralized the abuse in real time), and (c) seek victims who remind you of yourself and save *them* as proxies for you.
Actions taken toward living out the three unhealthy options repeat and tend to escalate because the driving torment cannot be undone and its memory cannot be expunged (short of death, natural or otherwise; so suicide is occasionally exercised as an additional option). Adolph Hitler is a poster child for (b); Mother Theresa, for (c).
Whether and to what degree Mother Theresa may have been an atheist is immaterial; as with the historical figure known to us as St. Augustine, the Church has managed to recast her clear and ongoing abject doubt as utter proof of her devotion to (and therefore of the reality of) that doubted. The last thing those systematically avoiding healthy, reality-based mourning in their own lives need is a leader like Adolph Hitler or a “heroine” like Mother Theresa. (Reading suggestion: Alice Miller, *The Drama of the Gifted Child*.)
Humm . . . was Mother Theresa abused ? I’ve known a few very religious people and they did go through traumatic experiences in their lives.
Apparently Mother Theresa began losing her faith when she started working with the dying on the streets of Calcutta. Perhaps she was not abused as a child. Perhaps just seeing the plight of these human beings and realizing that many of them did nothing to deserve their plight, did nothing wrong at all, or did good things in their lives, yes were still visited by tremendous suffering . . . why does God allow these things to happen is an obvious query. Mark Twain argued for atheism on similar grounds – crippled and handicapped children – he posited if there was a God, then he very well could be a sadist.
“Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.”
nice quote 🙂
Wow Bob,
I had read your column about Allen-Gates back in 2006 and was amazed. Now that Paul Allen has confirmed it, first thing I thought “what will be cringely’s reaction :)”
Great job Bob. Always liked your articles.
you have a great blog here! would you like to make some invite posts on my blog?
head unit…
[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive I told you so – I, Cringely – Cringely on technology[…]…
Interviews…
[…]I told you so ~ I, Cringely[…]…