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Mar 27, 2012 / 1:14am

The day Bill Gates called me rude — and other lessons in user experience

At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t combine them into one thing to reduce their learning curve. We don’t merge them into one object because each of them are in use in fundamentally different ways at different times.

Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 investment in Apple

I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success.”

A Learning a Day: How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates

Here’s the quote from Steve Jobs:

“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

And here’s Bill’s response:

“When you think about why is the world better today, the Internet, the personal computer, the phone, the way you can deal with information is just so phenomenal…Over the course of the 30 years we worked together, he said a lot of very nice things about me and he said a lot of tough things. I mean, he faced, several times at Apple, the fact that their products were so premium priced that they literally might not stay in the marketplace. So the fact that we were succeeding with high volume products, including a range of prices, because of the way we worked with multiple companies, it’s tough. So the fact that at various times, he felt beleaguered, he felt like he was the good guy and we were the bad guys, you know, very understandable. I respect Steve. We got to work together. We spurred each other on, even as competitors. None of that bothers me at all.”

Microsoft Co-Founder Hits Out at Gates

Even before Microsoft made him wealthy, it appeared to people who knew him that Mr. Allen had broader interests than running a software business. David Bunnell, who worked in New Mexico in the 1970s with Messrs. Allen and Gates at the pioneering PC maker Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, better known as MITS, said Mr. Allen was more passionate about music and culture than his business partner.

"He was more interested, in a broader sense, in the world," Mr. Bunnell says. "I think Bill is more single-minded."

Bill Gates, Hero

Bill has won plenty of accolades for his foundation, but more from the world of charities and doctors than from us. When the digerati last year launched a rallying cry to give entrepreneurs the Nobel Prize, it was for the founders of Twitter, not Bill Gates. Undoubtedly, the Twitter folks are visionaries who deserve all that’s coming to them. But Bill has been embraced more warmly by others than by his own.

An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

The Gates Notes

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Bill Gates

The day Bill Gates called me rude — and other lessons in user experience

Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 investment in Apple

A Learning a Day: How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates

Microsoft Co-Founder Hits Out at Gates

Bill Gates, Hero

An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

The Gates Notes

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