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Gates looks back on 30 years at Microsoft

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Ina Fried CNET News

Published: 25 Jun 2008 16:04 BST

…I've developed a relationship with them [around] brainstorming and thinking about what things we'd pick and how we do it.

You know, it's another good example of something that breakthrough work is not — it doesn't happen in a day; it happens in many years. Now, many of those years, fortunately, are the years we've already put into it. But — to really help [the search group] keep on track and just to give [the group] positive feedback as they're going — that's actually the only [thing] that's truly concrete at this point, where, literally, we've scheduled out a bit of this summer and even some[time] into the fall [concerning] when and how I'm going to look at various aspects of their work.

Can you think of a time when the company was coming from behind? I mean, we've all heard about the early days of developing the first version of DOS, but are there other times where it was kind of a mad scramble?
Well, we weren't that well known publicly until sometime in the 1980s. One of my favourite articles was where they wrote that there were four software companies, and none of them was that much different than the others. But we knew at that time that the other three just weren't long term, hiring the right people [and] thinking globally.

It was ourselves; Ashton-Tate; WordPerfect; and, I guess, Lotus. There were many software companies that were bigger than us. VisiCorp was bigger than us at a point in time. MicroPro [publisher of WordStar] was bigger than us at a point in time. And then each of those three — WordPerfect, Lotus and Ashton-Tate — were bigger than us at a time.

But the way we were going about it, and just thinking about software, and how was the chip going to change, and how did the pieces come together, and how did you do business in Europe and stuff — we were just different; we were just a long-term company.

So, it was funny to me that the article was written right as if somebody had really looked carefully. [If they had], they would see that we were quite different than those others. And then it was only about four years later that there was a spoof article in InfoWorld where they said: "Microsoft announced today that Ashton-Tate never existed", which is kind of an over-the-top thing. But that was a period where we came to the fore.

There was actually a point where we talked with Lotus about getting together with them, but it wasn't a good cultural fit there

Bill Gates

There's a lot of interesting twists and turns. There was actually a point where we talked with Lotus about getting together with them, but it wasn't a good cultural fit there. It was actually [Lotus chief executive Jim] Manzi who — I mean, it wouldn't necessarily have happened — but it was Manzi who ended the discussions.

There was one day that was rather funny. IBM didn't invite us to the introduction of the PC. We'd been invited, and then they decided not to invite us. Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people: "Yeah, we had this invitation… Yeah, we're going to go… There's going to be a big deal". And then they decided: "Nah, we don't want you to come to the thing." That was a little bit of a downer. Now, who cares?

Looking back at those early days, if you could give the 21-year-old you, who was just starting Microsoft, some advice, what would you say? Is there something that you know now that you didn't then that would have been useful?
Not really. I mean, you could say: "Hey, you're going to be successful, so don't work so hard", or something like that, but then it might completely erase the whole thing. Or [you could say]: "Learn that you're going to need a mix of skills, not just engineering skills." But, at first, the fact that we were just over-the-top engineering-centric wasn't so stupid.

I mean, that's the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career: that you find people who are so good at one thing, and, where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, yet they're very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other.

If that same 21-year-old you could see where things have gone, what do you think would be most surprising? Because it sounds like you had the ambition all along.
Well, yeah, we certainly said: "A computer on every desk and in every home." I had calculated out that we'd only need a thousand developers to write all the software that we were going to do all the horizontal software. So, definitely, if you took me to this place, I'm sure that, as a 21-year-old, I'd say: "What do all these people do? And...