did
and does,
- just like I did and do.
He wasn't really interested in how you drive
the business,
he worked on projects, things that interested him.
He didn't go rushing off to the patent office and
patent CPM and patent every line of code he could,
he didn't try to just squeeze the last dollar out of it.
- Gary was not a fighter, Gary avoided conflict,
Gary hated conflict.
- Bill I don't think anyone could say
backed away from conflict.
Nobody said future billionaires have to be
nice guys.
Here, at the Microsoft Museum, is a shrine to
Bill's legacy.
Bill Gates hardly fought his way up from the gutter.
Raised in a prosperous Seattle household, his
mother a homemaker who did charity work,
his father was a successful lawyer.
But beneath the affluence and comfort of
a perfect American family,
a competitive spirit ran deep.
I ended up spending Memorial Day Weekend
with him
out at his grandmother's house on Hood Canal.
She turned everything in to a game.
It was a very very very competitive environment,
and if you spent the weekend there,
you were part of the competition,
and it didn't matter whether it was hearts or
pickleball or swimming to the dock.
And you know and there was always a reward
for winning
and there was always a penalty for losing.
One time, it was funny, I went to
Bill's house and he really wanted to show me his
jigsaw puzzle that he was working on,
and he really wanted to talk about how he did
this jigsaw puzzle in like four minutes,
and like on the box it said, if you're a genius you
will do the jigsaw puzzle in like seven.
And he was into it. He was like "I can do it". And I
said don't, you know, I believe you.
You don't need to break it up and do it for me.
You know.
Bill Gates can be so focused
that the small things in life get overlooked.
If he was busy he didn't bathe, he didn't
change clothes.
We were in New York and the demo that we
had crashed
the evening before the announcement, and Bill
worked all night with some other engineers to fix it.
Well it didn't occur to him to take ten minutes
for a shower after that,
it just didn't occur to him that that was important,
and he badly needed a shower that day.
The scene is set:
in California laid back Gary Kildall already making
the best selling PC operating system: CPM.
In Seattle Bill Gates maker of BASIC the best selling
PC language
but always prepared to seize an opportunity.
So IBM had to choose one of these guys
to write the operating system for its new
personal computer.
One would hit the jackpot the other
would be forgotten,
a footnote in the history of the personal computer,
and it all starts with a telephone call to an
eighth floor office
in that building the headquarters of Microsoft
in 1980.
At about noon I guess I called Bill Gates on Monday
and said I would like to come out and talk with him
about his products.
Bill said well, how's next week, and they said we're
on an airplane,
we're leaving in an hour, we'd like to be there
tomorrow. Well, hallelujah. Right oh.
Steve Ballmer was a Harvard roommate of Gates.
He'd just joined Microsoft and would end up
its third billionaire.
Back then he was the only guy in the company
with business training.
Both Ballmer and Gates instantly saw the
importance of the IBM visit.
And Bill said Steve, you'd better come to
the meeting,
you're the only other guy here who can wear a suit.
A lot of these computer fairs discussions would get
around to, you know, I...
we'll put on suits and we'll go to this meeting.
We got there at roughly two o'clock
and we were waiting in the front,
and this young fella came out to take us back to
Mr. Gates office.
I thought he was the office boy, and of course
it was Bill.
He was quite decisive, we popped out the
non-disclosure agreement
the letter that said he wouldn't tell anybody
we were there
and that we wouldn't hear any secrets and so forth.
He signed it immediately.
IBM