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Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

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Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#71

Post by macrael »

codingthewheel wrote: post #33
sunchild wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't doing it to benefit himself. He probably doesn't care whether you like him or not, and he definitely doesn't need your money or respect. I guess Paul just wants the world to know that the image of Gates as our benevolent patron of philanthropy is itself revisionism, lest anyone forget that Bill Gates was one of the least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for. It doesn't surprise me that HN sid…

Yeah, I completely agree. I'm sure he doesn't need my or anybody else's money or respect. But I wonder if the message he's trying to get across is the one that's actually getting across. Looking at it from a gaming standpoint, can his play here can ever have a positive expectation?

By what measure? If Paul Allen wants people to remember that Bill Gates used to be a dick, and people read his book and do so, maybe that's all the positive expectation he needs. Even if it hurts his own reputation maybe it is worth it to him.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#72

Post by Xixi »

sushilchoudhari wrote: post #58
bad_user wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Gates as the great computer guy. I look at him as a ruthless evil genius that made Microsoft what it is. Of course that's partly because he's also a "great computer guy". To make an analogy with Apple, if anything, his role at Microsoft was more like that of Steve Jobs, rather than that of Steve Wozniak; he provided the vision, he made the business calls that made Microsoft. Bill Gates does have a differe…

This is a very interesting article. I am myself working on a project and considering good friends to be co-founders in that. But based on what Paul Allen is mentioning here and based on few other stories of startups which made it big like Facebook, few thoughts came to my mind: 1) Is it that to make it really big, to the likes of Microsoft, Facebook a founder has to play games and trick his own friends in a way that…

What about Larry Page and Sergueï Brin? It seems from the outside that they their relationship didn't go sour.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#73

Post by [deleted] »

kloncks wrote: post #17

Is it just me or was Bill's reaction so cordial and professional? I loved it; thought it was great. "While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul's, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft," Mr. Gates said in a written statement.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#74

Post by gnosis »

kloncks wrote: post #17

Is it just me or was Bill's reaction so cordial and professional? I loved it; thought it was great. "While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul's, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft," Mr. Gates said in a written statement.

That statement was probably written by a professional speech writer under advice from a legal team and a PR company.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#75

Post by narrator »

michaelchisari wrote: post #69
codingthewheel wrote: post #3

Difficult to see how publicizing this stuff could be beneficial for Mr. Allen. At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made.

At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody I've never understood that. At what point do you make enough money to say whatever the hell you want, without any fear of repercussions? What's the point of having all that money if you have to worry about what other wealthy people think of you?

If you are a billionaire you buy a news network and then hire a pundit, heck a whole panel of pundits to say whatever negative things you want to say about anybody.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#76

Post by whyenot »

eyeforgotmyname wrote: post #64
yannickt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cringely's article, as well as Allen's accomplishments outside of Microsoft make that questionable. Gates may have had more business savvy, but it seems pretty evident that Allen was in no shortage of it either. To put it another way, I don't think Allen was to Gates what Wozniak was to Jobs.

So then what was Gates contribution? I thought he was a brilliant businessman but that he wasn't really a tech guy. Is that wrong?

Gates was/is very much a tech guy. Here is a quote from his Wikipedia article

At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#77

Post by anonymous246 »

sunchild wrote: post #50
anonymous246 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for": citation? Are you referring to the discussion Gates and Ballmer had about diluting Allen? That seems to be a way to dilute a founder who was slacking off. The word partnership is used several times; this may imply that everybody was 100% vested already. If so, this is the only thing they could do to somebody who wasn't pulling his weight.

Are you seriously asking for a citation to show that Bill Gates is (was?) a ruthless person with questionable ethics? Forty years of ripping off other people's software, berating and humiliating his own team, buying and shutting down competitors, and impeding progress in the name of vendor lock-in, plus the newly-published "insider" memoir of his co-founder isn't enough for you? I've met Bill Gates, so I'll stick wit…

The parent claimed "least loyal and trustworthy friend".

Where have you supported that claim? If you've "met" BG, I invite you to post some already-known anecdotes etc about his conduct as a friend, which is exactly what I asked about.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#78

Post by anonymous246 »

spinchange wrote: post #46
anonymous246 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for": citation? Are you referring to the discussion Gates and Ballmer had about diluting Allen? That seems to be a way to dilute a founder who was slacking off. The word partnership is used several times; this may imply that everybody was 100% vested already. If so, this is the only thing they could do to somebody who wasn't pulling his weight.

He was fighting cancer.

Heartless as it sounds, it is absolutely fair to think about how to protect the business and yourself in the event that a fully vested founder were to be unable to do the duties one has reasonably assumed they would do.

Ownership shares are not like salary (imho): they're not just for past work, but also for future contributions.

Without specifics on to what extent exactly they were planning to dilute him, I am not prepared to condemn BillG. YMMV.

Jobs' actual cheating through a straightforward lie to Woz wrt how much they got paid for Atari's contract job they did is FAR worse than a planning conversation BillG had. IMHO. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve-wozniak/

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#79

Post by sunchild »

anonymous246 wrote: post #77
sunchild wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously asking for a citation to show that Bill Gates is (was?) a ruthless person with questionable ethics? Forty years of ripping off other people's software, berating and humiliating his own team, buying and shutting down competitors, and impeding progress in the name of vendor lock-in, plus the newly-published "insider" memoir of his co-founder isn't enough for you? I've met Bill Gates, so I'll stick wit…

The parent claimed "least loyal and trustworthy friend ". Where have you supported that claim? If you've "met" BG, I invite you to post some already-known anecdotes etc about his conduct as a friend , which is exactly what I asked about.

That comment was based on Allen's account of Ballmer and Gates plotting to dilute him – a dick move by any measure, esp. after Allen showed his good faith on a number of occasions.

Gates and Allen were friends at when they went to school together. I went to the same school some years after them, and drew my own opinions based on first and second hand experiences with both of them.

No matter what you believe about the quality of their friendship, there's a teaching lesson for co-founders in their story.

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Hits Out at Gates

#80

Post by stretchwithme »

david927 wrote: post #43
stretchwithme wrote: post #39

"I'm not sure Bill would ever have dropped out of Harvard if it wasn't for Paul," Mr. Yoffie said, referring to Mr. Allen's role in encouraging Mr. Gates to leave college to start Microsoft. "I don't know whether Steve Jobs, without Wozniak, would have ever gotten things together." baloney.

Yoffie mixed up Wozniak and Jobs there.

totally, Woz is awesome, to be sure. But Jobs has been running without him quite well of late.
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