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[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Years-General-Motors-Alfred-Sloan/dp/0...
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Buffett is an investor though right? Whereas Gates built a company. The two closely related but not the same? So it doesn't surprise me they turn to different books. Investors usually recommend books on security analysis, which would hardly have been useful for Gates in the 90's.
Actually it's a little known fact that Buffet built a company too. Yes He did invest in other publicly traded companies, and he's also acquired quite a few too. You can think of those as acquisitions. It's sort of a lesser known fact that he made the majority of his money in insurance. Before anyone else thought of it, Buffett developed a Homeostatic operation that collected insurance premiums and then invested that…
That's exactly what I mean. Buffett is famous & successful for being a finance wizard. They are both businessmen, of course, but different sorts. At least, so it seems to me.
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Check out the Innovator's Solution, the follow up. It explains why most of the profit (ability to charge your costs plus a premium) was dominated in the 90's by OS's, and not by the now notorious disk-drive companies. Gates probably understood this (how to position yourself not be disrupted) and it's why we're all reading his favorite book - which is great by the way.
And for the other side of the coin -- Jill Lepore's "What the Theory of Disruptive Innovation Gets Wrong" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_...
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-chri...
It's not Business @ the Speed of Thought???
I'd be more interested in Steve Jobs' favorite business books. I know he was a huge fan of the Innovator's Dilemma, probably because he already naturally understood most of it from experience before having to read it, and he was probably fan of other similar books too, and I'd like to know which books those were. I don't think Bill Gates ever understood a book like Innovator's Dilemma. Not really.
Bill's taking advantage of IBM's focus on their mainframe customers and under cutting them with Windows pcs seems almost the classic example of the things the Innovator's Dilemma is on about and probably the biggest one in history in dollar value terms. I suspect he understands that stuff.
It's not Business @ the Speed of Thought???
If you have a New Yorker subscription, you can read all of John Brooks' work online: http://www.newyorker.com/search?qt=dismax&rows=10&sort=score... Each of these links (after a summary) to a scanned archive version of the actual magazine, which is cool. You can see the ads and layout of the day. Edit: I actually want to read all of them, so here's the direct links to the original articles: - Fluctuations: http://arc…
Only about halfway through that, and I'm amazed at how history has repeated itself in regards to copyright law.
Separately Gates looks amazingly old in the last few years way beyond his age. Especially in that photo. That is not the skin of a man in his late 50's. I've speculated that he has either to much sun exposure [1], smokes (but he doesn't?), or has some sickness that has caused him to age. Actually when he retired from Microsoft I had thought that health might have something to do with it. (I don't remember many cases…