> "You'd have to sit in a meeting with Bill, and he's frighteningly brilliant. People throw around the word 'genius' all the time, and the way people say 'genius' is not accurate if you've met somebody who is a genius – somebody who, when you meet them, it seems like aliens are whispering in their ear because there's no way they could know these things otherwise. This is a different kind of a thing, and Bill's like that.
This pretty much describes the guy. I was at Microsoft during the final years of BillG being very hands-on with most core products (pre-lawsuit). I really wish I had worked with him more, but here is my anecdote that speaks to the guy’s brilliance:
My boss had gotten a fairly angry email from Bill sometime in 1995 if memory serves right. Chicago had taken much of his and Microsoft’s attention since the early 90s, that we didn’t see the internet coming.
When it came, nobody was alarmed. Bill had apparently gone on a learning tour of sorts shortly afterwards, but most of the people in the industry knew nothing about what the internet made possible. We knew you could share documents, and it was growing fast, and that Bill thought it was important. Nobody “got” the internet, just like nobody “got” the power of controlling the OS before Microsoft.
At the time, we were working on IIS (internet information service server) and a little behind schedule. Bill had also somehow caught wind of some Palo Alto startup talking to set top box companies to deliver an internet-connected OS (turned out to be WebTV, which we bought later) and was furious. Comes in, yells about how we can’t get the web resource model working, all that. Four letter words. Fairly typical angry boss rant. And then he collected himself and said something we thought was absurd - something akin to this: IIS and Internet Explorer will be Microsoft’s two most important products. We were struggling to get static HTML documents serving properly, and Bill goes on a monologue about how much of commerce will shift to the web, most video will be delivered online, we’d have free live video calling on handheld computers and the web as a platform would end Wintel. Thousands of machines running IIS that we could loan to web companies (sound familiar?).
Bill understood no matter how far we got with Windows, the days of a platform tied to an OS were numbered - in the same time period that Windows 95 was selling like hotcakes. There is no other person I think who could analyze situations objectively like that. It’s like if Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 3G and a month later gives Apple a speech on how the iWatch will kill it.
It was all absurd at the time - stuff of science fiction. Even a few years later during the dot com boom, much of it seemed far fetched.
Then Android and Chrome, iPhone, M1, AWS, and Amazon all happened, and I realized Bill was right. It took a little longer than predicted, but every single laughable thing the guy said that day turned out to be true. I really do think if it wasn’t for the anti trust case, Bill would have seen a lot of this through - for better or worse. It’s easy to look back and say Microsoft lacked the vision to succeed in the internet age - and it’s almost true - but Bill had formulated all this in a few weeks of “exploration”.
In a different universe, I think Microsoft abandons consumer Windows earlier than we can imagine, and builds “AWS” and “Chrome” around the IIS/IE combination. With reason to abandon the Wintel cash cow, IE may not have been so distastefully bad. Guess we’ll never find out though.