Billionaire.
Gets your attention, doesn't it? We are irresistibly drawn to the story of a billionaire. It doesn't matter who it is. It could be Ross Perot, Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, Donald Trump (a little while ago), or the Queen of England, we just want to get a little closer to whatever it took for them to get where they are, maybe to imagine that we could do it, too. Well, except for the Queen, perhaps. Anyway, how many other billionaires do you know about? Of them, how many would you care to spend much time with? Other than for the availability of what Bill Gates calls "infinite money," how much of their lives and personalities would you like to assimilate? Are they nice people? Would you be like them to have what they have? If Bill Gates came to your house to take your daughter to the prom, would you let him in the door? How about if you didn't know who he was?
An analysis of the self-made billionaire usually reveals character and personality disorders that most people do not have, do not respect, and do not suffer. And you'll find them all in Hard Drive, a book written by two Seattle Post-Intelligence reporters who started out to do a series of articles about the city's most famous citizen. To become a billionaire, you must understand negotiation and have a consuming desire to win. You should have little or no care or concern for anyone who would impede your progress. Oddly, you should care little about money itself because you have to be willing to risk it without concern about the consequences. Winning the deal is important. Dashing your competitors. Being the best. Being the only one. The money is only a badge of victory. There won't be time to enjoy it. You'll be making the next deal and slaying the next competitor. Take everyone to the cleaners, if not your clothes. Most of us don't know why that's so much fun, and so we will never be billionaires. We don't have the right stuff.
There is a magnetic draw to the billionaire mystique, though. Get inside the aura. What must it be like to own a $300,000 car that U.S. Customs won't allow into the country because the manufacturer hasn't crash-tested three copies of the model? And your partner has one just like it in the same impound lot. What's it like to not really care all that much? Do the two of you get together and go visit the cars and then go have a beer and laugh about it? That world is as far removed from most of us as anything can get.
We do have something in common with Bill Gates, though, because we write code and so does he, or at least he used to, and he was good at it. The book tells us about it. Conjure up the typical image of a nerdy kid hacking out a Basic interpreter, hand-coding it on yellow tablets, toggling it into the front panel of a spit-and-baling-wire home-computer kit, selling a few copies, making some deals, turning the venture into the world's biggest software company, and becoming one of the world's richest men. Could have been you; could have been me. I can write code that good; so can you. We aren't reminded, however, that he already had a million bucks in a family trust fund when he started. Forget that he has the incessant drive to put success ahead of everything, including personal relationships, hygiene, and the professional esteem of his colleagues. Never mind that he has the unique intelligence to supplement that drive and turn it into success. It's just that he wrote a program that many of us could have written, and now he is a billionaire. The interesting part, though, is what happened in between.
Hard Drive is an unauthorized biography. Unauthorized works are free from the personal bias that usually accompanies an authorized one. On the other hand, they might lack some inside information that only the subject or his appointed representatives could provide. Hard Drive seems to cover most of the Gates story without missing much.
At first I worried about the book. Chapter 1 starts with Gates at age 11, riding the elevator in the Space Needle, on his way to lunch with a teacher and classmates, a reward for memorizing the Sermon on the Mount. "Blessed are the poor...." The book next grandly purports to tell us about Bill Gates's thoughts, which it tells us are some 3000 miles away at Cape Canaveral, lifting off in a spaceship, thinking about Edgar Rice Burroughs. What? Is this going to be that kind of book? How, thought I, could the authors of a biography, proudly promoted as having been "undertaken without the help or cooperation of Microsoft," know anything at all about what young Bill was thinking, particularly some 26 years ago? They don't say how they know, and I suppose they might have read a quote somewhere, but, fortunately for the reader, that's the only obvious place where they veer off track and take license with journalistic integrity. The balance of the book draws mainly from interviews and published accounts of Gates and his company.
And it's an intriguing and well-told story. Amidst all the anecdotes about fast cars, traffic tickets, hamburgers, and ruthless deal-making weaves the story of how Microsoft, with some lucky breaks and a lot of sheer energy, advanced from a couple of programmers and one program to become first the principal microcomputer language company and then the purveyors of DOS, applications, and Windows. The book follows the IBM lashup, and much later, the breakup; the announcement of Windows and its interminable time to delivery and the introduction of the term "vaporware" into our language; the look-and-feel lawsuits; going public; hiring and firing presidents; the FTC probe.
The story of our youngest billionaire is salted with accounts of coattail riders. If you had gotten on board in the early days, maybe now you would be one of the millionaire coders who rode along and cashed in on the stock options when the company went public and did well. Maybe you would have. Not me. I wouldn't have lasted long and many didn't. The book is filled with stories about Gates's tantrums and tirades directed at subordinates who were not delivering to his standards. He called them stupid, idiots, and worse. Some of them took it, stayed the course, and got rich. I take comfort in the knowledge that I did not miss out on anything. I could never have been among the reams of paper plutocrats who weathered the lean years to reap the gravy, because I would have punctuated the first such diatribe aimed at me with the old Stevens one-two-three: Verb, followed by pronoun, followed by departure. Just not cut out for glory, I guess.
One story I like is about Gates's treatment of a lady friend who was president of a competing company. In a social one-on-one situation she mentioned that she had sold a significant quantity of her product to Apple, a transaction that was in direct competition with Microsoft. Gates began machine-gun firing questions at her and furiously taking notes about the details of the transaction--quantities, people, dates. Later, at dinner she asked why he wanted to know all that. So he could kill the deal, came the answer. He was going to call Apple and put some pressure on. Microsoft comes first, and she should never tell him anything he could use against her. I don't think Bill got lucky that night.
Even though Hard Drive chronicles the meteoric rise of the largest software company in the world and one of the biggest of any kind of company, the book will probably not become a textbook in any prestigious business schools, because you can't use it to teach successful management. It is about Gates, which is about Microsoft, which is about all that energy, drive, and success. To duplicate Microsoft, you'd need to create another Gates, and that's not something you can teach. At least I hope not. But the book is pure fun to read, particularly if you were in this business through the '70s and '80s when it all happened. Just think. If I would have grabbed that January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, got an 8080 manual, hand-coded a Basic interpreter, and run down to Albuquerque, and toggled it in....
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal