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....