In 1994, John Seabrook wrote about contacting Bill Gates via e-mail, “the best way to communicate with another person on the information highway.”
For years after the telephone was invented, in 1876, people thought it was a device that would transmit news, drama, and music: the idea that the telephone was a way to talk to other people took about twenty years to sink in here, and about thirty years in Europe. Similarly, today one hears about shopping, banking, and renting movies on the information highway.
But all Gates’ influence and success are small potatoes compared with the influence he could have and with the opportunity that now lies before him. The computer, which in twenty-five years has evolved from a room-size mainframe into a laptop device, appears to be turning into a new kind of machine. The new machine will be a communications device that connects people to the information highway.
New employees at Microsoft are likely to encounter Bill Gates electronically long before they meet him in person. Some get to thinking of him by his E-mail handle, which is “billg,” rather than by his real name. You’ll be chatting with a Microsoft employee in the employee’s office, the computer will make a little belch or squeak, indicating an incoming piece of electronic mail, and it’ll be E-mail from Bill.
When Gates was in his twenties, his mother color-coördinated his clothes—he had green days, beige days, blue days—and then the job was taken over by girlfriends, and now it will presumably fall to his wife, but so far no one has really handled the task successfully.
Because Bill Gates was my first E-mail relationship, I wasn’t always sure how to comport myself electronically, and occasionally I solicited advice from experienced E-mailers. Once, while I was questioning a media analyst named Mark Stahlman about a point of E-mail etiquette, he said to me, “Well, hey, you’re not a digital guy!” This line often popped into my head when I was E-mailing Bill.
All of the above is about how adults will use the system. Kids will use it in ways we can’t even imagine. It is pretty cool that the products we work on empower individuals and make their jobs more interesting. It helps a lot in inventing new software ideas that I will be one of the users of the software so I can model what’s important . . . .
I don’t remember being wounded or losing something big so I don’t think that is driving me. I have wonderful parents and great siblings. I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in . I can’t remember any major disappointments. I did figure out at one point that if I pursued pure mathematics it would be hard to make a major contribution and there were a few girls who turned me down when I asked them out.
Not long ago, Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, said to me, “Bill Gates is an introvert. He is not the kind of person you want building the social network of the future.” Ann Winblad, Gates’ former girlfriend, told me, “People who know Bill know that you have to bring him into a group—say, ‘Hey, Bill, tell us the story of such-and-such—because he doesn’t have the social skills to do it on his own. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t social. Bill is an open, emotional guy, very.
There is substantial political pressure not to prosecute Microsoft. Microsoft is the principal reason that the United States is by far the world leader in software production, an industry that has an unimaginable potential for growth. Also, the government’s huge antitrust case against I.B.M., which was filed in 1969 and ended with the government’s giving up on it in 1982, distracted and weakened that organization, and helped companies like Microsoft to get the better of it.
Gates and Allen sometimes talked about how cool it would be to design the software for the first personal computer, which appeared to be on the horizon, but this was not a serious career goal of Bill’s. His father wanted him to become a lawyer. “When I was in college, it was really hard to pick a career, because everything seemed so attractive, and when you had to pick a specific one you had to say no to all the others,” Gates told me.
Now, thirteen years after that contract, Microsoft is by far the largest software company in the world. It has a market capitalization of twenty-three billion dollars—more than General Motors, Xerox, or I.B.M. To what extent Gates is mainly a product of I.B.M.
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