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January 20 - March 29, 2020
Just before they left, one of the twelve staffers won a free photo shoot from a local studio, so they posed for what would become a historic photograph, with Allen and most of the others looking like refugees from a hippie commune and Gates sitting up front looking like a Cub Scout.
Jobs would later say that he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely simple: “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.” Devices should not need manuals. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne, who worked with Jobs at Atari.
“He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end.
The most influential pioneer in that field was Dan Bricklin, who conceived the first financial spreadsheet program, VisiCalc.
They used friends and professors as focus groups to make sure the interface was intuitive and easy to use. “The goal was to give the user a conceptual model that was unsurprising,” Frankston explained. “It was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience.”
A few weeks earlier, Gates had recruited his Harvard dorm mate Steve Ballmer to Microsoft as the business manager, and he asked Ballmer to join him at the IBM meeting. “You’re the only other guy here who can wear a suit,” Gates pointed out.
Microsoft did not yet make an operating system. It was instead working with one called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers) that was owned by Gary Kildall, a childhood friend of Gates who had recently moved to Monterey, California.
By then Gates had come to the realization that one operating system, most likely the one chosen by IBM, would end up being the standard operating system that most personal computers would use. He also figured out that whoever owned that operating system would be in the catbird seat. So instead of sending the IBM folks to see Paterson, Gates and his team said that they would handle things on their own.
Microsoft had bought DOS outright, “for whatever usage,” rather than merely licensing it. That was smart, but what was even smarter was not letting IBM force Microsoft to make the same arrangement.
Gates boasted to his mother about the importance of his deal with IBM, hoping that it would prove that he had been right to drop out of Harvard. Mary Gates happened to be on the board of the United Way with IBM’s president John Opel, who was about to take over from Frank Cary as CEO.
“We have a dependency on Intel for the chip, and Sears and ComputerLand are going to do the distribution,” the team leader explained. “But probably our biggest dependency is actually a pretty small software company up in Seattle run by a guy named Bill Gates.” To which Opel responded, “Oh, you mean Mary Gates’s son? Oh, yeah, she’s great.”
In an interview appearing in the first issue of PC magazine a few months later, Gates pointed out that soon all personal computers would be using the same standardized microprocessors. “Hardware in effect will become a lot less interesting,” he said. “The total job will be in the software.”
He had worked out a deal with Xerox that allowed the Apple folks to study the technology in return for allowing Xerox to make a million-dollar investment in Apple.
In the early 1980s, before the introduction of the Macintosh, Microsoft had a good relationship with Apple. In fact, on the day that IBM launched its PC in August 1981, Gates was visiting Jobs at Apple, which was a regular occurrence since Microsoft was making most of its revenue writing software for the Apple II. Gates was still the supplicant in the relationship. In 1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write new versions of its software for the Macintosh, which was still a secret development project. So at their August 1981
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Nevertheless, Windows eventually clawed its way to dominance, not because its design was better but because its business model was better.
Torvalds initially planned to name his new software “Freax,” to evoke “free” and “freaks” and “UNIX.” But the person who ran the FTP site he was using didn’t like the name, so Torvalds resorted to calling it “Linux,” which he pronounced, similarly to the way he pronounced his first name, “LEE-nucks.”
“Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.”
In late 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an MIT engineer working at BBN, decided to concoct a cool hack that would allow such messages to be sent to folders on other mainframes. He did it by combining SNDMSG with an experimental file transfer program called CPYNET, which could exchange files between distant computers on the ARPANET. Then he came up with something that was even more ingenious: in order to instruct a message to go to the file folder of a user at a different site, he used the @ sign on his keyboard to create the addressing system that we all use now, username@hostname. Thus Tomlinson created
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He learned two lessons: that people like to be part of communities and that technology needs to be simple if it is going to appeal to the masses.
AOL’s users were not called customers or subscribers; they were members.
“It made me realize that the limitations on what you could do with a computer were just the limitations of your imagination.”
But it became even more popular because Andreessen knew one of the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time on Internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints.
That became the recipe for his and many future blogs: stay casual, get personal, be provocative.
By 2014 there would be 847 million blogs in the world.
“Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,”
“By publishing ourselves on the web, we reject the role of passive media marketing recipient,”
Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.”
Creating user simplicity is one of the keys to successful innovation.
He was following another basic lesson for innovation: Don’t stay too focused.
Now he needed a name. What he had created was a quick Web tool, but QuickWeb sounded lame, as if conjured up by a committee at Microsoft. Fortunately, there was another word for quick that popped from the recesses of his memory. When he was on his honeymoon in Hawaii thirteen years earlier, he remembered, “the airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.” When he asked what it meant, he was told that wiki was the Hawaiian word for quick, and wiki wiki meant superquick. So he named his Web pages and the software that ran them WikiWikiWeb, wiki for short.
World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was fastidious about doing so.
Larry Page was born and bred in the world of computing.115 His father was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State, and his mother taught programming there.
Sergey Brin’s parents were also academics, both mathematicians, but his childhood was very different from Page’s. Brin was born in Moscow, where his father taught math at Moscow State University and his mother was a research engineer at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute.
Intellectually rigorous, he could find logical flaws in the most mundane comments and effortlessly steer a shallow conversation into a deep discussion.
“You make an invention you think is great, and so you want it to be used by many people as soon as possible.”
Wetware is different from hardware. The human brain not only combines analog and digital processes, it also is a distributed system, like the Internet, rather than a centralized one, like a computer.
In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.
The goal instead could be to find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities—to forge a partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do best.
the digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations.
The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them.
Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally.
It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new
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Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.
The Internet facilitated collaboration not only within teams but also among crowds of people who didn’t know each other. This is the advance that is closest to being revolutionary. Networks for collaboration have existed ever since the Persians and Assyrians invented postal systems.
Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones.
Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all of their prickly intensity, knew how to build strong teams around them and inspire loyalty.
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design.
“The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”
