Fly, Bill, Fly

I've been listening to Herbie Hancock's Grammy-winning "River: The Joni Letters" CD a lot recently. It's the album where he covers a bunch of Joni Mitchell songs. The title track, "River," is one of Joni's best. It always makes me think of departure, of an exit, of somebody leaving. And because it's time, whenever I hear the song now, I think of Bill Gates.

 It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Resource Library:

Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I told myself I wasn't going to join the crowd and write about Gates' departure from the day-to-day. But here I am, trying to get my little piece in.

To me, Bill G. is a hero, plain and simple. ‘Nuff said. For real.

Anybody who came up in the tech press in my era is sure to have some Bill Gates stories, but I don't want to talk about random stuff like seeing Bill absolutely throwing down and dancing with women six deep at Comdex parties. Shucks, I damn near inched myself over to say I had danced with Bill Gates myself! OK, enough of the nonsense.

For me to try to promote any interaction I've had with Gates right here would be a joke. I mean, sure, for somebody who has covered software -- and app dev in particular -- for as long as I have, there are all kinds of occasions where I have had interaction with or observance of Gates. Who cares? I could share a "me too" story. But I don't claim to know the man in any true sense of the word. Yet I raise a hand high, way high, in salute to Bill Gates.

You don't need me to tell you about the Microsoft history and how Gates shepherded the company to a position of dominance in the PC era. And I'm not going to try to predict what will happen at Microsoft post-Gates. You can go to my SisterLady Mary Jo Foley, also known as MJF to me (another three-initialed nickname, like my own DKT) to see what she believes the next step for Microsoft will be. I am not going there. However, as MJF is a good friend, my former online editor and a trusted source, I defer to her. She even allowed me early access to prominent chunks of her book prior to publication to get a sense of how it read to a different set of eyes.

Anyway, Bill Gates set out to see to it that a PC would find its way onto every corporate desk and into every home. And that's just about true. He parlayed that operating system monopoly into dominance in other areas. Yet throughout, Gates knew the value of the developer in driving the adoption of the Microsoft platform. His courtship of developers was relentless. He hired a lot of very smart people along the way to ensure that developers got the best tools available and others to evangelize those tools and the Microsoft platform.

And Gates was a fierce competitor. I recall a conversation I had with a colleague who said Gates had no, well, guts. But this person used another term. I begged to differ. You don't take the risks, make the bets or fight the battles that Gates fought if you have no cojones. Gates has them in spades. A walk onto the Microsoft campus is also a testament to Gates' guts, will and intellect.

In the early days of Microsoft's courtship of developers, Borland had a solid following and was able to innovate ahead of Microsoft on many fronts. Borland became a stone in Microsoft's shoe. No, more than that, Borland was an obstacle -- a tough little company of smart, development-savvy folks run by a tough Frenchman who was unafraid of a fight. But by 1995, that Frenchman, Philippe Kahn, had resigned as CEO and Microsoft began to woo Borland's top talent. So much so that in 1997, Borland CEO Del Yocam filed a lawsuit against Microsoft to stop the software giant from raiding Borland's staff. Yocam said Microsoft was sending limos down to lure Borlanders away. Many former Borlanders left to join Microsoft, including the creator of Borland's first product -- Turbo Pascal -- Anders Hejlsberg, and Paul Gross, who in many ways was part of the heart and soul of Borland after Kahn left.

Yet, while many current and former competitors did not want to comment on Gates' departure, Kahn, ever the class act, said: "The industry is transitioning from the PC to the world of the iPhone/Google, yet Bill's legacy will endure"

Another former competitor, but also a good friend of Bill's, Gordon Eubanks, former CEO of Symantec (which sold development tools under Eubanks), said:

"More than any person in the software industry, Bill’s vision drove the direction of the industry and certainly the execution of that vision has changed how all of us work. It is hard to pick specific memories, but Bill has always been a forward-thinking visionary with a great will to win."

Many folks who saw Bill Gates' deposition in the Microsoft antitrust trial with the Department of Justice got to see Gates' will to win as he turned into a hostile witness and did his best imitation of Bill Clinton's evasive responses when he was deposed in the Monica Lewinsky mess. Yet later, when Gates appeared live in court in D.C. in a different phase of the case, he was in total command. He was back to the Gates so many developers know and love.