Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (29 page)

“Gates looked with disdain on Steve Jobs,” said one Microsoft manager who was part of the team working on applications for the Macintosh. “I think he thought Jobs was a fake, that he was all bluster and no go. I don’t think he thought Jobs knew how to design anything himself.”

Like Steve Jobs before him, Bill Gates was starting to make a name for himself in the national press. He was being hailed as the next wunderkind of the personal computer revolution, the
new
Steve Jobs. Journalists who trekked to Seattle to write about Microsoft’s brilliant young leader found a skinny kid with a high-pitched voice, oversized glasses, dandruff, and uncombed hair whose techie talk was liberally sprinkled with words such as “cool” and “super.” Gates’ unassuming manner was a welcome contrast to what writers often referred to as the “darker side” of Steve Jobs.

“There is a hint of Andy Hardy in his boyish grin and unruly cowlick,” wrote
People
magazine. The magazine had named Gates as one of the 25 most “intriguing” people of 1983. “Now 28, Gates is to software what Edison was to the light bulb—part innovator, part entrepreneur, part salesman and full-time genius.”

The comparison to Thomas Alva Edison was appropriate. Although he is remembered for inventing the electric light bulb,

Edison spent most of his life as an entrepreneur, selling the public on his vision of the future.

Many of these early national stories about Gates focused on his obsessive work habits, his Midas touch, and competitive personality. An article in
Fortune
magazine that appeared shortly after the
People
piece was headlined “Microsoft’s Drive to Dominate Software.” The article described Gates as “a remarkable piece of software in his own right. He is childishly awkward at times, throws things when angry, and fidgets uncontrollably when he speaks. But he is an extraordinarily intelligent master programmer steeped in technical knowledge about his complicated business. At the same time, he is monstrously competitive.”

The national press usually portrayed Gates as a computer whiz kid and hardcore technoid, a peculiar egg who liked to spend his Saturday nights watching physics lectures on his VCR. The
Wall Street Journal
described him as a nerd on its front page—not once, but twice. Gates took exception to the tag. A nerd, he said, could not manage people or run a multimillion- dollar business. But if people wanted to call him a nerd because he enjoyed watching physics lectures, that was all right with him. Gates did occasionally watch a videotaped series of Cornell University lectures given by Richard Feynman, the brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential postwar theoretical physicist with whom Gates later corresponded.

Reporters for newspapers and magazines who flocked to Bellevue to do stories about Gates and Microsoft tried to outdo each other in finding colorful tidbits that helped build the Gatesian legend, like the time in the early 1980s he turned a $40,000 ante into a million-dollar windfall by investing in undervalued stock, including Apple. But the common thread that ran through each of their stories was Gates’ youthful appearance. He did not fit the mold of the typical CEO. In fact, he didn’t look old enough to drive a car, much less run the fastest-growing software company on the planet.

Even
Time
magazine got into the act with a cover story on Gates in its April 16, 1984 issue. “He looks like an undernourished graduate student as he waits for a plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport,”
Time
wrote of Gates. “His gray sweater has patches on the elbows, his shoes are scuffed; his ginger hair flops over a pa
ir of steel-framed glasses.
” The
Time
cover photo of a nervous-looking, bespectacled Gates balancing a floppy computer disk on the index finger of his left hand was not especially flattering. The article described Gates as America’s software tycoon, having amassed a personal fortune estimated at $100 million. It noted that in 1978 Microsoft had 15 employees and now had 510, with projected 1984 revenues of $100 million.

The
Time
magazine article was the first to mention that Gates had a girlfriend, Jill Bennett, a 27-year-old computer sales representative for Digital Equipment Corporation. Gates had first started dating Bennett in 1983. Although he had occasionally gone out with women since high school, it was his first serious relationship. They had met at a party thrown by a college friend of Bennett’s who worked at Microsoft. “One of the first questions I asked him was why the company didn’t develop software for a 32-bit microcomputer,” said Bennett, who now lives in the Boston area. “He laughed pretty hard and nicknamed me ‘32-bit.’ ” (Only recently has Microsoft started to get into the 32-bit software market.)

She described Gates as a combination of Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, and John Cougar Mellancamp, the popular rock singer. Mellancamp, she explained, is rebellious and sensitive, with tremendous sex appeal. Gates, for her money, has all of those qualities. But dating him was no picnic because he was so thoroughly consumed with his work. “There was a fair share of pain and challenge involved for both of us,” she said. “He often showed up on my doorstep dead on arrival. Girlfriends are clearly peripheral in the whole scheme of things.”

While they had similar backgrounds and interests, there were also clear differences. Gates was introverted while Bennett was much more outgoing. Gates was extremely focused, she said, and did not tolerate distractions. As a result, he didn’t own a television and had disconnected the radio in his car. “Bill is a . . . person with a high level of intensity and competitiveness. He is also a man of sensitivity and compassion.” Few people, however, are able to get close enough to Gates to see that sensitivity, she said.

“Although he hides it well. . . and certainly will not admit to it, Bill’s feelings get hurt easily,” she said. “He has a particularly difficult time when key employees leave Microsoft. Bill has always been a bit of a loner. The age-old adage is true: it
is
very lonely at the top.” She found a vulnerability in Gates that was very appealing. “It made me want to protect him.” Gates had felt very lonely growing up, she believed, and felt just as lonely as an adult.

Having a close-knit family, however, helped Gates deal with his loneliness, according to Bennett, who was particularly fond of the Gates family. For example, on Christmas Eve Gates and his two sisters always returned home to be with their parents, and would sleep in their childhood beds. New pajamas were laid out for them. In the morning, the family would get up and open gifts together. This kind of closeness, in Bennett’s eyes, helped to provide Gates with the emotional stability and love that he needed. “He derives major strength and support from them, and loves each of them intensely, more than they’ll ever know. ... He would not be the man he is today . . . without them. . . . His family is one of his greatest assets.”

Gates and Bennett stopped dating in 1984, not long after the
Time
article appeared. “In the end it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour’ turnaround—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.” At one point in their relationship, when Gates felt particularly overloaded from work, he told Bennett that he wished she and Steve Ballmer would get together. That way she could still be close to him, but he could remain more focused on work. It wasn’t exactly what Bennett hoped to hear from Gates.

“He was, and is, very hung-up on setting a hardcore work example in his company,” Bennett said. “I think this ... is unrealistic and inhuman and will eventually break him.”

Gates remains a loyal friend, says Bennett. “I know he is there and would do anything for me if I asked him.” Gates could not have been too heartbroken over his breakup with Bennett, however. Before long, he was seeing another woman, Ann Win- blad, a software venture capitalist with Hummer/Winblad in San Francisco.

What not many people realize is that in many ways, Bill Gates is something of a mama’s boy. When he socialized with customers, Gates often invited his mother along. Mary Gates called her son several times a day and even wrote letters to him, as well as cards, according to a former Microsoft executive. Gates used to keep his mother’s letters stacked on his desk. “I always thought it was weird,” the executive recalled, “because, gee, they had just talked.
...”

He found Mary Gates to be warm, nurturing, and very different from her son, who was structured and “not a warm guy.” “She worried about him and would talk to key managers about him.”

Mary Gates liked having her son close by her. When Microsoft moved to Bellevue in 1979, Gates had rented an apartment for several years. In 1983 his mother located a home for him in Laurelhurst, less than a mile from the Gates’ family home. One family acquaintance remembered Mary feeling that she had to take care of her son. For example, Gates’ parents and grandmother moved his things out of his apartment into the new house while he was out of town on a business trip. Bill took care of himself in his own world, but the world of needs and desires is one they took care of.

The house, a three-bedroom, $889,000 affair on the shores of Lake Washington, was Gates’ first home. Over the years, various articles on Gates described his home as “modest,” and it is, considering some of the more fashionable homes in the area. But it does have a 30-foot indoor swimming pool and a boathouse. From his backyard, Gates has a commanding view of Mount Rainier to the southeast and the University of Washington to the west. Curiously, it was Gates’ father who actually bought the house. The previous owner, Joe Diamond, had built a fortune as Seattle’s parking-lot czar. Diamond negotiated directly with the elder Gates over the property, and court records show that Bill Gates, Jr., is still legal owner and taxpayer on the property, although the reason for this is not clear. Neither son nor father will comment.

Early visitors to Chairman Bill’s home were surprised to find that he not only made do without a television but also with little living room furniture. A computer was set up in the den, and it was there that Gates spent most his time when he was home, which was not that often. A giant map of the world was pasted on the ceiling of his study, so he could look up at the map whenever he took a break from the computer. The mind has a lot of “unused bandwidth,” Gates explained, that can be filled in while the eyes are just wandering around. He put up a map of Africa on the wall of his garage so his eyes could sweep over it while getting in and out of his car.

Microsoft’s offices in the Northup building on the other side of Lake Washington were only about a ten-minute drive from Gates’ home. Typically, he would arrive at work mid-morning and not return home until well after midnight. He would then spend at least a couple of hours answering or writing E-Mail to his employees. His home computer was connected to computers at Microsoft. Mary Gates was also on the E-Mail system and could send messages to her son either at work or at home.

As Microsoft grew, Gates relied on E-mail more and more to communicate with his employees. And he encouraged them to communicate with him the same way. He tried to respond to each personal message. “Most people liked electronic mail,” said Ingrid Rasch, Microsoft’s human resources director in 1984. “I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Electronic mail was the hardest thing for me to give up when I left Microsoft [in 1987]. Everyone was connected to everyone else.
...”

But the system had a darker, “Big Brother” side to it as well. Beginning in 1984, Microsoft managers secretly began using the E-Mail system to determine which hourly employees were working on weekends, according to a knowledgeable management source at Microsoft. Whenever an employee logged into E-Mail, it left a trail of electronic footprints in the computers’ memory banks. This information was retrieved and then used by the company to determine employee bonuses. Bonuses were tied not to how effectively one worked, how much was accomplished, or on the importance of a specific project, but rather on how many hours of overtime an employee put in late at night or on the weekends. In time, word got out that Big Brother was watching, and some employees began logging into their E-Mail on weekends with a modem from home so it would appear they had come in. But Microsoft management found a way to detect this, too, according to the source.

Although the bonus system had its pluses, it also provoked hard feelings. Since most employees worked strange hours, and no one punched in or out on a time clock, it was difficult for management to know how much overtime a person worked. Many employees complained the system was not equitable.

E-Mail had another downside—an information explosion. Employees would sometimes have to spend the first two hours of their day answering what might be as many as 100 electronic messages. Each message was tagged in military time so it was clear what time it had been sent, and many of the messages were sent long after “quitting time.” “It was a big macho thing to send E-Mail late at night,” said a young woman who was hired in early 1984 as a technical writer for applications. “I’d send a message to my supervisor and look at my watch and say, ‘Oh yea! This is great! He will see that I was here late. . . .’ Not that you were afraid to go home, but it looked bad. Actually, you were so caught up in the work that you didn’t want to go home.”