Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (31 page)

The
Wall Street Journal
people figured Gates would be thrilled to have his picture taken for a national ad campaign. In fact, Gates hated having his picture taken. “He thought it was a waste of time and he was just sort of obliging them because someone had said it would be good for Microsoft,” the Microsoft manager said.

On the day of the shoot, Gates was wearing a green sweater with the Microsoft logo. He had been told specifically to wear something casual for the photo session, which was to be done in his office. While his office was being set up, Gates left, telling one of his employees that he couldn’t stand to see so many people standing around with so little to do with their time. An hour or so later, when everything had been properly arranged, Gates was brought back in. He got into position and held up the newspaper as directed. But there was a very visible hole under the armpit of his sweater. Rather than telling Gates he had a hole in his sweater, the
Wall Street Journal
people said the shot wasn’t going to work from that angle and they needed him to hold up the paper with the other hand. They explained that it would take a few minutes to rearrange the lighting.

“By this time, Bill was very
,
very irritated. But he came back in and held up the paper with his other arm, and lo and behold there was an even bigger hole in his sweater under that armpit. So they said, ‘Bill, Bill, look, this sweater is just too dark on the film.’ ” the shot had to be done without the sweater, Gates was told. So he took off the sweater and held up the paper and there was a huge, ugly stain under the armpit of his shirt.

“The people from the paper told Bill there was something wrong with the camera and they needed to have a meeting outside. By this time, Bill was really hacked off,” recalled the Microsoft manager. “Everybody went out into the hallway and this one woman told me, ‘We just had to get some ventilation in that office! It smells so bad I thought I was going to be sick/ Well, for us that was pretty much par for the course.”

Having done something like this once before, the handler from Microsoft went down the hall to find someone about the same size as Gates. The employee was brought back to Gates’ office, and Gates was told the color of his shirt was wrong. He and the employee were asked to exchange shirts. Finally, everything was set, and the shooting commenced. But after only a couple of shots Gates had had enough, and he angrily told everyone in the room to clear out. “Why don’t you people go make a better living and leave me to make mine,” he said. The session was over.

The professional hair stylist later explained to the Microsoft people that an airbrush would be used on the photo to get rid of the grease streaks in Gates’ hair.

This public relations fiasco was described as “typical” of Gates. But also typically, everyone was afraid to say anything that would offend the Microsoft chairman.

The growing number of older and more experienced executives who had been hired during 1983 and 1984 to help manage Microsoft’s tremendous growth had one noticeable trait in common—they were all males. Although there were a few female programmers, for the most part women working at Microsoft were relegated to nontechnical positions. It was the men who called the corporate shots at Microsoft.

In February of 1985, however, the company seemed to reverse that trend when it hired its first two female executives, Ida Cole and Jean Richardson. Both had considerable management experience. Cole, 37, had spent four years with Apple, most recently as director of new product development; she had previously been director of applications software and manager of applications software development at Apple. Richardson, 48, also came from Apple and had built the company’s communications division from scratch.

Cole was recruited as part of Microsoft’s reorganization of applications and operating systems into separate divisions. Steve Ballmer was made a vice-president in charge of operating systems, which included the Windows project. Cole was named a vice-president in charge of applications. Jean Richardson was made vice-president of corporate communications. (Rowland Hanson, the previous head, had recently left the company.)

Had Gates developed an enlightened attitude regarding women? Not according to one well-placed source at Microsoft who was involved in the hiring process. In essence, both were hired as a result of Microsoft’s attempt to win a lucrative government contract to provide the Air Force with computer software. The company had been told it did not have enough women in top management roles to qualify for the contract under government affirmative action guidelines. (Microsoft had hired a consultant in Washington, D.C., just to stay on top of government contracts for computer-related products.)

Gates and several of his managers would discuss from time to time whether to hire a man or a women for a particular job, according to the source. “They would say, ‘Well, let’s hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other ‘crap’ work to do because they are women.’ That’s directly out of Bill’s mouth. ... I thought it was surprising that he wasn’t more sensitive to the issue. His parents were pillars of the community.”

On paper, Ida Cole seemed the perfect choice to head Microsoft’s new applications division. She knew how to program, and she had experience managing large groups of people from her days at Apple. She even understood the marketing side— her resume included a stint as chief marketer for the Apple II.

Gates had met Cole in 1983 at the wedding of Jeff Raikes, who had previously worked with Cole at Apple. She and Gates continued to run into each other at industry functions and seemed to get along together.

Less than a month after her arrival at Microsoft, Cole was asked to speak at Microsoft’s companyw
i
de meeting. Four years earlier, Charles Simonyi had galvanized nearly 100 employees with his famous revenue bomb speech at the Ramada Inn. In early 1985, nearly 900 employees crowded into a Bellevue theater to cheer glowing reports about the company’s future. These gatherings had grown into fairly elaborate productions. Gifts were handed out to employees, ranging over the last few years from name-brand tennis shoes, to director’s chairs. Employees were free to ask questions of Gates and the other officers of the company.

Cole wasn’t sure what to talk to the Microsoft troops about, having only been with Microsoft for a few weeks. After a few general comments, she outwardly thanked people for doing such a great job, for working overtime and putting out so many good products.

“I talked to them about how much I appreciated the warm welcome I had been given, and that I was looking forward to meeting all of them, and I was looking forward to a great career at Microsoft,” Cole said. “It was very personal, and again nobody had ever gotten personal with them before. They had Ballmer up there being the cheerleader, but it was so impersonal.”

Cole left the stage to great applause.

Some of the more experienced technical managers listening to her remarks were not sure what to make of it all. Praise was not something Microsoft employees were accustomed to hearing from their managers.

“It was very weird,” said a manager on the Windows development team. “It was this very mushy, person-to-person, I’m going to make it a better place, very non-technical, and very non-marketing. It was very touchy feely. And of course, here are all these guys and nobody had ever encouraged them to take an interest in each other personally, and here’s Ida talking about personal values and all this stuff. It was real obvious she was a square peg in a round hole. We had no idea why Bill would have chosen this person.
...”

Not long after the company meeting, Cole gave an employee two weeks of paternity leave so he could take care of his small children while his wife recuperated from delivering her third child. There was no company policy on paternity leave, and Gates told Cole the decision was “unwise.”

By September of 1985, Cole’s relationship with Gates was becoming strained. Cole, who had worked with another of the industry’s wunderkinds, Steve Jobs, had great admiration for Gates, but she had trouble dealing with his confrontational personality.

“Steve Jobs, who is probably the most charismatic person I’ve ever met, can’t hold a candle to Bill on substance,” she said. “Bill knows what he’s doing. He’s thought it out. He demands excellence in people. I don’t mind that because I do, too. But Bill’s whole modus operandi was railing at the Gods. Bill was constantly in this confrontational state, whether or not it made sense to be there. I’d just wait for him to get finished ranting and raving and when he got tired we would talk. He would on occasion send me just rabid E-Mail. I would write him back and say, ‘Look I didn’t come here to take this stuff.’ ”

At the beginning of September, Cole learned she needed major surgery. But because her division was due to begin shipping Excel by the end of the month, she postponed the surgery and instead finished a series of press tours and other tasks related to the product release. Three weeks after she finally had the surgery she returned to work—much too soon, she realized later—to finish off nearly 200 staff performance reviews that were due out by the end of October. On her third day back, Cole met with Gates to talk about firing Philip Florence, the Excel manager who had had a heart attack. He had since returned to work but wasn’t getting the job done. In the middle of the discussion, Gates suddenly began shouting at Cole that she was not up to speed about a product scheduling change.

“I was hurting from surgery. ... I had a fairly life threatening situation. They thought I had ovarian cancer when they did the surgery. I had a benign mass removed. It was really scary and not a great thing to go through. I didn’t really want to have a hysterectomy. I was 37 at the time. So Bill’s screaming at me [made me decide] ‘I’m not doing it anymore.’ ”

Cole got up and went in to talk with Jon Shirley, whom she told ‘ ‘I can’t come in to work everyday thinking it’s never going to get any better than this.”

Eventually, Cole was moved into the International Division, far removed from the day-to-day meetings and tirades with Gates. Gates took over as head of applications; it would be two years before he found a replacement.

No Microsoft manager, man or woman, escaped the emotional tirades and verbal abuse of Bill Gates, but none took more of it than those working on Windows.

The project, which had been announced with such fanfare, had slipped so far behind schedule that Gates had reorganized the company and put Steve Ballmer in charge of the development team. If possible, Ballmer was throwing even more tantrums than Gates.

The first weeks after the announcement of Windows in New York in November 1983 had been hectic. There was a tremendous sense of urgency to the project. The first meetings, however, had more to do with explaining the project in more detail to the press than actually designing code.

“It was sort of ironic,” Scott MacGregor, the manager hired away from Xerox to guide the development of Windows, said, “because here we were talking to the press about what was going to be in the first version of Windows and we hadn’t even designed the product yet.”

Following the company’s New York announcement, Windows was demonstrated a second time a couple weeks later at the fall Comdex in Las Vegas. Gates, the keynote speaker for the show, devoted little of his valuable time preparing. He worked on his remarks less than an hour, showed up only ten minutes before he was to go on stage, and appeared disheveled in his rumpled suit. His father ran the slide projector for the presentation.

Having promised a software system to two dozen computer manufacturers as well as hundreds of application publishers, Gates had raised enormous expectations. But within Microsoft, there were doubters.

“I don’t think Bill understood the magnitude of doing a project such as Windows,” MacGregor said later, reflecting back on it all. “All the projects Bill had ever worked on could be done in a week or a weekend by one or two different people. That’s a very different kind of project than one which takes multiple people more than a year to do. There were 30 some odd people in the Windows group by the time we were fully staffed, which for Microsoft was the largest project they’d ever done.”

The technical challenges were formidable. As became evident later, to operate most efficiently the program required more memory than available on the most widely used IBM-compatible computers of the day. Those machines, based on Intel’s 8088 chip, had only 256K of memory. The goal for Windows was to create a system that could accommodate very different applications and allow them to run at the same time, with just the click of a mouse. But most application programs written at the time were “incredibly rude,” according to MacGregor. “When they’d start up, they’d grab as much memory as they could lock down, on the assumption that they were the only important thing running. So typically, the conversation something like Lotus 1-2-3 would have with the operating system when it started up would be, ‘How much memory do you have?’

And the system would say, ‘This much,’ and Lotus would say, ‘Fine I’ll take that’.”

Windows, then, had to make better use of the limited memory capacity of the computers available on the commercial market. One of the major challenges was writing code containing very advanced features that could run fast on the 8088 chip and be crowded into so little available memory. Programmers on the Windows team had to find a way to provide the application only some of the memory it thought it needed to run, at precisely the time it needed it.

During the first several months of the project, there was little to suggest such an undertaking was impossible. In fact, nothing seemed impossible. The atmosphere was electric.

“It was exhilarating, exciting, fun. We were competing with the world and winning,” said one of the programmers. “Other companies already had announced windowing products, but we were able to persuade the OEMs to wait for ours. There was a great deal of interest in the press, a great deal of excitement around Windows. That first year or so was really exciting.”

But there were difficult times just ahead. The Windows project would soon reveal some serious organizational and managerial problems within the company.
Fortune
magazine, in an article on Microsoft that ran at the end of January 1984, made what would turn out to be a very accurate assessment of the company’s inexperienced management structure:

“. . . a lot is riding on Windows. If it fails to become an industry standard, Microsoft may not get another chance to take the consumer market by storm. Momentum is an ephemeral quality in any business, and in an industry evolving as fast as microcomputer software, it can be lost in the blink of an eye. . . . Like other fast-growing companies racing to seize transient opportunities, Microsoft has devoted little time to develop the kind of management depth that will be needed to turn temporary victories into long-term dominance.”

The arrival of MacGregor and Nikora in late 1983 had represented an attempt to bring more experienced management into the organization. Microsoft had to have more officers and sergeants to keep the soldiers marching in semi-orderly columns. At that time, there was little corporate hierarchy at Microsoft. Individual product development teams were small, usually no more than three people. Simonyi was in charge of applications development. MacGregor headed the brand new Interactive Systems Group, with a staff of three. There was a development group for languages and one for operating systems. Each group had its own guru, its resident genius. With Paul Allen gone, software creation was very much under the direct, day- to-day control of Gates.