Click here to read the book’s Appendix, "A compendium of Bill Gates and Microsoft jokes"

MY E-MAIL FROM BILL

Here’s the short e-mail I received from Gates (via Microsoft PR maven Pam Edstrom) after a 13-month quest to get him to answer a few questions for my book. It’s remarkable for the number of errors it contains despite its short length, and for its sanitized view of reality. For the full story, see "My Five Minutes with Bill Gates," published by Salon magazine.

From: Pam Edstrom

To: Gary Rivlin

Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 14:03:56 -0800

this is what bill said

le tme know if you need anything else

pam

In terms of Novell. In 1989 whend we thought about merging with Novell I believe Novell contacted us. At the time we had a great relationship with IBM. IBM was doing its own networking protocols that conflicted with Novell’s. IBM made it clear that they did not want us to endorse what Novell was doing because IBM thought it should own the definition of network protocols. This along with other factors meant I never spoke with anyone at Novell in 1989 when either Murray brought up the issue or Novell brought it up to him. I could also go into some depth about the technical work we were doing in Networking that we were excited about that was different than the Novell approach.

By 1991 IBM had a lot of employees who wanted to do their own operating system. Jim Cannavino had come in to eliminate our role. Also IBM decided to team up with Apple and create Taligent. Topview, AIX, the deal with NEXT and OS/2 EE showed a very different approach than IBM had had in the past. As we were following a lot of IBM’s priorities in OS/2 work the networking software had not gone made the progress we had wanted it to. Joint development with IBM was a painful process. Some of this is documented in Paul Caroll’s book BIG BLUES. We decided that maybe talking to Novell about teaming up would be a good thing. This had NO RELATIONSHIP to DRDOS except that we would have had to spin off DRDOS if Novell bought it. There is NO information of any kind that would have been interesting to us relationg to DRDOS. It is absurd for someone to suggest this.

Given the roll I played in running Microsoft and writing almost all of Microsoft BASIC it has been very important for me to emphasize how much the original vision was something we shared. The partnership was 60-40 because I dropped out of school to run Microsoft without any payment while Paul had his BP job at MITS and a number of other factors. We briefly amended it to 64-36 but this got reversed later back to the 60:40 ration when we brought Steve Ballmer in. Paul and I started Microsoft because of the vision we had and not because we ever thought it would become such a business success. Paul and I each feel like we owe each other everything for having the chance of a lifetime to do some amazing things which wouldn’t have happened without us coming together.

Appendix, "A compendium of Bill Gates and Microsoft jokes"

A press release posted by the Bogus News Network:

Redmond (BNN)—World leaders reacted with stunned silence as the Microsoft Corp. conducted an underground nuclear test at a secret facility in eastern Washington state. The device exploded at 9:22 a.m. PDT and was aimed to coincide with talks between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Microsoft is going to defend its right to market its products by any and all necessary means," said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. "Not that I’m anti-government, but there would be few tears shed in the computer industry if Washington were engulfed in a bath of nuclear fire."

In Washington, President Clinton announced that the U.S. government would boycott all Microsoft products indefinitely. Minutes later, the President reversed his decision. "We’ve tried sanctions since lunchtime and they don’t work," said the President.

Rumors suggest a second weapons development project is underway in California, headed by Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems. "They’re doing all of the development work in Java," said one source close to the project. The development of a delivery system is said to be holding up progress. "Write once, bomb anywhere is still a dream at the moment."

* * *

A post to an anti-Microsoft mailing list called anti_m$@enemy.com, from a woman calling herself "Ladydeath":

"I am facing a very serious problem. You see, I am a Vietnam-era deserter from the U.S. Marines. My mother peddles Nazi literature to Girl Scouts and my father, a former dentist, is in jail for thirty years for raping most of his patients while they were under anesthesia…

"My problem is this: I have just gotten engaged to the most beautiful, sweetest girl in the world…But I am worried my family will not make a good impression on hers. In your opinion, should I or shouldn’t I tell her about my cousin who works for Microsoft?"

* * *

Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates find themselves in heaven standing before God, who is sitting in a beautiful white thrown. And God asks Gore, "What do you believe in?"

"I believe that CFCs are killing the Earth and that until this is corrected, the ozone layer depletion and greenhouse effect imperils all of humanity."

And God says, "Okay, you can sit at my feet."

God then asks Clinton, "What do you believe in?"

"I believe that all people are equal and everyone should be able to live their lives as they see fit. I believe in empowerment to the people and freedom for all."

And God says, "Okay, you can also sit at my feet."

God then asks Bill Gates, "And what do you believe in?"

Bill Gates replies, "I believe you’re sitting in my chair."

* * *

Someone imagines the Microsoft God package. It includes a feature called Microsoft Missionary, which can be used to convert God "from competing products like Buddha or Allah." Said the director of Microsoft’s newly formed Religions division, "Microsoft God will make our Lord more accessible, and will add an easy, intuitive user interface to Him, making Him not only easier to find, but easier to communicate."

* * *

A post to another electronic mailing list (am-info@essential.org) home to more than its share of Microsoft critics: "If Bill Gates had a dime for ever time a Windows box crashed…Oh, wait a minute, he already does."

* * *

Contraceptive98

Microsoft Corporation has taken another step toward dominating every aspect of American life with the introduction of Contraception98, a suite of applications designed for users who engage in sex.

Microsoft has been a pioneer in peer-to-peer connectivity and plug and play. It believes these technologies will give it substantial leveral in penetrating the copulation enhancement market.

The product addresses two important user concerns: the need for virus protection and the need for a firewall to ensure the non-propagation of human beings…

While Contraceptive98 does not address non-traditional copulatory channels, future plug-ins are planned for next year. They will be known as BackDoor, AuraLee, TitElation, and JerkOff.

* * *

"Well, Bill, I’m really confused on this call," God says. "I’m not sure whether to send you to Heaven or Hell. After all, you’ve enormously helped society by putting a computer in almost every home, yet you also created that ghastly Window 95. I’m going to let you decide where you want to go."

"Well, what’s the difference between the two?"

"I’m willing to let you visit both places."

"Fine. Let’s try hell first?" Bill said.

So Bill went to Hell. It was a beautiful, clean, sandy beach with clear waters and lots of beautiful women running around, playing in the water, laughing, and frolicking about. The sun was shining, the temperature perfect.. Bill was very pleased. "This is great. If this is hell, I really want to see heaven."

"Fine," said God, and off they went. Heaven was a place high in the clouds, with angels drifting about, playing harps and singing. It was nice, but not as enticing as hell. "I think I’d prefer Hell," he told God.

"Fine," replied God, "as you desire."

So Bill Gates went to Hell.

Two weeks later, God decided to check on the late billionaire to see how he was doing in Hell. When he got there, he found Bill, shackled to a wall screaming amongst hot flames in dark caves, being burned and tortured by demons, with no one to help him out of his dilemma no matter how loud he screamed.

"ow’s everything going?" He asked Bill. Bill responded, his voice filled with anguish. "This is awful. This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago. I can’t believe this is happening. What happened to that other place, with the beaches and the beautiful woman playing in the water?"

"Oh," God said, "that was Hell 3.1—this is Hell 95."

* * *

Another post to the anti-m$ list:

Someone asks: you know Microsoft Word’s "Answer Wizard"? (And of course a few people grumble, or maybe they were boasting, that they wouldn’t know from the inner workings of Word.) That confounded talking Paper Clip that occasionally pops up uninvited and asks, with a fluttering of virtual eyebrows, if perhaps you need help? Well, turns out if you ask Mr. Paper Clip, "How can one go to hell?," it answers, "Connect to Microsoft’s technical resources."

Someone else posts this tale picked up from a European newspaper: A 67-year old man dies in the Netherlands, and this snippet from his obit is posted on the list, "While busy installing Windows 98, our beloved husband, father, and father-in-law has passed away…" And of course the comments flood in: "Maybe they should start putting warning labels on the boxes: ‘Not for people over 50 with bad hearts.’" And people ask, Can you imagine a more untimely and gruesome a death?

* * *

Another post to am-info@essential.org:

A rumor of the Beatles’ "Paul Is Dead" variety held that Microsoft had encrypted a secret message in its NT 4.0 CD—play it backwards and you could hear it clear as a bell. So Mike Harris, a list regular and computer consultant, wrote a quickie program instructing a machine to spin the CD backwards. "Just as I expected, nothing but white noise," he reported to the group. But he got the better of the tale with this line: "Then I tried playing it forward but that didn't work either. It crashed three times, destroyed my three other Primary partitions, reclaimed the entire hard disk for itself, formatted the whole thing and then crashed again. It took System Commander along with it too. Fortunately I had a backup. ;o)"

* * *

* * *

A Dave Barry column began, "If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I’d give the same answer most people would: nuclear war, global warming, and Windows." After thanking goodness that at least the feds had decided to protect him from one of the three when suing Microsoft, he cracks a column’s worth of jokes about a software giant whose motto is, "We Have Worked Out All The Buggs!"

--Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, 7-19-99

"The reader emerges from the book with a full view of Gates the man—albeit a smidgen biased by Rivlin’s unrelenting interest in Gates’s physical features, e.g., his hair (‘dirty-blond and cowlicked,’ ‘bowl cut, his bangs looking as if he had taken a pair of scissors to them himself’) and his voice (‘a cross between Julia Child and Barney Fife’")."

----Sarah Finnie Cabot, Barnesandnoble.com

"In Mr. Rivlin’s portrait, the founder of Microsoft is hard-working, tenacious and decisive. He is also a foul-mouthed and ill-mannered bully, a momma’s boy, a compulsive fidget, a person without a scrap of common decency….[an] intriguing book."

-- by James Buchan, New York Observer

"Rivlin's notion--to understand Gates through his many adversaries--may offer the most telling insights yet into the reasons he's so successful, perhaps the best insight into Gates that we're ever going to get."

-Jon Katz, Slashdot.org

"Throughout the book, Gates comes off as a backstabber, a graceless social misfit, and an unfeeling corporate generalissimo who cares for nothing outside the utilitary worlds of technology and commerce."

-Mark Ribbing, The Baltimore Sun

"If you want to understand Gates better, or to read a cogent analysis of why he provokes such passionate dislike in people he competes with, read this book."

-Paul E. Schindler, Jr., Byte.com