Quote:
Originally posted by neewwman
This is a pretty uninformed post.
-- Bill Gates didn't "write" DOS, he and Paul Allen licensed it from someone else.
-- IBM didn't "back out" -- their pc's ran on DOS.
-- Allen didn't "back Gates financially," the two of them started as tech guys who created a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair 8080 which was the first microcomputer.
-- I've never heard anyone refer to Bill Gates as a "figurehead." The general consensus is he's brilliant. You don't become the richest man in the world from being "lucky."
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I never said Bill Gates wrote DOS. I said he was hired by IBM to write it. Whoever actually wrote the damn thing is irrelevant.
IBM did back out initially. They told Bill Gates it wasn't exactly what they were looking for. They backpeddled later on, but only after signing off all interest in DOS. This is why I say he's lucky. He can be brilliant, but he only got rich because DOS was huge and IBM released their interest in it initially.
Whatever Paul Allen did before Microsoft, he was the one with the money and friends that made it possible for them to found Microsoft.
Personally, I think Bill Gates isn't as smart as people think he is. He got lucky in that he sat on all his Microsoft stock from the beginning until now. That's a huge risk that is usually only taken by people uninformed of how the stock market works. The fact that his company has grown steadily since inception has very little to do with his intelligence.