As Microsoft Turns 50, Four Employees Remember Its Early Days (seattletimes.com)
- Reference: 0176868543
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/31/018215/as-microsoft-turns-50-four-employees-remember-its-early-days
- Source link: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-turns-50-4-employees-recall-their-early-years/
That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell."
[1]What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days ?
> Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small; Gates was hands-on, and hard to please. "One of his favorite phrases was 'that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,'" Oki says. "He didn't use that on me, so I feel pretty good about that."
>
> Another, kinder phrase that pops to Oki's mind when discussing the international division he founded at Microsoft is "bringing home the bacon." An obsession with rapid revenue growth permeated Microsoft in those early days. Oki was about three weeks into the job as marketing manager when he presented a global expansion plan to Gates. "Had I done business internationally before? No," Oki said. "Do I speak a language other than English? No." But Gates gave Oki a $1 million budget to found the international division and sell Microsoft products overseas.
>
> He established subsidiaries in the most important markets at the time: Japan, United Kingdom, Germany and France. And, because he had a few bucks left over, Australia. "Of the initial subsidiaries we started, every single one of them was profitable in its first year," he says...
>
> Oki left Microsoft on March 1, 1992, 10 years to the day after he was hired.
Other memories shared by early Microsoft employees:
One recent graudate remembered her parents in Spokane saying "I think that's Mary and Bill Gates' son's company. If that kid is anything like those two, that is going to be a great company,'" She got her first job at Microsoft in 1992 — and 33 years later, she's a senior director at Microsoft Philanthropies.
The Times also interviewed one of Microsoft's first lawyers, who remembers that "The day the U.S. government sued Microsoft ... that was a tough day for me. It kind of turned my world upside down for about the next eight years."
Microsoft senior VP Brad Chase remembers negotiating with the Rolling Stones for the rights to their song "Start Me Up" for [2]the Windows 95 ad campaign . ("Chase is quick to dispel any rumor that Mick Jagger called up Bill Gates and got $12 million. But he won't say how much the company paid.")
But Chase does tell the Times that Bill Gates "used to say all of the time, 'We're going to bet the company on Windows.' That was a huge bet because Windows, frankly, was a lousy product in its early days."
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-turns-50-4-employees-recall-their-early-years/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdl1BjTG7c
Does it talk about the lives (Score:1)
it destroyed?
Why do we need this propaganda on /.?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should be more specific about what you mean, because your gist is not clear. In what ways did Microsoft destroy lives?
I'm not arguing that it didn't do so, I just don't know what you're talking about exactly, and I doubt others do either.
50 years of evil (Score:5, Informative)
The only time - briefly - when Microsoft was ever the good guys is when they coded early basics for early machines. Then Bill Gates [1]shat the bed [wikipedia.org] and it's been a terrible company ever since: they've been consistently technically incompetent, incredibly aggressive,hostile, monopolizing and always ready to do whatever it takes to earn money and principles be damned.
People usually get better with age. Not Microsoft. Fuck Microsoft. I hate them every bit as much now that they reinvented themselves as an invasive Big Data company as when they were an aggressive OS and software vendor.
As for Bill Gates, the sonofabitch has been working hard for years since he retired from being an evil CEO to clean up his image. But reality is, his foundation is just a tax avoidance vehicle and he's just as evil as he's ever been, But somehow people think he and Balmer are nice retired billionaires now. No they're not. Fuck Bill Gates too.
Nothing and nobody good ever came out of Microsoft.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
I know itâ(TM)s not cool here but⦠(Score:1)
The DOS-derived OSes were indeed terrible from the point of view of stability. It was almost impossible to be anything other than flaky and fragile building a multiprocess OS on that foundation.
But, windows 95 was an astounding marketing triumph. If you lived through it as I did, a kid who defined himself by esoteric knowledge of Apple ][ and 6502s and had built a disdain for how Gates & co. threw the established hacker norms aside to monetize their OS, you really wanted to hate MS. But in 1995 things c
I've often thought that (Score:2)
Without Microsoft, their predatory monopolistic practices, and the general dumbing down of what is now considered reasonable standards of software quality, the whole world would be about 30 years further on in terms of computer tech by now.
Windows ...was a lousy product in its early days (Score:1)
And got worse through the years.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn you beat me to it. Came here to say that
Re: (Score:2)
I supposed it depends on your definition of "worse."
Windows 3.0 had terrible performance. I mean, so bad that you couldn't use it at all to do things like delete a bunch of files. It would delete a file, refresh the whole screen, and then delete the next file.
Windows 3.1 still was limited to 8-character file names.
Windows 95 crashed all the time, as in BSODs. I mean, all the time.
Windows 98 was so leaky that you had to reboot it daily or it would run out of memory, even if you didn't do anything.
These days,
Re: Windows ...was a lousy product in its early da (Score:2)
There have been excellent version of Windows, but now we've hit a point that hardware is no longer outrunning software and Microsoft can no longer hide their flaws by just throwing new CPU's at them. The bloat is now overtaking X86's ability to mask inefficient programming.