Overdrive, page 12
“It really was a death march,” he said, “but what was fun about it was that we were doing something big. At one of the meetings, I told the guys that this was really a unique chance to create something that maybe their grandkids would recognize. I don’t know how true that was, but it rang, it really did ring with people that they were creating something very, very big, very, very exciting. In a lot of ways—and this is somewhat ironic—we were building a big mainframe. We ended up with a couple hundred servers over in the lab; and in some ways, it was just a giant mainframe that happened to be in separate boxes.”
But something for the grandkids was not to be. Little did they know that they were creating a product that would be obsolete before it was finished. Rob Glaser tried to tell them that, when he came over to make his Internet pitch in December, about a month after Siegelman had his aneurysm. Change your strategy, Glaser told the team leaders; the Internet has arrived, and you’d better get with it. No one was listening.
A month or so before he met with the Marvel team, Glaser had given his recommendations to Gates on Cablesoft, Microsoft’s proposed venture with Time Warner and Tele-Communications. By then, talks among the three companies had pretty much broken down. The two cable giants were concerned that Microsoft was making unreasonable demands, such as wanting to limit the use of software by other companies for set-top boxes. Microsoft had many problems with the proposal, too. For one, Time Warner was insisting on a joint venture partnership that gave it half ownership. Gates did not want to give away that kind of control.
Glaser made two rounds of recommendations to Gates. The first, in October, led to a resumption of the talks with TCI and Time Warner. “Bill decided he would either try and get the deal back on track, or not do it,” said Glaser. “Bill and John Malone met several more times in December. Then Bill asked me to review one more draft. It was different, but still had big issues that needed to be resolved, so I passed along a second recommendation for substantial changes, absent which I didn’t think Microsoft should proceed. I ended up recommending that Microsoft not proceed on it for a very specific set of reasons, and Microsoft ended up not proceeding on it.”
At Microsoft’s insistence, Glaser would not be more specific in an interview about his recommendations or what changes he thought Microsoft should make in the draft contract. “I can tell you,” he said, “that it was not clear to me that the cable companies were going to be the inheritors of the information highway, and I made my recommendations to Bill accordingly.”
What was clear to Glaser was that the Internet had produced a radical change in the computer industry. The last such change had occurred in the late 1970s, when the development of the personal computer triggered a revolution that gave rise to companies like Microsoft, and altered the fundamental power structure of the industry. Glaser believed the same thing was about to happen because of the Internet, and he was beating the drum loudly.
Even though Glaser was no longer working at Microsoft, he and Siegelman had talked several times since that day in mid-September when Gates had asked Glaser to evaluate Microsoft’s on-line service and how it fit with the Internet. Glaser was convinced the Internet was going to be the leading platform for distributing information in the future. And having become convinced of that, it was simply a matter of deciding what Microsoft should do.
In the pre-Internet world, each of the on-line services had its own architecture, its own way of browsing information, its own way of transmitting information, its own infrastructure of servers and clients. Other than through the most minimal form of interchange through e-mail gateways, nothing could connect to anything else. And that was precisely what Microsoft was buying into with its on-line service. The alternative was a standard architecture. But where would it come from? Did it already exist? Glaser believed it did, in the form of the Internet. And Microsoft needed to embrace and extend that architecture.
“I became convinced that Microsoft was building the last minicomputer,” said Glaser, “that the Microsoft Network was based on the notion that your competitors were the model— proprietary on-line services like America Online—and that the reality was that the Internet was going to be such a fundamental paradigm shill, or sea change, that you needed to think about your strategies fundamentally differently.”
Glaser was prepared to make some very radical proposals to Siegelman regarding Marvel. He was going to tell Siegelman that he had to totally change his strategy and build a nonproprietary on-line service that anyone could access through the Internet. But fate stepped in. About a week before the two men were to meet, Siegelman suffered the brain aneurysm. Glaser considered giving his recommendations directly to Gates, but he worried what that might do to the Marvel team while Siegelman was out. Instead, he requested a meeting of all the Marvel managers. He had decided to play schoolteacher, and give a slide-show presentation about the Internet in the conference room of the East Tech building.
“I did not want to randomize the team while Russ was out getting well,” said Glaser. “So I decided to basically teach his staff Internet 101.1 explained to them what the Internet was; that it was a fundamental architecture, a fundamental platform and they needed to design their system in light of it. I told them, ‘You guys need to get over to the Internet as soon as possible.’ But what I didn’t say was, ‘If you don’t do this, you’re going to fail.’ Their leader had just taken ill. I had the view that if I just basically educated them on the Internet, they ultimately would reach the right conclusion. Of course, at that point, they were planning to ship MSN with Chicago. But I got the sense that everybody basically bought into my recommendations for the long term. But they were all so busy on their short-term priorities that no one was willing to say, ‘Hey, the emperor has no clothes, we have to change strategy.’ ”
What some members of the Marvel management team remembered most about the meeting that December day with Glaser was that he had one hell of a time hooking up to the Internet with Mosaic. And they wondered what that coffeepot thing was all about. The coffeepot was just one of the many “cool” things on the World Wide Web that Glaser had wanted to show the Marvel team. In Hngland, someone had rigged a camera to take pictures of a coffeepot, and the live image was transmitted to a Web site. Glaser wanted to use Mosaic to connect to the Web site, but he kept losing his Internet connection, and eventually gave up.
Glaser might have hoped the Marvel team was buying into his vision of the Internet, at least for the long term, but he might as well have been shouting into the wind. “We were not thinking about the Internet at all,” said one Marvel manager. “At the time, our competition was Prodigy and CompuServe and America Online, and that’s what we were focused on, a proprietary on-line service. After that Internet talk, it was like, ‘Okay. Great. Now let’s all get back to work.’ There just wasn’t any sense at all at that point that the Internet was an alternative way of providing information.”
Lill, as technical manager of the project, was determined to keep things on track. A debate within the team about going in a new direction would mean that the deadline for shipping with Windows 95 would not be met. “My attitude was, ‘This is great, but we’ll worry about it later.’ My goal for the whole effort was not so much to come out with a glorious technology that was going to live on for 40 years. It was more to develop an organization that understood what it meant to build an online service and run it. We needed to get our foot in the door with a product that could ship with Windows and start getting significant users. My goal was just to learn and get a foot in the door. In my mind, it was, ‘Yeah, great. We’re going to rewrite this thing in two or three years anyway.’ It ended up being sooner than that. But the primary goal was just to get something out so we could start learning. And frankly, that is Microsoft’s forte: A competitor comes in and does something interesting, then we come in and basically clone it; do it marginally better and throw some marketing clout behind it, then relentlessly make it better over the years. That’s our strategy. And it has worked damn well.”
Siegelman returned to work just after Christmas. The surgeons had shaved his head before they operated, and his hair was just beginning to grow out, and his speech was slightly impaired. His doctors had told him to take it easy, but he didn’t. Other than taking time off for speech therapy, he worked as hard as anyone on the team. “The rate at which he recovered and how soon he jumped back into things was exceedingly courageous,” said Glaser. “This was a serious, life-threatening situation. What Russ did was just amazing.”
Even though he didn’t succeed in talking the Marvel team into changing its strategy, Glaser himself embraced the Internet. He formed his own company, called ProgressiveNetworks. Several of his Microsoft pals, as well as Mitch Kapor, became investors. One of its first products was RealAudio, which allowed Internet users to pluck sound off the World Wide Web and play it through a computer’s speakers immediately, without the long wait for data to download to the computer’s memory bank.
Although Glaser didn’t talk to Gates about his recommendations for Microsoft’s on-line project, he gave the material he had used for his slide-show presentation to Steve Sinofsky, Gates’s technical assistant.
“At the time,” said Glaser, “there were only a few people at Microsoft who were true Internet believers. Steve was one.” James Allard was another. Early in 1994, the two would play important roles in dragging the company, at times kicking and screaming, toward the Internet. It would be the beginning of a remarkable 180-degree change of direction for Microsoft, unprecedented in the history of American business. But change was imminent and not just for the company. Its still-boyish, 38-year-old leader was about to undergo a transformation of his own. Before the sun had set on the first day of the new year in 1994, the country’s richest bachelor would be a married man.
Bachler Tycoon Takes A Wife
Alone on a bluff high above the Pacific Ocean, the two old friends walked back and forth over the lush green golf course fairway, occasionally stopping near natural lava outcroppings to look at the cobalt-blue waters below.
Anticipating another glorious Hawaiian sunset, the cirrus-streaked sky to the west already had started to turn shades of gold and pink, nature’s signal that the wedding ceremony was about to begin. But there was still time for Bill Gates to spend his final moments as a bachelor walking and talking with his best man, Steve Ballmer.
Their friendship went back nearly two decades, to their days together at Harvard. Later, after Gates had dropped out of school in his sophomore year to found Microsoft with Paul Allen, he had called on Ballmer to become one of his most trusted advisers. It was to Ballmer that Gates had turned in 1984 to lead what would become a death march to develop Microsoft’s first Windows program after it fell far behind schedule and threatened to sink the company. Now, here they were 10 years later, on the first day of the new year, with the sun about to set into the Pacific and Gates about to be married.
Gates had long felt the pressure to marry; he had watched as other Microsoft executives, many of whom he had known practically since they were fresh out of college, settle down into family life. Microsoft had even been sued by a couple who claimed that the company’s relentless demands on its employees amounted to discrimination against married people. Even Ballmer, as committed to the cause as Gates, had exchanged vows with a Microsoft consultant a couple of years earlier and now had a son. Finally, Chairman Bill, at age 38, was about to tie the knot.
After about 15 minutes together on the bluff, Gates and Ballmer got into a golf cart and drove several hundred yards to where the wedding guests were seated on the tee box of the twelfth hole of the golf course at the Manele Bay Hotel on the tiny Hawaiian island of Lanai. Gates, wearing a white dinner jacket and black trousers, walked to a white wooden lectern that had been positioned off to the side in front of the 130 seated guests, who included four other billionaires. The lectern was to be used by Father William Sullivan, an old Gates family friend who was to officiate at the wedding. Ballmer, wearing a black tuxedo, stood near Gates. Gates’s parents were seated in the first row. Mary Gates, fatally ill with cancer, had summoned all her strength to be there. Moments after Gates took his place, the wedding guests who had been seated in white chairs facing the ocean stood and turned around. The bride was coming.
Melinda French, dressed in a traditional white gown, walked down the aisle through the gathering of guests on the arm of her father and stood next to the man she was about to marry. The guests sat down. Five bridesmaids, dressed in pink, stood in attendance. The wedding ceremony began. It was 5:25 p.m., Hawaiian time. Fifteen minutes later it was over. Gates and his bride kissed. The sun had set, leaving a golden pink glow across the evening sky. America’s richest bachelor was a married man.
It was a clay that many of Microsoft’s rivals had long waited for as they speculated how a change in marital status would affect Gates’s first love—Microsoft. Perhaps marriage and a nursery full of children would slow down the workaholic Gates, distract his focus from business, and at last give them a competitive edge. Few in the industry, though, had actually believed Gates would ever marry.
His life as a bachelor had been the subject of much media humor. Syndicated cartoonist Berkeley Breathed modeled his comic strip antihero Bachelor Tycoon after Gates. Appearing in more than 400 newspapers across America, Bachelor Tycoon, the founder of Micro-Squish Inc., has bad skin, bad clothes, thick glasses, and a microchip tattooed on his stomach. The nerdy character looks a lot like Gates. In one strip, Bachelor Tycoon, the “richest guy on the planet,” has a hard time getting a date until he offers to buy Norway for the girl. But “no kissing,” she tells Bachelor Tycoon.
Borrowing from a standard routine of late-night TV talk show host and funnyman David Letterman, NewMedia magazine had listed 10 reasons why a woman would want to marry Gates, and 10 reasons why one wouldn’t. The 10 reasons to marry Gates: Money; he works late at the office; money; necking in the Porsche; money; career advancement; money; a household of gadgets; money; Steve Jobs is taken. The 10 reasons not to marry him: Too much rain in Seattle; those prebed DOS quizzes; having to address him as Sir William; the Porsche is grounded; no college degree; premarital agreement will take too long to read; he works late at the office; legal bills from the inevitable lawsuits; wedding vows in BASIC; Pee Wee Herman is still available.
During his two years at Harvard before he dropped out to run Microsoft, Gates rarely dated. But he did like to frequent Boston’s notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints, and prostitutes. His first serious girlfriend was Jill Bennett, a tall blonde who sold computer equipment in Seattle. They met in the early 1980s. Bennett found a sensitive side in Gates.
“Although he hides it well with his hard-core exterior, and certainly will not admit it, Bill’s feelings get hurt easily,” she recalled.
Gates and Bennett broke up in the mid-1980s, in part because Gates could not make time for the relationship.
“In the end,” said Bennett, “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.”
Melinda French is nine years younger than Gates. They met at a company function soon after she went to work for Microsoft in 1987. At the time, he was dating Ann Winblad since his breakup with Bennett. Like Gates, Winblad was a company industry junkie. A former college cheerleader, the daughter of a Minnesota high-school football coach, Winblad had founded a Minneapolis software company for $500 and sold it several years later for $15.5 million. But she was nearly 10 years older than Gates and wanted to marry and have children. Gates was not yet ready to settle down with one woman. They broke up in December 1987, at the wedding of Gates’s sister, Kristi. Winblad remained one of Gates’s closest friends, however, and he kept her picture in his office even after their romance ended. Gates and Winblad also continued to see each other as vacation buddies. Their week-long spring breaks together had become something of a ritual, one they did not want to stop even if they were no longer romantically involved. They liked to assign motifs to these times together. On one vacation trip, they each read as many physics books as they could and listened to tapes of noted physicist Richard Feynman lecturing at Cornell.
Gates and Winblad had such a special friendship that he sought her approval before he married French. “When I was off on my own thinking about marrying Melinda,” Gates would later tell Time magazine, “1 called Ann and asked her approval.”
And before French and Gates married, French gave her approval for him to continue to take a week’s vacation with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. “We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,” Gates told Time. Or as Winblad put it: “We can share our thoughts about the world and ourselves.”
Whether such an arrangement, even if platonic, bothers French is not known. She has never spoken publicly about her personal life with Gates.
At first glance, it might have seemed that Gates and French had little in common. She was an avid runner and hiker who also enjoyed the theater. Gates had never exhibited interest in any activity that smacked of drudgery. In contrast to his “nerdy” dress and manners, she was poised and gracious and looked like the girl next door. She was also smart, well-read, and extremely driven, just like Gates. They hit it off.
Though Gates began dating French in 1988, he continued to play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business, when he would frequently hit on female journalists who covered Microsoft and the company industry. His womanizing was well known, although not well reported, because Gates and Microsoft spoon-fed stories to industry writers for such papers as the New York Times, and none of them wanted the flow of information to stop. They also didn’t report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft’s boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates would visit one of Seattle’s all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool.
