Gates (Premium)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has weighed in on the antitrust scrutiny facing Big Tech. His take: They all “deserve rude, unfair, and tough questions.” He’s right.

Unfortunately, Gates’s comments come via a somewhat insipid podcast called Armchair Expert. In the latest episode, the hosts pepper Gates with important questions related to his favorite color, his favorite movie, the musician Prince, Diet Coke, and other trivialities. But if you can get through the meandering 90 minutes—I did so only with great difficulty—Gates is finally able to weigh in on some more relevant topics in personal computing today.

I won’t make you listen to it. Instead, here’s a rundown of what he said about personal computing.

Big Tech

The conversation finally turns to Big Tech about halfway through the podcast, but I’ve moved this to the top because it’s so timely.

“Anything that dramatically changes society is going to be used for bad things,” Gates says when asked about social media. “Henry Ford used to say, ‘yeah, [our cars are] running over a few people … is this good? … It’s tricky. For car safety, the U.S. government had to figure out seatbelts … they really regulated [that business] … There will be some things about how these tools are used politically. Should you be able to do microtargeting [of ads, like Google and Facebook do]? I don’t think so.”

With regards to the recent U.S. congressional committee hearings with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the host criticizes a representative of an inefficient organization (the government) criticizing those who run highly efficient organizations. Jeff Bezos, he claims, could have solved COVID in two weeks.

As someone with experience in both Big Tech and vaccinations, Gates disagreed strongly.

“If you’re as successful as I am, or as any of those people you are, you deserve rude, unfair, tough questions,” Gates responded. “The government deserves to [take] shots at you. I testified in front of the Senate, and I attempted to do this sarcastic thing where they were being tough on me, and I was going to say, ‘Senator, Senator, I have discovered that 43 capitalists work at Microsoft, and it’s really awful, they’ve infested my company.’ Anyway, I was told by adults not to do that particular joke. But when you’ve got so much [market/usage] share, should you be able to have in-house products in that market? Should your logistics overwhelm everyone else? Or should you have to unbundle that? You know, what should Mark Zuckerberg have to do about these titillating things and even really bad things like attacks on his surface? These are hard questions.”

“Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they have done a phenomenal job. But that type of grilling comes with the super successful territory. It’s fine. Congress has to think, are the laws up to date with respect to these companies … these tech developments? The competition laws, how we do acquisitions law. That’s OK. The idea that [today’s Big Tech CEOs] get to hide out … they didn’t even have to fly there [because of the pandemic]. I had to fly there. And I had competitors sitting next to me who were being tough [on] me. But I did not begrudge the fact that it’s part of the process.”

Finally, Gates admitted that ignoring Washington and not hiring lobbyists back in the day was “naïve on [his] part.” The hosts don’t press forward on that bit, in fact, they move to discussing optimism, but it’s important to note that all of the Big Tech companies today, including Microsoft, are heavily invested in lobbying Washington on their behalf.

Steve Jobs

Gates was asked about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011 and has a complicated legacy of his own, and whether it was hard to reconcile the darker interpersonal moments.

“I certainly wasn’t a sweetheart when I ran Microsoft,” he admits. “If you push yourself super-super-hard … you definitely project that onto other people, especially when you’re trying to move at full speed. In the business I was in, every day counted, we had to see what we were doing wrong. And so we said, this is not for everyone, to sit here and work these hours and be … tough on each other. The reason you’re here is because you’re amazing, so don’t get confused when we’re being kind of tough. We’re a team, we’re in this together. And every once in a while, we were tougher than we needed to be. [But] I was not as tough as Steve [Jobs].”

Gates likened his behavior as the CEO of Microsoft, and Jobs’s behavior, to that of basketball star Michael Jordan, the subject of recent documentary, noting that, like Jordan, he and Jobs never asked anyone to do anything that they weren’t doing as well. “I never asked [others] to be as tough on their own mistakes as I was myself,” he said. “It doesn’t completely forgive it, but at least it shows where you’re coming from, that you’re projecting your own values and trying to get everybody to be hardcore like you are … Now that I’m older, I’m more subtle in terms of motivating people without having to push as hard,” he reflects.

“Jobs was a genius,” Gates said, “particularly when he came back to Apple … his ability to pick people, even for skillsets he didn’t have himself, what he did at Apple … was truly phenomenal … Apple was on its way to die … No one else could do what he did there. I couldn’t have done that.”

Evolution at Microsoft

Gates was asked about his ability to delegate at Microsoft and whether that was a challenge.

“At first I wrote all the code,” Gates said of his time at Microsoft. “Then I hired all the people who wrote the code and I looked at all the code. Eventually, there was code I didn’t look at [and] people I didn’t hire. And of course the average quality per person was going down. But [our] ability to have a big impact is going up. And the idea that a big company is imperfect in many ways, but it’s the way to get out to the entire world and bring in all these skills, most people don’t make that transition. And there are times where you go, my God, I just want to write all the code myself.”

Gates reflects that he used to complain to developers that he could have written the code they wrote over a weekend. And then realized over time that that was no longer the case. He had become a manager and leader over time, not a coder. “The individual contributor and the [person] orchestrating an organization, those aren’t often found together [e.g. are the same person] because there’s a certain contradiction.”

Rockefeller

Most of the interview doesn’t involve tech issues, and that makes sense, given that Gates has focused on philanthropy for many years. But another interesting tidbit, and it comes and goes by far too quickly because of the hosts’ stunning lack of historical context and inability to drive the conversation further, is Gates’s brief discussion of John D. Rockefeller.

As you may know, I’ve been harshly critical of Bill Gates’ career at Microsoft and how he drove the firm’s illegal business practices in the 1990s, resulting in the “lost decade” after the antitrust dramas in which the software giant ceded the industry to Amazon, Apple, Google, and others. But Gates, like Rockefeller, became a philanthropist in his later years and has done a lot of good. So it’s reasonable to wonder whether Gates modeled his turnaround after Rockefeller’s, given that they were both the richest and most powerful men in the world at their respective peaks.

You won’t find that out in this podcast. Gates speak of his admiration of Rockefeller while slyly, perhaps hypocritically, noting that his [Rockefeller’s] career was “controversial.” But the hosts never pick up on the obvious comparison, nor do they even discuss any of the controversies.

But at least we know that Gates’s favorite color is blue.