Free Resolve and Fortitude : Microsoft's ''SECRET POWER BROKER'' breaks his silence by Joachim Kempin Page B

historic document residing in my office.
    Following the signature ceremony, we were required by custom to invite half the ministry to a formal reception, serving Western food. Afterward, a small core of the agency employees instrumental in concluding the deal enjoyed a more elaborate celebration. For the fancy dinner we had planned, all arrived in dark-blue Mao uniforms and throughout kept their caps—replete with a centered red star—on their heads. Our crew, in business suits, provided quite a contrast. Deviously they asked us to order rare high-proof Chinese liquor, 16 which arrived in tiny bottles. Every single one of our seven guests proposed a toast to me and me alone. Seven times I stood, seven times I tossed one back; I still don’t know how I survived the evening.
    When the jamboree ended, we got into our car and asked the driver to take us to the Great Wall of China. November was frigid in Beijing. Liquored up, we climbed the historic monument after waking a protesting guard and tipping him to let us pass. The stars twinkled on the firmament in a subzero night. The moon was nearly full and lit the impressive scenery. Here, as we tottered about on the Great Wall of China, the icy winds from the Mongolian steppes greeted us and cleared our heads sufficiently to propose a final victory toast with good old Bourbon. Finally!
    The agreement in place, we patiently sat back and waited for the royalties and quarterly reports to arrive. The money arrived on time for two years, but no MS-DOS unit was ever reported. We never challenged the arrangement and bit our tongues, never complaining about missing information. Two years and two million US dollars later, our agreement expired, and the Chinese government allowed licensing local OEMs directly. Patience and restraint had paid off!

GETTING OUT OF BONDAGE
    “Bring it on!”
    In late ’89, Jon Shirley announced his retirement while staying on the board for another ten years. As captain, he had steered our ship successfully through the rough seas of the last five years. Our finances were now rock solid despite the constant growing pains, market turmoil, and various nasty, competitive headwinds we’d experienced. The greatest disappointments during his reign were persistent and ongoing product delays. Unfortunately, they were mostly outside his influence. Bill had his most loyal knight, Steve Ballmer, running the OS division. My group suffered more than any other sales organization from its notorious failure to deliver products on time. The man in charge seemed to have earned the right to fail.
    In ’88 my group was proud of winning a big, breakthrough contract for our soon-to-be-launched LAN Manager product: developed with the goal of turning high-end PCs into small business servers. It fell into what analysts call the network operating system (NOS) category. Novell, a Utah-based company, led that category with a nicely evolved, mature, and stable product called NetWare, with Compaq being her largest OEM customer. I wanted a slice of Compaq’s NOS business, and so did our product manager, Rob Glaser, the eventual CEO of RealNetworks, then reporting to Steve. My best group manager, Richard Fade, seized the opportunity and teamed up with Rob, landing the business.
    Unknown to me, Steve did not have the OEM channel in his sight of aim to sell LAN-Manager. For him the enterprise sales reps were better suited to peddle our newest baby. When he heard about the Compaq deal, he came storming into my office to read me the riot act. The deal was done and the ink dry. I was shocked by Steve’s outrage and responded, matching his lack of restraint. He quickly discovered his yelling tirade did not intimidate me. I remained convinced the freshly struck deal with server-market leader Compaq had tremendous potential complementing his plan perfectly. Yet Steve adamantly insisted on undoing the arrangement. Where was his logic? I happened to have the bulky and heavy Compaq file folder