Free Bill Gates by Jonathan Gatlin Page B

Gates may get angry, and he sometimes says harsh things about people who attack him, but he doesn’t hold the kind of grudge that prevents him from making a subsequent deal if he sees it as good for Microsoft.
    As stated before, Gates sometimes had a combative relationship with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and Allen can still be critical at times, but that does not interfere with their friendship of a quarter century. Gates is a combative person. It’s worth recalling that when he was sent to apsychologist as a teenager, the therapist ended up telling his mother that she would never win a battle with him and had to take another approach. In the long run, Gates became extremely close to her. It should also be kept in mind that when Gates shouts “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard” in meetings with his employees, it is taken as a badge of honor. It means Bill Gates is paying attention. That kind of person may sometimes be difficult to deal with, but the business world is full of people who just smile at you and then stab you in the back when you least expect it. Many people would rather deal with Bill Gates’s frontal assaults.
     
     
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    W ell, I think, throughout our history, we wake up every day knowing that in the business of technology you have to think about what you are missing. What is the research or customer feedback that you should be paying more attention to? And how do you keep that pace of innovation very, very high? How do you make sure that you are hiring the very best people? And that kind of focus has helped drive us forward through all the milestones the company has had.
    —B ILL G ATES , to Charlie Rose, 1996
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    One of those who knows all about both the difficulties and rewards of dealing with Bill Gates is Andy Grove, the head of the chip manufacturer Intel. Grove, nineteen years older than Gates, was born in Hungary, where he survived the Nazi horrors of a World War II childhood only to find himself living under the yoke of Stalinism. He was twenty when he escaped to the west after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, eventually getting a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He and Gates first met when Allen and Gates dropped by to introduce themselves in 1978, when Microsoft was still located in Albuquerque. Two years later, giant IBM hired Intel to provide the chips and Microsoft to create the software as they tried to play catch-up with Apple in the new field of personal computers.
    There were some rough patches between the two men early on. In a 1996 joint interview, they told Fortune about a dinner at Groves’s home that turned into a table-pounding shouting match. Groves recalled, “It was not a pleasant evening. I remember the caterer peeked into the room to see what all the ruckus was about. I was the only one who finished my salmon.” For a while after that Groves andGates had contact only through other representatives of their two companies. But they got past that period and began to meet on a regular basis, two or three times a year, as their companies became more and more entwined with one another on many developmental projects. In part, they were drawn together because IBM broke with both of them. IBM invested in Intel, but sold its last interest in the company in 1987; it had refused to invest in Microsoft the previous year. “As these things happened,” Grove said, “instead of being two junior partners of a senior partner, we became equal players without that senior partner being present.”
     
     
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    T he other day someone asked me, “Can’t Microsoft work with people so that they can be successful too?” That night I looked at a chart comparing Intel’s valuation with our valuation over the years. Although they vary somewhat, in both cases they went from a relatively small number to a relatively gigantic number. And I thought, “When have there ever been two companies with that kind of dependency both rising to that kind of success?” Even