KEY POINTS:
You chose to end the non responsive program Internet Explorer. The program is not responding. "Please tell Microsoft about this problem."
News of Bill Gates' retirement this month caused me to reflect on what one, who for years was the world's richest man, has wrought.
Then I got the error message. I had typed into Google: "Bill Gates rocking back and forth". There was an enormous list including: "Bill Gates acts oddly as he is interrogated" and "Bill Gates Rain Man" (both related to a YouTube video of Bill being grilled by a lawyer during the browser wars anti-trust case).
Another search result was "Bill Gates' Management Style" - about how Bill would rock with his eyes closed when staff were giving a PowerPoint presentation and, at some point, inevitably say: "That's the dumbest idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Then there were the findings about Bill's upbringing: "When Trey (his nickname because he was actually Bill Gates III - named after his father and his grandfather) was a child, he enjoyed rocking back and forth as a means of comforting himself. To this day, Bill still has the habit of rocking in his chair when he is thinking about something."
Bill's retirement reminded me of his propensity to rock, because in 2000, I was fortunate enough to interview the great man. In truth it wasn't a real interview, more of an orchestrated stage show with four other journalists carefully selected from China, Mexico, the Netherlands and Britain by PR minders. We sat around a huge boardroom table at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, all poised to ask Bill, at the head of the table, our one, or maybe two, questions.
And that's when it happened. I'd asked about the United States District Court's ruling, at the time, to dismember the Microsoft empire because it abused its monopoly power and stifled high-tech innovation. Bill held himself in a hug and rocked back and forth throughout my questions. It was unnerving. The richest man in the world seemed upset and vulnerable. It was as though the line of inquiry attacked Bill's very core.
The most vigorous rocking came when I asked how not being able to integrate Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser into Windows would, as Bill had claimed, hurt customers. It's a matter now consigned to the annals of PC history.
But at the time it was serious. Netscape was king of the browsers and Microsoft was playing dirty. In essence it was a question of whether "you will have fries with that" (Windows plus Microsoft's browser) or "would you like fries with that?".
Bill said: "Well, understand that we add features to Windows all the time and Windows is made up of literally thousands of features." He argued that if the company wasn't allowed to integrate features, Windows would have to ship as 10,000-50,000 different products. Then he got to the nub: "Why is the PC industry so successful? It's because every year we've added new capabilities to Windows. Their [the court's] basic principle is no new features should be integrated in."
As I sat irritated by the error message on my screen, I wondered whether it was fair to regard them as a feature of Windows. Then I thought about all the error message I had received on my PCs over the last 20-something years - from Dos to Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. "Abort, Retry, Fail." "Bad Command or File Name." "Divide Overflow." So many errors, so often accompanied by that loveliest of Windows features, the Blue Screen of Death.
While contemplating the amount of time I've wasted over the years restarting my PC or an application, and remembering that visit to the Redmond campus, I realised Gates' true brilliance. Not just that someone who spoke a little like Kermit the Frog and rocked could command such a loyal following - the "Microserfs" I met there were true believers who knew they had changed the world and had the stock options to prove it.
Gates' real legacy is that he has convinced so many to buy so much unfinished product. This is indeed why the PC industry and Bill - adding features to Windows all the time - are so successful.
Bill and his rocking may appear to some as not normal.
But buying a product that is clearly broken and has been for more than a quarter of a century isn't the sanest thing to do either. Yet we keep the faith with this notorious work-in-progress and its error messages. Bill figured this out some 27 years ago - a product in permanent upgrade that people would have to keep buying. The man's a genius.
