A Blog About Making Culture
Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever
June 26, 2008
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.
On a day when everyone will be noting Gates' departure from day-to-day involvement in his work at Microsoft, it's worth noting the work he's done which will likely be seen as his greatest legacy.
The unofficial goal of Microsoft in its early years was to see a computer on every desk and in every home, presumably running Microsoft software. That sort of vision, put forth in a time when the conventional wisdom dictated that personal computers might disappear entirely, was astounding enough. But by the year 2000, just 25 years after its founding, Microsoft had achieved that improbable goal, at least in the developed world.
The story of the Gates Foundation is well-covered, but it's important to consider the context in which the Foundation was created. What would you do if you defined the most ambitious goal you could imagine, and then achieved it just 25 years later? And what if you had done so while still relatively young, not even fifty years old? That's the position Gates found himself in just a decade ago.
Most people, when faced with the realization of their greatest dreams, will respond at first with elation, and then later settle into melancholy or even depression. It can be overwhelming to think that there's nothing left to do. Instead, Gates upped the ante.
How high did he set his new goals? How about curing AIDS? Or ending the spread of malaria? What about improving life expectancy and quality of life for the poorest people in the world? After achieving a goal that seemed outlandish, it's clear that the only logical next step is to try to achieve a goal that seems nearly impossible. I have to point out that sense of thinking "Okay, we won -- what next?" is extremely unusual.
Plainly, I admire Bill Gates for this. I think there are few people who, instead of resting on their laurels, decide to stake their reputation and fortune on goals that are not only altruistic, but that conventional wisdom dictates may not be achievable in a single lifetime. There are many other ways to measure a man, and I'm not diminishing at all the fact that Microsoft as a corporation has made regrettable, unfortunate, and even illegal decisions during Bill Gates' tenure. But imagine if someone had defined an explicit goal of a "cure AIDS tax" for corporations, and then tried to get that enacted. The fact that, effectively, this has happened is remarkable.
And there are many who still want to think, despite the commitment of incredible resources and formidable talents to support the Gates Foundation's mission, that all of this philanthropic work is an attempt to simply generate good PR. But that simply doesn't follow the facts.
A Family Tradition
The truth is, Bill Gates doesn't just come from a family tradition of philanthropy: It's actually a significant part of the reason he got the single biggest opportunity of his professional career. You can see the family tradition today, with the founding chairman of the Gates Foundation being William Gates Sr., Bill's father. But you have to go back twenty years earlier, to Gates' mother Mary Maxwell Gates, to understand how philanthropic work opened doors for a fledgling Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Mary Maxwell Gates was deeply involved in the work of the United Way for many years before her passing in 1994, most notably as its first female chair. And one of the connections she made through that work back in 1980 was to John Opel, the chairman of IBM who was also a member of the United Way's executive committee.
It's become fairly clear in the years since that at least part of the reason IBM was willing to hire Microsoft to create an operating system for the initial release of the IBM PC was because of the introductions made through that connection. Taking a risk on an unproven small software company was a big leap to take, and it's one that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created.
It's fitting, then, that that opportunity is honored by having the founder of the company return all of his efforts and the vast majority of his wealth to an even more ambitious new vision for philanthropic work. So, congratulations to Bill Gates on his new job, and I hope this hack is even more successful than all the ones that he's done in the past.
Essential Links
A few recommendations for those who want to understand more about Bill Gates and his legacy:
- Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews published Gates: How Mirosoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry, back in 1992. I have been a big fan of this book since it came out. It was released before his period of greatest fame after Windows 95 launched, and perhaps as a result is more insightful than later efforts that tried to case Gates' entire life and career merely in the context of post-monopoly Microsoft. (I've shown the original, gloriously awful, cover photo above, but I think the paperback edition has less floppy-disk lunacy.)
- Fortune has a slideshow covering 30 years of Bill Gates' career, narrated by the man himself.
- Gates' 2003 rant about the shoddiness of the Windows user experience. Though this has prompted lots of "haw, haw, Windows sucks!" responses from geeks, I though it was interesting to look past the memo as merely a document of a typically dysfunctional large company. What struck me was a founder, nearly 30 years after starting the company, and decades after becoming wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, still obviously had both great passion and an enormous amount of technical knowledge.
- Those same themes of passion and technical competence are echoed in Joel Spolsky's essay about his first BillG review. Joel revisited this in a less-geeky version of the essay published in Inc. magazine.
Mayor Mike's Not Wearing His Pajamas
June 17, 2008
Today Newtalk, a site dedicated to substantive political discussions, hosted a conversation asking "Is it possible to fix government?". In his response to host Philip Howard, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg reveals that it's his first time responding to a conversation online:
Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this discussion, Philip. This is my first time participating in an online discussion, but I can assure you I am not at home wearing my pajamas. This is a great group, the kind of crowd I'd enjoy having over for dinner. So I'm just going to pretend that we're all sitting around a big table. I always learn something when I break bread with diverse groups of talented people, and I expect this conversation will be no different.
It's a little bit depressing that, more than ten years after blogging's taken off, even some of the most prominent politicians in the country still think bloggers are folks at home in their pajamas. But I will take it as a sign of at least a little progress that Newtalk is a Movable Type Community Solution site, so maybe indirectly my day job helped Mayor Mike make his first steps online.
Shuttle Chips Shipped — Cheap!
June 17, 2008
When the Space Shuttle Discovery glided home a few days ago, one of the electronic components which made it possible was the humble Intel 8086 processor.
Some of the chips powering support systems for the shuttle were purchased from a motley variety of suppliers including sellers on eBay. The New York Times told the story six years ago:
Civilian electronic markets now move so fast, and the shuttles are so old, that NASA and its contractors must scramble to find substitutes.
In the past, NASA procurement experts would go through old catalogs and call suppliers to try to find parts. Today, the hunt has become easier with Internet search engines and sites like eBay, which auctions nearly everything.
The 8086 processor just celebrated the 30th anniversary of its release. The space shuttle program just celebrated the 27th anniversary of the maiden shuttle launch.
Image of the 8088 processor, sibling to the 8086, courtesy of Intel's Microprocessor Hall of Fame.
Sippey, Superstar!
June 11, 2008
One of the most satisfying and fun things I've ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just about the biggest shows in town, and Sippey killed it on the toughest stage around.
As Michael graciously mentions in his own post, the demo wouldn't have been possible without our great developer (and demo god in his own right) Ray Marshall, along with Stephane Delbecque on our team who helped pull the entire effort together. You can watch the whole keynote on Apple's site, or just see a short clip of the TypePad demo for yourself:
But while I'm happy for Michael and the team on such a great demo, it also made me happy to see Michael onstage showing that his knowledge of blogging is second to none. Michael was, along with Peter, one of the people who really inspired me to start blogging, and he's probably under-recognized as a pioneer.
The list of ways he's influenced blogging and our industry are countless: Even the biggest gadget blogs today still make a huge deal out of featuring big-name tech CEOs when they get an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, but Michael interviewed Jeff Bezos for his seminal blog Stating the Obvious twelve years ago. I interviewed Michael for our series on the 10th anniversary of blogging last year, in which Michael talks about creating what was arguably the first link blog, Filtered for Purity, ten years ago. And of course, Mena mentioned Michael's joining Six Apart back in 2004 as our VP of Products. It's a role he's held ever since.
Add in his influence in efforts like advising the original Pyra team, which created Blogger, and it calls to mind the old chestnut about the Velvet Underground: Not everybody has read Michael Sippey's blog, but everyone who did, started a blog. (And at some point in recent history, it's possible that everyone who did started a blogging company.) Congrats to my friend Michael on putting that experience on display on the biggest stage around.
(And oh yeah, if you're the best in the world at what you do, you can work at Six Apart, too.)
Auto-Tune Goes Legit
June 6, 2008
Dedicated readers will recall me obsessing over and over-analyzing Auto-Tune in pop music earlier this year. It is, then, my pleasure to report that, thanks to the inestimable Sasha Frere-Jones, Auto-Tune analysis has gone legit. Behold, no less an authority than the New Yorker weighs in on Auto-Tune, especially T-Pain's (ab)use of it:
This, roughly, is what happens: Auto-Tune locates the pitch of a recorded vocal, and moves that recorded information to the nearest "correct" note in a scale, which is selected by the user. With the speed set to zero, unnaturally rapid corrections eliminate portamento, the musical term for the slide between two pitches. Portamento is a natural aspect of speaking and singing, central to making people sound like people. A nonmusical example of portamento would be "up-speak," a verbal tic common in some people under thirty. (Can you imagine the end of every sentence rising in pitch? Like a question?) Processed at zero speed, Auto-Tune turns the lolling curves of the human voice into a zigzag of right-angled steps. These steps may represent "perfect" pitches, but when sung pitches alternate too quickly the result sounds unnatural, a fluttering that is described by some engineers as "the gerbil" and by others as "robotic."
The gerbil.
Update: Now with audio! "Here Frere-Jones talks about how Auto-Tune has become a pop-music phenomenon, and demonstrates how it can transform the human voice, with the help of the music producer Tom Beaujour."
Tomboy Hacks
June 2, 2008
Trapani ventured that if the internet had been around when she was a teenager she might have felt less isolated: "I kind of wish I had the access to the internet that teenagers have today." She got a gleam in her eyes when she started to talk about what life could've been like as a wired youngster, being able to "express yourself online in a way that you'd be totally afraid to do in real life." She added, "I think I would have had a lot of alter egos online as a kid if I had access to the internet."
Cheryl Coward, on AfterEllen, writing about Gina Trapani.
On Exposure
June 1, 2008
I started blogging when I was 25, and it was a much smaller blogosphere back in 2000. I was able to make my mistakes in oversharing, overexposure, and unmitigated egotism in a smaller pond, without the entire New York media world and Jimmy Kimmel staring at me. In some ways, blogging and I grew up together, so by the time I was doing national television, I'd already had lots of media training ... a luxury Emily Gould didn't seem to have. I also developed some personal boundaries before I had thousands of daily readers, a luxury Emily Gould also didn't have.
Ariel Meadow Stallings, on Emily Gould's recent NY Times Magazine cover story.
I'm on the Internet!
May 19, 2008
Because my name and my big ole' head are sitting on top of this page, it's probably not making the self-indulgence any worse to collect a few links to some recent places I've popped up online:
- Gawker recommended my Twitter account as one to follow after Krucoff posted a list to Young Manhattanite based on Rex's suggestions. The strange thing to me is that Gawker is (still!) such a presence in media circles in NYC that 6,000 people would actually read such a thing. Of course, they're all just wannabees -- real Gawker credit comes from having been at the launch party five years ago. I'm just sayin'. (For more, similarly inane insights, add me on Twitter!)
- I helped Charlene Li (a.k.a. The Best Tech Industry Analyst) save $8.33 by offering up my testimonial about the Clear card. That's enough to pay for a subscription to dashes.com for more than a year!
- Mat Honan wrote a piece in Wired about The Big Word Project, the
scamwebsite where people pay for words. My site shows up because it's the link for the word "purple", even though I didn't do it myself. I blame Mike. - CRN has a (really very good) look at what the technology industry wants from the Presidential candidates, with responses from the likes of Bill Gates and Paul Otellini. Inexplicably, I'm in there, too: "The No. 1 thing we want to see is elected officials use social networking tools online as a tool for governance and for leadership when in office, just as they do to get elected." Basically, I am tired of politicians treating web communities as an ATM for their campaigns, instead of seeing the web as an opportunity for fixing government.
- And last but certainly not least, "So What Do You Do, Anil Dash". It's a really long interview with me by the folks at Mediabistro, in advance of my presentation at the Mediabistro Circus event on Tuesday. If you know me, there's probably few surprises, but I was happy to get the chance to articulate a lot of points that I otherwise don't usually talk about explicitly. Most of all, I am really glad to help emphasize how vibrant the technology scene is here in New York City; My biggest goal in participating in these sorts of conferences here in New York is to show people that there's a lot more going on with tech here than people might realize if they're myopically focused on just Silicon Valley.
