Glory days- Recalling the Bill Gates Era

[narangz]

How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days
By: Joel Spolsky

As Bill Gates retires, our columnist recalls what it was like to work for the world's most successful entrepreneur


When i graduated from college, in 1991, I started working for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) on the Excel team. My title was program manager. I was supposed to come up with a new programming system so users could automate Excel. I sat down to write a spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of detailed pages.

In those days at the company, we used to have these things called BillG reviews, at which Bill Gates personally went over every major new feature. At the time, he was already famous and on the cusp of being named the world's richest person. The day before my BillG review, I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office. It consumed almost a full ream of laser-printed paper.

Once the spec was printed and on its way, I picked at random one of the million little details of the spec that I still had to tackle: figuring out if Excel's internal date and time functions were compatible with BASIC, the programming language we were using on the project.

The next day -- June 30, 1992 -- we gathered in a conference room. In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management the company has today, I reported to Mike Conte, who reported to Chris Graham, who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About six layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors, with their eight layers of management.

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[iNFiNiTE]

^^ Can't access the link.

[The_Devil_Himself]

^^you and your net both suck?

[Pathik]

^^ Yea. Just like you.

[MetalheadGautham]

Originally Posted by Pathik

^^ Yea. Just like you.

pwned him

[Psychosocial]

well ya i wud surely miss him as he made the best gaming platform out there He wasnt mean and **** as ppl describe but ya Microsoft is evil as ppl say no open-source, no code modification , paying huge $$$$$$$$$$ so Mr.Bill can bcum world's reachest person was just all out of sum normal class consumers. I said that i liked Windows but JUST as a gaming platform otherwise Linux is way better than Windows

[iNFiNiTE]

@narangz: Good find.

Originally Posted by The_Devil_Himself

^^you and your net both suck?

IIRC while at IRC, my disconnections are far lesser than yours.

[chicha]

All the wannabe linux users and the real die hard linx users have started using pc's with windows thats where your interest started so its wrong to say windows sux (which to some extent does ) i too am not a big fan of microsoft but i do respect windows and i love bill gates he is my mentor i just adore him.