Bill Gates

Why we read him as an Architect

5 moments from his public record, and what each one shows of the Architect pattern.

• In January 1975, Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for a computer, the Altair 8800, that neither of them owned, testing it on an emulator they built themselves at Harvard. On 22 July 1975, they signed a deal to license it to the Altair's maker, MITS, as Microsoft's first product. He designed a piece of software meant to run on hardware he had never touched. [2]
• On 6 November 1980, Gates signed a deal with IBM to supply an operating system for its coming PC, and insisted on a clause that let Microsoft license the same system, later renamed MS-DOS, to any other computer maker as well. Within a year, Microsoft had licensed it to about seventy other companies. He designed the licensing structure, not just the product inside it, and that structure is what turned one IBM order into an entire industry standard. [3]
• On 26 May 1995, Gates sent Microsoft's executive staff and their direct reports a memo titled "The Internet Tidal Wave," describing the internet as "the most important single development" since the IBM personal computer and rating it "the highest level of importance" for every part of the business. He redirected the whole company's strategy in one internal document, months before most competitors moved. [4]
• Starting in the mid-1990s, Microsoft built its web browser, Internet Explorer, directly into Windows itself rather than selling it as a separate product beside it, so that every Windows PC shipped with a browser already part of the platform. It was an architecture decision: fold a new product category into the operating system's foundation rather than compete for it standalone. [5]
• In January 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO and took the new title of chief software architect, handing daily operations to Steve Ballmer so he could spend his time on the technology and platform direction of the company rather than running it. [7]

What made him so effective

Where his type’s weakness shows up

Every type has a known weakness. For the Architect it is this: can treat a finished design as finished work, when nothing has yet met a real user or a real load. Here is where that shows up in his record.

• The decision to build Internet Explorer into Windows brought the United States Department of Justice and twenty states to court. On 3 April 2000, the district court ruled that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly in PC operating systems and illegally tied Windows and Internet Explorer together, violating the Sherman Act. [5]
• Gates gave a deposition in the case on 27 August 1998. Businessweek reported he used "I don't recall" so often that "even the presiding judge had to chuckle," arguing over word definitions while prosecutors read back emails he had sent and received that contradicted him. [5]
• The district court's first remedy order, in June 2000, was to break Microsoft into two separate companies. An appeals court overturned the breakup in 2001, and Microsoft settled with the Department of Justice that November, agreeing to share programming interfaces with rivals and accept outside monitoring, with no breakup and no code changes required. [5]
• This is the architect's blind spot working exactly as the type predicts: Microsoft treated its bundled Windows and Internet Explorer as a finished, correct design, built and shipped it that way for years, and only found out it had not met a real test, a federal court applying antitrust law, after the design was already the default on hundreds of millions of PCs. [5]

What to copy

Three things he is on record actually doing, that you can start doing this week.

1. 1

   Negotiate to keep the right to resell or relicense your work elsewhere, not just to deliver it to the first customer paying you. Gates's non-exclusive MS-DOS clause is the reason Microsoft became a platform instead of an IBM supplier. [3]

2. 2

   When you can see a shift the rest of your industry has not priced in yet, write it down in one internal memo and send it to the specific people who need to act on it, the way Gates rated the internet the "highest level of importance" inside Microsoft in May 1995. [4]

3. 3

   Once your own daily execution starts competing with your ability to think about where the platform goes next, hand the operating job to someone whose strength is operations, and rename your own role to match what you are actually best at. Gates did this in 2000, becoming chief software architect while Ballmer ran the company. [7]

What not to copy

Sources

Every numbered claim on this page links to one of these.

1. [1] Bill Gates
2. [2] 50 years ago, Gates and Allen made the deal that launched Microsoft
3. [3] The clever clause that made Microsoft
4. [4] Bill Gates' Internet Tidal Wave - This Day in Tech History
5. [5] United States v. Microsoft Corp.
6. [6] The Genesis of a Tech Giant: Discovering Who Invented Microsoft
7. [7] Steve Ballmer named CEO