Fiona Bruce (commentary)

On the Money Programme tonight; we have exclusive access to Bill Gates.

Fiona

Nice to meet you. Not just one of the richest people in the world but a man who’s changed the way we live and work.

Bill Gates

Our brilliance was to have a product that was explosively successful.

Fiona

Gates’ original dream was crazily ambitious.

Steve Ballmer

Bill said; Steve, you don’t get it. We’re going to put a computer on every desk and in every home. Come on! You’ve got to stick with me.

Fiona

Like most people I spend hours every day in front of the computer and for much of that time I’m one of Bill Gates’ customers because Microsoft provides so much of the software.

Sir Alan Sugar

He has taken over the world. End of story! Live with it!

Bill

Hey, this is software, we can do anything.

Fiona

But not according to the courts.

Fiona

Did you think they were right when they ruled that you’d behaved in this predatory, anti-competitive manner?

Bill

No, I didn’t think, I didn’t think that they were right in that but we did everything they asked us to.

Fiona

And in today’s Internet world Microsoft has powerful new rivals.

Charlene Li

They’ve been trying for years to compete against Google and they haven’t succeeded, in fact their market share is dropping.

Fiona

From next week Gates will be devoting himself to giving away his enormous pile of cash through the charitable foundation he runs with his wife Melinda and his father.

William Gates Snr

He said; well Dad, he said, I’ve just been thinking about it, Melinda and I are pretty sure that we’re going to over the next year, year and a half we’ll put twenty-four billion in.

Bill

This wealth, we’ve chosen not to pass it to our children or, you know, buy all sorts of mansions or whatever, we’re getting it back to society in the way that can have the most positive impact.

Fiona

As Bill Gates prepares to step down from Microsoft I’ll be finding out he built his extraordinary money making machine.

Fiona

After two years of negotiations with Microsoft...

Fiona

I’m here to see Bill Gates.

Fiona (commentary)

...my filming with Bill Gates has finally been scheduled.

Bill

Come on in.

Fiona

So this, is your office?

Bill

It is.

Fiona

Wow! So this is where it all happens.

Bill

Has for a long time.

Fiona (commentary)

That looks like a top of the range computer. But I had to ask.

Fiona

Does it ever crash like my computer at work does sometimes?

Bill

No, I, this is a super reliable system. If there’s anything I don’t like about the software I certainly send e-mail, you know...

Fiona

And you get it changed, I’m sure you do.

Bill

...like the guys work on Outlook, which was a fantastic piece of work but I’m always having ideas and just shoot mail off to them. No, I get to make suggestions and if I make them at the right time it could make, make a big difference.

Fiona (commentary)

I’ve been finding out about Bill Gates from his friends and his colleagues.

Fiona

And I’ve been talking to his critics, many of whom are damming about Microsoft’s ubiquitous software.

Mitch Kapor

There have been billions of wasted hours of people fiddling with their computers and pressing Control, Alt, Delete and armies of paid consultants who do nothing but go around and make computers work and that I really believe did not have to be as bad as that.

Fiona (commentary)

The first impression at company headquarters is that Gates exerts an extraordinary influence on Microsoft’s ninety thousand staff.

Steven Vanroekel

You can see a little piece of the culture of Bill, Bill’s work ethic and, and really the inner Bill inside all the employees you meet.

Chris Capossela

I used to have a job where I ran a relatively small business Microsoft project, which was a wonderful business for us and when Bill would spend a couple of hours on that business or do a speech on our behalf, you know, you’d get sort of six months of morale juice out of that for the entire, you know, one hundred people working on the project business.

Fiona

I’ve talked to a lot of people in, in, in many companies; I’ve never, ever come across a figure who is talked about as Bill is as a kind of revered, almost mythical stroke messianic figure.

Chris Capossela

Yeah, I mean it, it’s true, I mean the things that the, that Bill has done are just legendary.

It will be released in May.

Bill

Right, but I’m not supposed to say that, right?

Chris

No, you can say that, you can say it will be coming soon, within a few months.

Bill

Ok.

Chris

Not a specific date.

Fiona

When staff meet Gates it’s a big deal. This team are waiting for him to review their work. For years he’s had a reputation for getting stroppy.

Miriam Lubow

There would always be heated arguments between Bill and the programmers. He’s very famous for having always said; that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Doug Klunder

He’s always been pretty confrontational but that worked well, I was confrontational also. As long as you stood up to Bill he respected that.

Bill

....no, no, do they, these are different compilers, so they’re not going to do any source code level things, right.

Microsoft worker

That, that’s, that’s right.

Fiona (commentary)

Last time Microsoft let a TV crew film Gates in action it captured a flavour of his management style.

Bill

That’s ridiculous, I’m not, I’m not using this thing. No, no, no, no, somebody’s confused, somebody’s just not thinking.

I mean there’s no way.

You guys never understood; you never understood the first thing about this.

Chris

He’s certainly passionate, err...

Fiona

So how do I interpret that? Does that mean he shouts?

Chris

Yeah, there are times, of course there are times he shouts. I think that as he’s grown older that the ratio of shouting to non-shouting has tremendously decreased.

Fiona

Spoken like a true Microsoft geek.

Fiona (commentary)

Today, Gates listens intently and responds with just a nerve inducing frown. This will be one of the last chances to talk tech with Gates. Next week, he’s off.

Fiona

Are you going to miss this because of course you’re not going to be in here quite so often now are you when you stand down?

Bill

Absolutely but that’s the decision I’ve made and I’ve done the same thing basically since I was seventeen years old so it will be a bit of a change.

Fiona (commentary)

To understand Bill Gates, 17 years old is a good place to start. He was at a private school near Seattle, sent by his well to do parents.

Fiona

The mother’s club had donated a Teletype machine which sent computer code down a phone line.

Bill Dougall

I would kind of phrase it that this was the machine that started Microsoft.

Fiona (commentary)

Former teacher, Bill Dougall, showed Bill Gates how it worked.

Bill

He somehow was naturally interested in computers and programming.

Fiona

Gates had to use punch cards to run programmes remotely on a computer at the local university.

Boy at school

With the typewriter that Bill had to use, you know, he had these cards and programming on each card and...

Girl at school

It was amazing what he’s done.

Boy at school

...I wouldn’t even know where to start to make a programme.

Girl at school

I wouldn’t know how to, yeah, it’s mind blowing.

Fiona (commentary)

The young Gates became part of a group who were determined to master the Teletype machine, including an older boy, Paul Allen.

Paul Allen

All of us were so passionate and excited about it, I mean but, you know, you meet Bill for just a few minutes, you know, you know, just how intense he is.

Fiona (commentary)

For Gates, it was endlessly fascinating. His father, a prominent Seattle lawyer, wasn’t so sure.

William Gates Snr

It was an addiction almost for him and a, and a few others, they spent all their spare time in that little lab building where the computer was located.

Fiona (commentary)

Gates was soon known as the computer expert.

Vicki Weeks

We had a computer assignment that we had to do for physics and basically nobody knew how to do it. So, you went and found Bill in the little computer room and either he helped you figure out how to do it or he did it for you.

Fiona (commentary)

The young Gates took a shine to Vicki and when it was time for the school prom.

Vicki

Bill called and asked me. So I said; I’m planning on asking someone else and essentially turned him down. And, as you can imagine, that’s something I’ve regretted since.

Fiona (commentary)

Gates graduated as one of the school’s star pupils and went to Harvard to study law. But he couldn’t kick the computer habit. Especially when his old school friend Paul Allen turned up waving a magazine featuring a mail order computer kit.

Bill

Here was somebody offering a computer and we thought, jeez, we want to do the software for this thing.

Fiona (commentary)

Working on the big university computer they managed to write a programme for the new computer without even having seen one. Paul Allen was to fly to New Mexico the next day to demo the programme to the manufacturers.

Bill

I spent the whole night studying that manual just to make sure we hadn’t got something wrong because the slightest detail and this thing wouldn’t have worked.

Fiona (commentary)

Allen arrived and fed his tape into the kit computer.

Paul Allen

They were like, wow, it actually does something. I’m going like; oh, if you only knew how much, you know, work and how nervous I was that it, that it was going to work at all.

Bill

So he called me up and said, hey, it actually works, which was incredible.

Fiona (commentary)

The makers of the Altair computer were so impressed they made Gates and Allen an offer for their software.

Bill

That was really the start of Microsoft.

Fiona (commentary)

The first office was in Albuquerque, close to their first customer. The new partners were sure they were on to something big.

Bill

The idea that Paul and I had that computers would be very cheap and they could be used for processing and e-mail and games, things like that, somehow the traditional computer people just didn’t think of it that way.

Steve Wood

Software as a separate business was to some degree kind of a controversial idea.

Fiona (commentary)

Steve Wood and his wife Marla were among the first Microsoft staff in Albuquerque.

Steve

There was a debate about whether you could actually create a, a substantial sized company purely on software because after all software is intangible.

Fiona (commentary)

The new secretary was surprised by a young visitor to the office.

Miriam Lubow

In walks this kid, walks passed my desk, waves hi! So I run to Steve and I say; hey, there’s this kid that just ran into the computer room, he’s sitting down, he’s typing away like he owns the place. And Steve said; guess what, he does own the place and that’s Mr Gates, the President. I said; what, the kid looks sixteen, how old is he? Oh, he says, he’s twenty-two.

Fiona (commentary)

Gates had dropped out of Harvard to the horror of his parents.

William Gates Snr

We were discomforted by that to put it mildly and we certainly expected that our son was going to graduate from college and we’re not, you’re not quite sure what, what happens to somebody who doesn’t have a college degree, like we did.

Fiona Bruce

It was only last year that Gates went back to Harvard to collect an honorary degree.

Bill Gates

I’ve been waiting more than thirty years to say this; Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.

Fiona Bruce

Gates was no ordinary college drop-out. He’d left because he wanted to spend more time working. He and Allen set an exhausting pace for their new business.

Paul Allen

We would programme until, I don’t know, six or seven pm, go have dinner, see a movie, come back and basically write or cut code until three in the morning, four in the morning sometimes. So, every day was like that.

Marla Wood

There was no, no life outside of Microsoft at that point. It was like, you get up, you go to work, you come home, if you socialise other than the few things with family it was with Microsoft friends.

Fiona (commentary)

But the hard work paid off as Gates signed up more and more customers.

James Wallace

Pretty soon a lot of people in three piece suits were coming to Albuquerque, New Mexico to do business with a kid in a t-shirt and pizza stains.

Fiona (commentary)

After a couple of years with annual sales of over one million dollars Gates and Allen decided to move the company back to their homes near Seattle. To mark the occasion there was a staff photo. That was exactly thirty years ago. Today, Microsoft has of course its own film studios and they’ve all come together to re-enact that photograph for the very first time.

Bill

Ok, I guess it’s Paul, doesn’t have his moustache.

Fiona (commentary)

The original Microsoft staff were mostly programmers, more interested in technology than business. But their work was the start of a company that produced at least three billionaires and an estimated ten thousand millionaires.

Some of the original group among them. When this picture was taken the world of computers was dominated by a superpower. IBM. Built on profits from big mainframe computers. But a new market in small computers was taking off thanks to the success of Apple. IBM was losing out and wanted to make its own small computer.

Jack Sams was sent to Seattle to check out Microsoft.

Jack Sams

When a young fellow came out and said; come on back, I didn’t realise that’s who it was. Then he walked around behind the desk and sat down and I suddenly realised ok, so this is Gates.

Fiona (commentary)

It was down to Gates to persuade the man from IBM that he could deliver.

Jack Sams

Within 15 minutes it was pretty clear he was a better programmer than I was, that he was a better lawyer than my lawyer and probably a better engineer than my engineer.

Fiona (commentary)

IBM was looking for an operating system; something to make the whole computer run. Microsoft didn’t have one but Bill wasn’t going to let a chance like this slip through his fingers.

Paul Allen

We had a discussion in Bill’s office. And Bill said; well, Paul, do you know, what alternatives do we have. And I said well there’s, there’s this company in Seattle that has a small operating system but I don’t know how good it is but let me see if I can buy it. So I was able to, to buy it for under fifty thousand dollars, complete rights to do whatever we wanted with it.

Fiona (commentary)

The deal was the foundation of Microsoft’s power. They adapted the software for IBM and in the small print of their IBM contract they pulled off another coup.

Fiona

There was one key clause wasn’t there, that let you sell the operating system to other customers.

Bill

Well they didn’t push that hard on asking for an exclusivity.

Fiona

And was it obvious to you at the time how crucial that was?

Bill Gates

Oh, absolutely.

Paul Allen

We knew it was a coup but it obviously was a, you know, it was a key part of the evolution of the personal computer industry.

Fiona Bruce

In 1981, the new IBM computer was launched, with Microsoft software inside. Sales took off and soon other manufacturers entered the market. All potential customers for Microsoft.

Fiona (commentary)

In Britain, Alan Sugar had turned himself from hi-fi maker to computer mogul. His Amstrad was the market leader.

Fiona (commentary)

But he admits to being a bit hazy about software.

Sir Alan Sugar

You know, I was one of those guys that said; how much is that tube cost, how much is that floppy drive cost, how much is this keyboard cost. And software, I’m certainly not paying any money for software because I can’t touch it.

Sir Alan Sugar

£80 for this lot. Have you gone mad?

Fiona (commentary)

Like it or not, even Sugar’s computers needed software. And Sugar was planning to install a disc operating system, DOS from a rival to Microsoft. But a Microsoft salesman had other ideas.

Sir Alan Sugar

Over comes this mid-Atlantic smoothie, sent over by Microsoft and the guy said to me; you know, you need to have MS DOS, Microsoft, MS DOS in this product. And I, and I said to him; well, you know, why? I said; look mate, you know, we are a consumer electronics manufacturer here, we’re not a bunch of geeks here, we don’t give a damn, you know, personally I don’t see no value for this Microsoft, the value there is for you.

Fiona (commentary)

The man from Microsoft finally agreed to sell Sugar the Microsoft system for a pittance. Gates’s strategy was to get his operating system out there, even if the deal wasn’t worth much.

Sir Alan Sugar

That showed me the first spark of entrepreneurial brilliance of Bill Gates in as he recognised, doesn’t matter what the price is we’ve got to be there.

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Content last updated: 26/06/2008

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