Creativity

What does our culture admire most? What is the hallmark of success in our society? Is it creativity or is it money? BusinessWeek for April 13, 1987 featured the success story of Bill Gates—the "Whiz Kid" of computing. He built a 2 billion dollar corporation out of computer software. Since Bill Gates owns half the stock of Microsoft he is a billionaire, at least on paper.

What is the secret of Bill Gates success? He is bright. A genius with good family and schooling. He dropped out of Harvard to make his millions. His genius, his creative streak is marketing software. His company sells the disk operating system that tells IBM personal computers and their clones how to do their work. Without a disk operating system a personal computer is just a dumb machine, good for video games. [It's not even good for that much. The DOS is the main program that lets the user access his/her disks. S/he can't use any of the stored programs and data—including games—without it. Editor]

Bill Gates' claim to fame and fortune is IBM chose "his" disk operating system to package with the IBM PC's. This system became known as PC DOS (disk operating system). Another version of the same system written for the IBM clones became MS DOS (Microsoft disk operating system).

Bill Gates had a small software company in Seattle. IBM asked him to supply them with a disk operating system for their new personal computer. (IBM built their personal computer from off-the-shelf parts. Little if any of the components were of IBM design or manufacture. In keeping with the strategy of the rest of the personal computer industry they chose to buy—not write—a disk operating system.) Bill Gates told them he wasn't interested. IBM came to him a second time again asking him to supply a disk operating system for their new personal computer. This time he figured they were serious, but he had a small problem. He didn't have a disk operating system. Bill Gates' genius lay not in writing software for which his company is now famous. His genius lay in understanding what an order from IBM meant. An order for software which IBM would package with each IBM personal computer, millions of them. He did what any genius with an order for millions of a product he didn't have would do. Bill Gates went to Seattle Computing, a small corporation in the software business, and bought the rights to a disk operating system. He sold that soft ware package to IBM and the rest is financial history. Bill Gates is now the genius of computers who turned Microsoft into a steam roller of the computer revolution.

I wonder about the person at Seattle Computing who wrote the program. I also wonder about Seattle Computing. What kind of a computing powerhouse did they become? I wonder what would have happened if IBM had asked for competitive bids? I wonder if IBM knows or cares.

Who do we love, the fast guy with an idea or the fast guy with a buck? Unfortunately, the answer is self-evident.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1987
Institute for domestic Tranquility