Open Source Billg The Manager (2021)

The breadth of the Microsoft product line and the rapid turnover of core technologies all but precluded BillG from micro-managing the company in spite of the perceptions and lore around that topic. In less than 10 years the technology base of the business changed from the 8-bit BASIC era to the 16-bit MS-DOS era and to now the tail end of the 16-bit Windows era, on the verge of the Win32 decade. How did Bill manage this — where and how did he engage? This post introduces the topic and along with the next several posts we will explore some specific projects.

At 38, having grown Microsoft as CEO from the start, Bill was leading Microsoft at a global scale that in 1993 was comparable to an industrial-era CEO. Even the legendary Thomas Watson Jr., son of the IBM founder, did not lead IBM until his 40s. Microsoft could never have scaled the way it did had BillG managed via a centralized hub-and-spoke system, with everything bottlenecked through him. In many ways, this was BillG’s product leadership gift to Microsoft—a deeply empowered organization that also had deep product conversations at the top and across the whole organization.

This video from the early 1980’s is a great introduction to the breadth of Microsoft’s product offerings, even at a very early stage of the company. It also features some vintage BillG voiceover and early sales executive Vern Raburn. (Source: Microsoft videotape)

Bill honed a set of undocumented principles that defined interactions with product groups. The times of legendary BillG reviews characterized by hardcore challenges and even insults had become, mostly, a thing of the past excepting the occasional sentimental outburst. More generally, they were a collective memory of hyper-growth moments any start-up experiences, only before the modern era when such stories were more commonly understood.

Much later in 2006, when BillG announced his intent to transition from full time Microsoft and part time philanthropy to full time philanthropy, many reporters surprised him by asking how Microsoft would continue without his coordination of technical strategy and oversight. But even in the early ’90s, at the height of the deepest and most challenging technology strategy questions, he never devoted the bulk of his time to micromanaging product development. He spent a good deal of time engaged with products, but there were far too many at too many stages of development to micro-manage them. In many ways this was the opposite of the approac

Source: HackerNews