What a great interview. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill Gates is a smart, smart man.

There are so many great quotes in there. Considering the time the interview took place, he did a great job of anticipating what was coming:

  * transition of interesting jobs from hardware -> software
  * user experience becoming more important than performance
  * the importance of networking

Well worth the read.

I was about 2 months old when DOS came out. Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.

> Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.

Probably it wouldn't be much different. The revolution would have happened anyway, but with Apple, Atari, Amiga or someone else.

And perhaps multitasking GUI OSes would be mainstream 5-10 years earlier ;)

BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems.

Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.

IBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-engineered BIOS were made despite IBM, not thanks to them.

But the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW, with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe dips, there never any attempt to really license it.

The mistake IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered the fold.

Interesting! The single page view is at http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=278114,00.asp?h...

Fun read - I especially liked the last statement of the interview:

>> Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.

"But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.

The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM (Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are used to dealing with it."

Am I the only one that would love to see this impleneted in spreadsheet software today?

It is there in Excel and Google Docs already :)

Guh. Right you are: named ranges (http://www.contextures.com/xlnames01.html).

I learned about this feature years and years ago and never used it. Maybe it wouldn't actually be all that helpful afterall. If only I could downvote myself.