DaveNet: Saturday, October 25, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Gates to Carlton on Apple

This memo was written by Bill Gates, billg@microsoft.com, sent to Jim Carlton, jim.carlton@news.wsj.com, dated 10/22/97.

Gates to Carlton on Apple

I just finished reading your book this weekend. I enjoyed reading it a lot. You certainly dug through a lot of history to pull this together! Congratulations on documenting something amazing.

I find the whole story fascinating. Perhaps because I worry about making the same mistakes they made. One thing I'll never understand is why the software group did so badly.

At one point very early in Mac history a company called Cadmus had Mac code running on UNIX. Apple bought this work and just buried it. Later a few other companies did this. Clearly Apple should have just picked up Mac on UNIX rather than trying to do its own kernel.

A few episodes I hadn't known about: the concreteness of the merger with IBM - a real error there, the Novell-Intel effort that Roger was involved in - he never told us about it except to grin a little when the rumors ran in the trade papers and finally how close Gateway got to licensing.

I sort of wish there was a timeline showing events, stock prices, sales and earnings.

Thanks for setting the story straight on the 85 memo Raikes and I put together. You are the first to really explain that whole story.

The only thing that makes the book seem to repeat a little is that Apple management kept repeating the same mistakes!

I think I am treated unfairly on pages 27 & 326 (great satan, gangly, deer caught in headlights, cold blooded killer, going for the jugular, wanted to dominate not change the world, secured control, leveraging, trained to smile, Chung story wrong).

The OS/2 story told on page 144 suggests we abandoned IBM. Of course this is a long complex story but there should be no doubt IBM divorced us.

Cannavino kicked us out of the project- we weren't brave enough to go out on our own -- Cannavino forced us to. The way the deal worked they got to keep the OS/2 name. Fortunately for us though we got to keep our code which was intended to be OS/2 3.0 so we renamed it Windows NT and the rest is history.

I guess Raikes doesn't look like me since he has "all American good looks"!

Basically I think this is a very important story that had to be told and you did a fine job pulling it all together! I am pleased you were willing to spend time to with me as you put the book together.

Postscript

In the email he sent in response to 1985, Gates added:

"As far as IBM goes I didn't understand how they were trying to "close" the PC to some degree with Microchannel and restricting OS/2 (our joint project) until 1987. From 1987 to 1991 we did everything we could to make the IBM relationship work. Interestingly I saw Cannavino at Agenda who was the person who decided IBM could close things because they could do the software on their own."

Sat, Oct 25, 1997 at 8:52:31 AM by DW