Bill Gates Remembers LSD Trips, Smoking Pot, and How the Smartphone OS Market 'Was Ours for the Taking' (independent.co.uk) 50
Fortune remembers that in 2011 Steve Jobs had told author Walter Isaacson that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up."
Gates went on to say that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn't know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject. "Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products," recalled Gates. "My response to that was to say, 'Look, I got the wrong batch.' I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn't know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."
Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan's book about psychedelic drugs, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. "The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating," said Gates. "Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:
But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up."
Gates went on to say that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn't know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject. "Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products," recalled Gates. "My response to that was to say, 'Look, I got the wrong batch.' I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn't know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."
Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan's book about psychedelic drugs, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. "The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating," said Gates. "Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:
- The Harvard Gazette notes that the university didn't offer computer science degrees when Gates attended in 1973. But since Gates already had years of code-writing experience, he "initially rebuffed any suggestion of taking computer-related coursework... 'It's too easy,' he remembered telling friends."
- "The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI," Gates told an audience at the Harvard Book Store. "And now with AI, I can see that we could shape this in the wrong way."
- Gates "expressed regret about how he treated another boyhood friend, Paul Allen, the other cofounder of Microsoft, who died in 2018," reports the Boston Globe. "Gates at first took 60 percent ownership of the new software company and then pressured his friend for another 4 percent. 'I feel bad about it in retrospect,' he said. 'That was always a little complicated, and I wish I hadn't pushed....'"
- Business Insider adds that according to his memoir, Gates "eventually gave his additional 4% stake to [Steve] Ballmer to convince him to quit business school for Microsoft. 'He joined in 1980 and became the 24-hour-a-day partner I needed,' Gates wrote."
- Benzinga writes that Gates has now "donated $100 billion to charitable causes... Had Gates retained the $100 billion he has donated, his total wealth would be around $264 billion, placing him second on the global wealth rankings behind Elon Musk and ahead of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg."
- Gates told the Associated Press "I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way," saying Intel is now "kind of behind" on both chip design and fabrication. "They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don't even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy... I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage."
- Gates also told the Associated Press that fighting a three-year antitrust case had "distracted" Microsoft. "The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."
- The Dallas News reports that in an on-stage interview in Texas, Mark Cuban closed by asking Gates one question. "Is the American Dream alive?" Gates answered: "It was for me."
The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:3)
That's not the kind of miss Microsoft would normally make. As you might imagine because they did that their phones were relegated to a filing cabinet in a basement behind a sign that said beware of leopard.
I guess it's possible it was just arrogance too thinking that people would flock to it because they knew Windows 8 of course everyone hate it Windows 8 so there's that. But again I think it's more likely they were concerned about antitrust law enforcement at the time whereas Apple and Google were in a better position to do stuff like that
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
People didn't buy windows phones because they sucked.
Microsoft trying to make a tiny kernel version of windows wasn't going to help even if they managed to pull it off. Windows wasn't never intended or designed to run on small systems or in pseudo real time. Windows NT was the first Windows with any form of real multi tasking/threading worth talking about and that shit wasn't going to squeeze down from the data center where it was intended to be used to a dinky phone.
And even let's assume that yeah sure t
Re:The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:4, Informative)
What're you talking about?! They all had that neat little hole on the back that you could stick a paper clip in to reset them every six hours when they locked up. Super convenient.
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Now, Im not saying thats sad, but.... thats sad.
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Everything that Microsoft got nailed to the wall for with their antitrust problems is known as "business as usual" for Apple and Google. Both platforms come with the OS preloaded on their hardware, both bundle their own first party browser, and they even go a bit further than Microsoft ever did by restricting user root access to the OS itself. Don't even get me started on app signing and locked bootloaders.
The smartphone market turned into absolutely everything we feared Microsoft would do to the PC indus
Re:The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:4, Informative)
Everything that Microsoft got nailed to the wall for with their antitrust problems is known as "business as usual" for Apple and Google.
Sorry I don't remember Apple or Google threatening Intel not to release a Java compiler for x86 because they feared Java. I don't remember either of them then releasing an incompatible version of Java just to screw over Sun. I don't remember either of them kindly remind OEMs that if they did business with Netscape and didn't preinstall Internet Explorer, they might lose their favored Windows OEM pricing. As much as Google and Apple does, you seem to forget what MS did back in the day.
When you're not a dominant market player (Score:2)
With Microsoft the problem is they would clearly be leveraging their dominance in the desktop OS market to take over the cell phone market. That's where antitrust gets triggered.
Although h
Re: The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:2)
Windows CE was not really bloated. The original XBox ran it and smart phones are as powerful as the original XBox.
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CE wasn't the worst piece of software but it couldn't compare to Android let alone iOS back then. I'm not a fan of iPhones but early Android was painful.
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That's not the kind of miss Microsoft would normally make. As you might imagine because they did that their phones were relegated to a filing cabinet in a basement behind a sign that said beware of leopard.
During the early 2000-s, Microsoft had very real mobile OS: WinCE. It had a nice programming API, basically a cut-down version of Win32. I can see a world where Microsoft iterated on WinCE and pre-empted Apple by several years. Microsoft was even pushing tablet computing long before iPad.
Their main problem indeed was a total lack of focus. I think Joel Spolsky told stories about how the Microsoft Word team was allergic to pen input (on tablets). Or Pocket Excel not being able to read the real Excel files
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The problem was the "windows" branding...
Buyers expected compatibility with the versions of windows they were already familiar with, but there was none. You couldn't run your existing apps.
The xbox was not windows branded, and was a lot more successful. Apple also differentiated ios from macos so that users didn't expect any type of compatibility between the two.
For others the windows name already had a bad taste. They might have been stuck with it on desktop computers due to existing lock-in, but they were
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Was never going to fly on smartphones without some heavy duty antitrust law violations. And I think they just had a little too much attention on them at the time. The reason Windows mobile never took off was because Android and Apple both gave out commission money every time of salesman sold one of their phones and Microsoft didn't.
What history are you remembering? Microsoft was in smartphones long before Google and Apple. Windows CE which powered Windows Mobile existed before Jobs returned to Apple. It was not compatible with Windows on PC and was just superficially made to look like Windows. Windows Mobile had a decent marketshare. The problem was it stagnated while Android and iOS kept adding new features. Also it was buggy, unstable, and sometimes unusable.
What further killed it in the mobile market was every revision that MS ma
wat (Score:2)
"The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI,"
You tried to murder it, bro
Epstein Client List (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is he gaslighting us into thinking Windows Phone didn't exist?
Or the Nokia acquisition.
The market didn't want what he was selling.
If you want to point fingers, it was Blackberry and BES - corporate learned that phones didn't need to be a Microsoft product.
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Because you didn't even finish reading TFS
what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone
He's saying it was theirs for the taking, but they failed to make their mobile OS good enough.
He never said he didn't do it. He said he didn't do it well enough.
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Well, he's right about that. If he could only be as honest about his impact on computing as about that, maybe I wouldn't hate his guts.
The early Windows phones (all of the wince ones) were bad technically, but they were also bad in other ways. Most had bad hardware to go with the bad software.
Re:Epstein Client List (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a far more important guy who keeps turning up in photos with Epstein. When asked about releasing the files he said it would be problematic for some people.
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Or the Nokia acquisition. The market didn't want what he was selling.
That was long after Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft entirely in 2008.
To remind everyone (Score:2)
Gates took free code, improved the UI, then sold it. That wasn't enough so he then added vendor lock-in. When he added forced bundling of software, the government got upset. The government got upset again, when Microsoft tried to buy competing software. Gates, the poster-boy of not-free software, knew the "good" didn't survive in the world of profit.
I guess Gates gave-up one dream, owning the world. But that's a common mind-set in the USA. It'll be interesting to see what this decade's billionaires do
Re: To remind everyone (Score:2)
What free code did he take? The only thing I can think of is early versions of Windows used the BSD network stack, but it was quickly replaced.
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He allegedly stole code for an open-source draft version of BASIC for x86 and tweaked it.
Bill must've been on drugs (Score:2)
Microsoft almost had the smartphone OS market? Can we get Vin Diesel [youtube.com] to explain to Bill how far from reality that statement is?
The unwashed masses were never going to accept Windows CE on their phones. It was a clunky, difficult-to-use OS, bringing all the worst design paradigms of Windows to a device too small and underpowered for anything even remotely resembling a decent user experience. People only suffered through using those devices because they were tech enthusiasts living on the bleeding edge, or
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His claim is that MS was positioned to have the entire smartphone market- and lost it.
And he's right.
MS had a smart phone when everyone else had shitty feature phones.
As he mentioned- they fucked up. Their smart phone sucked. If it had not sucked, mobile would be a very different world today.
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"Christ, I do wonder how the fuck people can formulate a comment with so many words in it when they seemingly can't read."
OP's been doing that for years, it gets no better.
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His claim is that MS was positioned to have the entire smartphone market- and lost it.
In order to be positioned to take something it first has to be within your capabilities to grasp it in the first place. Microsoft's corporate culture was simply antithetical to them ever winning over the smartphone market. They would've had to have been willing to flush Windows CE down the toilet much earlier in the game and Microsoft has never been an innovative company - embrace, extend, extinguish was how they've always competed. They've never known what the market wanted until someone else came along
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In order to be positioned to take something it first has to be within your capabilities to grasp it in the first place.
Oh, shut the fuck up.
That's how you're gonna dig your way out of idiotically commenting on an article you obviously didn't read?
Get the fuck out of here.
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You're the one who's not getting it. This isn't Mr. Bitcoin pizza who would've been a millionaire if he'd held onto his coins rather than ordered a pizza. Microsoft was so firmly intrenched in their when the only tool you have is a hammer belief that the only way they'd have captured the smartphone market was if the general public actually had a different opinion of Windows CE.
It was a garbage OS and Microsoft loved it so much they even crammed it into their first gaming console. This was never playing o
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Microsoft's corporate culture was simply antithetical to them ever winning over the smartphone market. They would've had to have been willing to flush Windows CE down the toilet much earlier in the game
Flushing WinCE down the drains later was one of the reasons Windows Mobile failed. They should have kept it and iterated on top of it, and there were plans to do just that.
Microsoft has never been an innovative company - embrace, extend, extinguish was how they've always competed
Oh, bullshit. MS was an innovation-driven company in 80-s and 90-s. They created the market for personal computers, and they had _the_ best office suite. Arguably, EEE really worked for MS only with Novell Netware, and maybe with Netscape Navigator.
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Microsoft almost had the smartphone OS market?
That's actually true. Microsoft was the dominant mobile smartphone OS in 2006. I'd say that HTC 8525 ( https://www.gsmarena.com/at&t_... [gsmarena.com] ) was _better_ than the first iPhone in every regard.
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By the time Microsoft finally got serious about designing a mobile OS where usability was a consideration, it was far too late. Android and iOS already had established their duopoly and Microsoft was relegated to being an also-ran with abysmal third party app support.
Add that MS cannot really do usability. (Or reliability or security...) They just scrape by on barely usable and that only works with a monopoly. Seems to get worse (again) at this time as well. Their crap wastes to much time that anybody that has alternatives stays away.
Complicated (Score:3)
I still can't decide if gates is just a savvy businessman or a supervillan.
His business behaviour in the 90's was grotesque and it's the reason the majority of the business world has to essentially pay a tax to Gates for his operating system and his office software. /. community loves to scoff at VB & VB6, but allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written. .NET/C# which made professional software development easy.
I much would have preferred open source won the business eyeballs battle, but gates was always a step ahead where it mattered.
- He had Visual Basic (and Borland Turbo Pascal on windows). I know the
- He had active directory which was a game changer in managing large IT systems.
- He had a unified registry which was easier to navigate compared to Unix/Linux hundreds of config files.
- He had
So really, I think MS was always a step ahead of the open source community, and when employee time can be hundreds per hour, his solutions become cheap compared to the alternative.
I still think there something deeply dark about the man though.
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I still can't decide if gates is just a savvy businessman or a supervillan.
I think you can be both.
His business behaviour in the 90's was grotesque and it's the reason the majority of the business world has to essentially pay a tax to Gates for his operating system and his office software.
Na. That hasn't been true for 2 decades. Change that "has" to a "had", and I'm with you, though.
We're constantly playing around with newer Office solutions, and moving people to FOSS desktops in test groups.
We keep going back, because the support is a fucking nightmare, and the solutions are janktastic as fuck.
I much would have preferred open source won the business eyeballs battle, but gates was always a step ahead where it mattered.
That was never going to happen.
For Random User A, Windows is a superior platform for them to use their computer. Nerds can claim otherwise, but they're hallucinating.
- He had Visual Basic (and Borland Turbo Pascal on windows). I know the /. community loves to scoff at VB & VB6, but allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written.
Ya- sol
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We keep going back, because the support is a fucking nightmare, and the solutions are janktastic as fuck.
[...]
Anyone still using AD should be summarily shot.
wat
He had a unified registry which was easier to navigate compared to Unix/Linux hundreds of config files.
Both regimes are fucking nightmares.
A bunch of flat files in /etc are not a nightmare, except that the non-machine-specific files never should have been in there like they were. Now we are transitioning away from that, to where standard or distribution-specific files are going into /usr/lib/whatever. This way you can safely pick up the whole /etc directory, move it to another host, and only exclude away the hostname (or just rewrite it later) if you would like to copy its configuration even to another version of system.
Flat files in a hier
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allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written.
You don't really want semi-skilled programmers churning out poor quality applications, this creates a security nightmare.
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True for large companies, but there are a lot of SME's who don't have the same security requirements.
They want to, convert some CAD data for a machine, or write a test program for a circuit board, or create an aged inventory report for a bean counter, or have a dash board for staff on site today. Even in big companies, it can be impossible red tape to get the pros to do anything, so they just do it on the side so they can get on with life.
Steve Jobs was druggie loser (Score:3)
Look, I do recreational drugs better than most. But people who drop acid and then act like they e joined a proselytizing cult are druggie losers.
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if we have people that are respected for their success in business like Bill Gates and Elon Musk admitting to use of recreational drugs then perhaps we can get some sanity in drug laws.
To get anything reasonably effective against even a common cold requires either a prescription from a physician or signing some log book at a pharmacist counter. Either way this can get people arrested by the DEA for buying "too much" of some chemical substance. How much is "too much" according to the DEA? Well, they won't
My rant against Baby Boomers (Score:3)
Antitrust case partially worked (Score:2)
Good! The anti-trust case partially did its job. (MS still owns the biz desktop market.)
Although some argue their obsession with compatibility was already sinking them. Without compatibility,
They not like us (Score:2)
Wow, look at all thsse friendly interviews and puff pieces from several outlets in the course of a week. Very organic (not)..
"He was a nerd that couldn't get laid", how relatable!.. but how does that pair with him being the sort of sex freak that would visit Jeffrey Epstein's residences and fly on his jet?
The rich stay rich (Score:2)
Gates has elsewhere admitted he had a wealth advantage in that his upper-middle-class area had schools that could afford access to early computers for students.
Re: The rich stay rich (Score:2)
Therapeutic uses (Score:2)
So does a full body cast after you've been in a motorcycle accident. But I wouldn't recommend it for the average healthy person.
MS could never have made it with phones (Score:1)
Phones require high reliability and high security in the absence of system administration. MS cannot even provide these _with_ system administration. Their engineering is just too shoddy and too insightless. But wishful thinking is a powerful drug.
Coding batch? (Score:3)
No, bro. You absolutely did NOT get the coding batch.
Maybe you got the Dunning-Kruger batch or the Random Crash batch.