Source Code: My Beginnings

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates

Bill Gates had the perfect childhood to set himself up to launch Microsoft. His parents were dedicated to their family, but gave their children significant autonomy. His mom was highly involved in community organizations and had many connections. His father was a lawyer. There were entrepreneurs in his family tree as well as a doting grandma that helped teach logical thinking through games. He enjoyed learning what he wanted to learn and struggled in school and socially. He would have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum today. His parents didn't give up on him or try to force him in a certain path. They had him engage in common youth activities. They let him learn on his own terms. He ended up enjoying some of the "punishments" he received in school (such as working in the library.) His parents helped him to "fall up" out of the public school to attend private Lakeside school. There he was able to find another socially awkward friend as well as other "geeks" who would help found Microsoft.

Lakeside was one of the few places that had a computer for students to access. Gates was drawn to the computer. He would spend time thinking in code and how to program. Through connections, he and some friends were able to get access to other computers at companies and the University of Washington. He had friends in older grades, such as Paul Allen that could get access. They were able to work on business projects finding bugs and coding - all while still in high school. Their parents helped support them as well as get them further connections. He was able to get into Harvard and explore other academic interests. There he met others with complementary skills. Then the first real home computer came out. He and his friends had experience and created a basic interpreter. They were able to sell it and create an appropriate contract that would help them defend their rights. They would later be able to defend their rights to allow the company to continue. 

Bill Gates was at the right place at the right time and had the proper support as well as the personal interest and drive to keep with his company. There are so many ways that Microsoft could have failed to be, yet it somehow managed to be the behemoth it is today.  

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das

Bill Gates is super rich. He also has a personality that is not very easy to get along with. Luckily, he has minders that help his public persona. Alas, this doesn't help prevent his private affairs or personal interactions.

This book uses Gate's career to explore the role of billionaires in society. The author occasionally tries to be objective, but very clearly has an agenda. She feels that billionaires have too much power and that society enables them. She would much rather have a wealth tax to enable greater government spending, rather than enable the very wealthy to control the agenda via philanthropy. This would be a terrible idea. Government and philanthropic work each have their place. Governments are beholden to short term political expediencies, while individuals can focus on longer-term goals. Individual philanthropists can also spend vast sums on items that are of interest to them. Some might turn out to be greatly beneficial, while others may be flops. Governments would have much more difficulty starting programs that do not have popular support (and have difficulty stopping those that do.) Big philanthropy is a needed force with big government.

The book also explores the rise of Microsoft and some of its anti-competitive behavior. Gates was "self made", but had received opportunities from his upbringing. His parents' connections helped to get Microsoft's initial contract with IBM. He went against the grain to encourage charging for software. This caused ire with the existing computer science community, but did start an entire new industry. Gates then used the dominant position to force companies to pay for Windows whether they installed it or not. Later, Microsoft competed with Netscape by providing a browser free with Windows and making it the default. These behaviors hurt competition and caused stagnation. (Web browser innovation stagnated once Internet Explorer dominated the market. Innovation only returned once Firefox and Chrome launched with enough financial muscle to compete.) 

What should be done to optimize the benefit to society?

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates presents a technocratic approach to dealing with climate change. His basic supposition is that we need to get to zero carbon emissions while at the same time increasing net energy use around the world. The primary tool used is a reduction of the green premium. The carbon-free and lower carbon approaches should be equal or cheaper than the high-carbon approaches. He proposes a large selection of different approaches that should start out generally. The government should play a role in regulation and encouragement. However, we need to be careful to not be too proscriptive. The government should encourage specific desired results rather than the specific means to get there. Research should also be encouraged in both the government and private sectors.

His solutions are well thought out. My concern are the basic propositions. Is zero-carbon an appropriate goal? Is that too much or not enough? Perhaps we are so far gone that we need to rapidly scale back the greenhouse gasses. Or maybe we are approaching a cooling and we really need to have a controlled increase in greenhouse gasses. A change of a few degrees temperature could be a very significant. However, it could be harmful or beneficial. We just don't have the ability to fully model everything.  A long term target needs to be easily adjustable.

The bigger concern is the assumption that we need to keep energy consumption to maintain a high standard of living. The general focus of his approach is on "greener" energy and "scrubbing carbon." What about the energy that causes great inefficiencies and reduces are quality of life? In the transport sector, a huge amount of energy is spent just transporting the vehicles. A person is nearly a rounding error in the overall weight of a car. What if we focussed on smaller, lighter vehicles. (More efficient bicycles?) Land use and urban design causes huge wastes. Many regulations force excessive energy use in the urban layouts. A person may spend all their time in 1000 square feet of living space, yet they have a 2000 square foot house on 10000 square feet of land. They need to spend extra energy to maintain the yard and living space. They need to travel greater distances to other destinations because all their neighbors have large yards. The energy consumption requires them to spend more time and more money - just to be able to consume more energy that they do not want. 

Urban development has also had a disproportionate impact on local climatic conditions. The urban heat island can make temperatures a few degrees warmer in cities. Should we do more to combat this?

The Covid pandemic has also shown that many in-person activities can take place fine over video conference. (There do still remain many things that are better done at a distance.) 

Continued focus on research should definitely come into play. However, before enacting vast policy changes, we need to make sure the goal is really the right one.

The Road Ahead

In the mid-90s, Bill Gates saw the dawning of the "internet age", and put forth his predictions on what would happen. He also drew on his experience with the start of the microcomputer age and how some big companies failed, while small companies like Microsoft were able to succeed.

Some predictions seem to be spot on. He predicted that people would watch a lot of video once bandwidth increased. The success of Youtube, Netflix and countless other streaming services attest to that point. Others are not so accurate. He envisioned a scheme where people would be totally anonymous, but have ads tailored to them based on filling out surveys. Instead, companies have collected a lot of information about users without the need for surveys. This has led to privacy concerns, but may just be thought of as "automating" the surveys.

He was quite optimistic about education. We do have teachers grabbing clip art for power point presentations. However, education is still largely stuck in the past. Even in the time of covid-required remote learning, teachers largely taught like they did in decades past, just using a screen instead of a chalkboard. There are remote classes and sites like Kahn Academy. However, education has largely failed to reach its potential. Though desires for more information can be fulfilled by searching Wikipedia rather than a CD Rom.

He talked about how Lakeside school gave students emails and they use it to communicate. Free webmail services took over from that. Now kids hardly email because there are so many other services available. The "closed garden" of services rather than the open internet has an aspect that he did not foresee.

This book was written before Google, Facebook or Netflix were founded. OSX, iOS and Android did not yet exist. Some of the big early internet companies are just a shell of themselves (Yahoo, AOL). Others, such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are behemoths. IBM has largely left the PC business. Compaq is pretty much gone. Even Intel is struggling today. Big companies that were not able to pivot largely failed.

Gates did come close to predicting the rise of mobile devices. He thought of them as pocket PCs. He even envisioned a mobile boarding pass. Mobile phones were still largely a niche item. It was hard to envision them pivoting to becoming the primary computing device for people. However, many of the uses were similar.