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Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: evaluation

22 Apr 2024 Acquired Microsoft Volume I

“It's so good. This quote is incredible because basically, Paul Allen brings up Moore's Law to Bill Gates; they don't use that language there.”

— Ben Gilbert

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
22 Apr 2024
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…Yes, so good. It's so good. This quote is incredible because basically, Paul Allen brings up Moore's Law to Bill Gates; they don't use that language there. But in 1971, that is what's happening. For Paul, this is just an observation of hey, there's an exponential thing happening here, it seems like it's going to keep happening, it's been happening. Bill's shaking and he's like, what? Exponential phenomena don't just happen. That's incredibly, incredibly rare and immediately gets Bill's wheels turning on. What does this mean for the world? If that's actually true, we need to act and do something profoundly different than anyone's ever done before because this enables new things that no one ever thought could be possible. This moment is the genesis of the vision for Microsoft. Even though Bill doesn't say the words in this quote, the vision of a computer on every desk in every home, that's the famous part that got left off later when the DOJ started sniffing around was running Microsoft software. But that is the vision here, and it is crazy at the time. A computer on every desk and in every home, Bill sees that this is what this exponential phenomenon, what Moore's law means, that that is going to happen. We're still in the era of teletypes. Nobody else sees this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

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