Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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. And it's also the reason why Microsoft is going to form into such a different type of company that's ever come before it, why they can break all the rules, why they can sell just software, even though that's never been a thing before, why their business model can be so much different than everyone else's business model. In preparing for this episode, we got to talk with Pete Higgins, who ran Excel and was an executive overseeing Office for a long time in the early days. He had this great quote to us, which was, "Computer on every desk was wackadoo stuff. People laughed at it. It was absolutely wild. People thought, I don't know, maybe 1 in 10 people in their finance group or something will have one at some point. This is the profoundness of an exponential decrease in price or increase in power of computing. It's going to become universal." All that said, even Bill and Paul know the AD08. It's not there yet. It's not powerful enough to really be a general-purpose computer on a chip, but they know it's coming. In the fall of 1973, Bill goes off to college at Harvard famously. It's funny, at Harvard, like Jim Simons that we talked about at MIT on the RenTech episode. Bill thinks he's going to be a world-class mathematician and set the world on fire.…

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