Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
74 published records
01 / belief
“Famously, speaking of Paul and where Bill and Paul meet, when Bill is in seventh grade, his parents enroll him at the Lakeside School, which now I think is internationally famous because of Bill.”
02 / recommendation
“If you are new to the show and looking for great recent episodes that we've done, I highly recommend the Visa one as discussed earlier in the Network of Networks idea, if you haven't heard that, or perhaps the Nintendo or NVIDIA episodes, all of which will be right up your alley if you liked this one.”
03 / belief
“I think Terry was the one that gave us the insight of Windows, especially in the early days.”
04 / belief
“I think you still see the legacy of this right to this day in Apple versus Microsoft.”
05 / belief
“Clint and LGR, and it stands for Lazy Game Reviews, which I think is how it started, but then it became so much more, and now it's just LGR.”
06 / belief
“I think the biggest example of this comes through where Microsoft is basically willing to jump on the microcomputer revolution before the incumbents were.”
07 / observation
“Just having this super locked-in operating system is not actually the way to bet your whole company for the future.”
08 / belief
“Pete, I think, ran Excel for a long time and oversaw a lot of the different stuff in the applications group, and I believe also ran Office.”
09 / belief
“Although, actually, I think once they start getting into the enterprise workplaces in general, organizations in general, there is the user network effect, like I want this Microsoft Word document that I just worked on for you to be able to open it and use it too.”
10 / belief
“Despite the fact that he doesn't own half the company, he's got a lot of founder-like control, which I think is pretty interesting.”
11 / uncertainty
“Maybe. I don't know. I'd agree with you if you had a bunch of short-term capital interests that owned your company, but if it's all founder-owned, there are great, large private companies in the world.”
12 / commitment
“I will say, you touched on something that's an interesting corollary to this. Their first versions of software famously are not good.”
13 / belief
“Meanwhile, in the computing industry background, while all this is going on with the launch of the IBM PC and then the clones, Apple had gone public at the end of 1980 in I think, the biggest and most successful IPO of all time at that point.”
14 / belief
“Similarly, I think the fact that they went international early was this very powerful constraint.”
15 / belief
“I think more students come out of the University of Washington and go to big tech than any other program in the country.”
16 / observation
“I guess the lesson is find an industry in its infancy, be capital-efficient, and run the table.”
17 / belief
“Why did it work? They had two things going for them that really, Ed, I think probably personally made happen.”
18 / belief
“I think the Microsoft OEM team for Windows was 20 people or something. Before the enterprise, in this era that we're talking about, the group of people responsible for go-to market for Windows was really small.”
19 / belief
“I think that's something we often forget about in the buzzy Twitterverse of like, oh that thing's over.”
20 / belief
“Also, by the time that this agreement actually happens, I think Steve Jobs has been ousted, so it's Scully who does this agreement.”
21 / belief
“Microsoft ends up winning the arbitration, I believe, in maybe November 1977, meaning they are now totally free to license BASIC to anybody who wants to buy it on any terms that they want.”
22 / uncertainty
“I don't know exactly what happened, but it basically seems like it just wasn't different enough to be meaningful to application developers.”
23 / belief
“You've got Excel coming out for Mac to take advantage of the GUI. This strategy is just all over the place, I think that's an interesting thing to underscore about Microsoft in this era.”
24 / belief
“Microsoft next year is going to have its 50th anniversary. I believe that'll also be the same year that Bill turns 70.”
25 / belief
“I think there are two freak laws of nature's one. (1) There was Moore's law that they were benefiting from.”
26 / belief
“I think that is such a key lesson of when you're in a really dynamic market like this, in our ecosystem right now in tech, venture capital, startups, whatnot, people put so much value on conviction.”
27 / belief
“CP/M, which I think is maybe Control Program for Microprocessors, I think, is the abbreviation there.”
28 / belief
“I think the ugly part is, a lot of people want to hate on the value capture, because god did they capture value, but they were sincere in their desire and ability to create too.”
29 / belief
“There's the eight pins for the data bits, and then I think there's one more control pin.”
30 / uncertainty
“People thought, I don't know, maybe 1 in 10 people in their finance group or something will have one at some point.”
31 / belief
“Whether that happened or whether it's just an NDA issue, either way, I think we all know the IBM PC did not end up running the CP/M operating system.”
32 / belief
“While antitrust and the government would seize onto this as a smoking gun, I think the reality is this was irrelevant in terms of the forces that made DOS and Windows the winners.”
33 / belief
“You cannot overstate how important the University of Washington was to this decision and an ultimate success of coming to Seattle. This brings us to 1980 in the beginning of the year when they move to Seattle, just in time for, I think you can make a very strong argument, the single most important deal ever done in the history of technology.”
34 / belief
“I think the way Python is now where you joke that Python is so flexible, you can accidentally write a program by writing English, it can forgive a lot of mistakes, and it reads English, it's a reasonable parallel to draw it way back when with BASIC where you say, look, you can understand it as a layman, but also it's used in a broad set of business applications.”
35 / belief
“Later on, before this all gets announced and the PC ships, Microsoft would pay Seattle computer products another $50,000 for full rights to own 86 QDOS, sell and license it to anybody else indefinitely. I believe the total amount of dollars that changed hands here is $75,000.”
36 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it was directly in exchange in the negotiations, but the other lever that he saw, that he pulled was Microsoft retained the rights to own DOS and to own their languages and license it and them to anyone else they wanted at any price on any terms.”
37 / belief
“In this whole OS/2 thing, I think you can see, they felt like they were still little brother.”
38 / uncertainty
“Everything else in there is much cheaper than the processor, so I don't know. Depending on how much they have to give to the sales channel they're selling through, if it's retail or distributors.”
39 / belief
“IBM, that team from Project Chess, flies down, I think, directly from Seattle and talking with Bill and Steve to Monterey, California, where Digital Research is based at this point, to meet with Gary and his wife, Dorothy, who run the business together.”
40 / belief
“I think IBM can do a deal with Intel, not necessarily trickier but the more important part is the software.”
41 / belief
“I think doing this episode though has made me think there's a little more nuance to it.”
42 / belief
“Certainly Bill and I think Steve, too, they needed to tow the party line politically of expressing that, nope, OS/2 is the future.”
43 / belief
“The three people who start Compaq in 1982 are actually Texas Instruments engineers who left, and they wanted to start a company. I believe as the legend goes, they were trying to decide what to start.”
44 / belief
“Dave Marquardt, I think most weekends, is flying up to Seattle to hang out with Bill and Steve.”
45 / belief
“Apple has always, at least in my opinion, created a better computing experience by being completely integrated.”
46 / belief
“I've always heard wonderful, wonderful things about Dave, and I think everybody really did love him and see his value.”
47 / belief
“I think part of it too had to do with the fact that Microsoft was up in Seattle.”
48 / belief
“Bill would never be the smartest guy in the room, and I think that hurt his motivation.”
49 / belief
“Bill, of course, I think is still the controlling shareholder just by the amount of stock that he owns.”
50 / belief
“The vector that they think they're going to compete, at least in spreadsheets with VisiCalc, is that they're going to be on every platform out there. VisiCalc, I believe, was more or less basically only on the Apple II.”
51 / prediction
“The magic will take care of itself as long as we ensure this industry can just exist and do its thing.”
52 / belief
“I think what that basically ends up meaning a few years later is one application programming interface (API) that developers can target so that when they want to write a Windows app, it works on both NT and whatever the evolution of 3.”
53 / commitment
“Steve took it on his shoulders at this point in time when Microsoft is passing IBM to say, I am going to build, and we are going to learn as a company how to sell to enterprises.”
54 / commitment
“At age 13, with his best friend, who we will talk about very soon, he brought up the idea, I wonder what company I will be the CEO of when I grow up.”
55 / observation
“The way to scale is Make the software that is going to get distributed on the most PCs, and then that is the most interesting to software developers.”
56 / belief
“I think the bigger thing that just wasn't in their consideration or mindset was they (I think) assumed that once they entered the PC market, IBM was going to be the dominant player, so it didn't matter.”
57 / belief
“I think Bill Gates even says, we might've actually started a year or two too early.”
58 / belief
“I think that is part of what IBM is seeing and why they're deciding to now get into the industry with the personal computer.”
59 / belief
“I believe Microsoft and Apple actually did a licensing agreement while they were working together during this time that said, hey, Microsoft can use a lot of the stuff that's being developed for Mac for Windows 1.”
60 / uncertainty
“I know the Compaq story, but I don't know the story of the BIOS specifically. Enlighten us.”
61 / belief
“I think there are two things going on here, one small and one big. The small thing is actually related all the way back to the beginning of the episode, what you said, Ben, about the antitrust concerns within IBM.”
62 / belief
“General Electric isn't going to write a better spreadsheet than 1-2-3. I think that the technology complement to this law is the killer app.”
63 / belief
“Apple does do a deal to license a lot of "their intellectual property" which of course came from Xerox, to Microsoft. Apple, I think, was under the impression that it was just for Windows 1.”
64 / belief
“I do think a lot of their competitors, we didn't obviously didn't study Lotus to the same degree that we studied Microsoft here, we didn't study WordPerfect, et cetera, but I think there was a mindset that a lot of other folks are like, you ship software, and then the software was done.”
65 / evaluation
“I think on the wall, there's this almost printed out magazine thing that says the bug slayer that they've hung up over the wall.”
66 / evaluation
“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.”
67 / evaluation
“Traffic data is not a huge success. I think I read a few places, they make about $20,000 in revenue from it.”
68 / evaluation
“I will say it's a nice clarifying North Star because it really draws the line in the sand and says, we're in the software business.”
69 / recommendation
“If you're looking for someone who's good at visual identity, branding, slide decks, websites, I've worked with her on a few projects before and she's just awesome, so I wanted to recommend her.”
70 / evaluation
“Microsoft doesn't make an operating system at this point, because in the 8-bit generation, the operating system, I think, was a glorified bootloader to just get into the programming environment so that you could either write or load up the BASIC programs that Microsoft was going to interpret and then run.”
71 / evaluation
“The other thing that I think is really important to say that makes it work for Seattle in a way that I don't know that this could have worked in too many other places in the country is the University of Washington.”
72 / prediction
“Bill Gates says, "I think the multiples of technology stocks should be quite a bit lower than the multiples of stocks like Coke and Gillette because we are subject to complete changes in the rules.”
73 / preference
“It's a pretty delightful product. I bought them because I was in Hawaii and with my four month old son.”
74 / recommendation
“I highly recommend the Visa one as discussed earlier in the Network of Networks idea, if you haven't heard that”