How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 491.12

+1.7%

Dec 8 3:59 PM EST

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To: alydar who wrote (51887)	10/20/2000 5:57:36 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) of 74651

I have met Larry Ellison on several occasions and once had dinner with him and a handful of others. In person he is charming, witty, very quick, not at all nasty or overbearing. I think he also has a good view of the industry and the players. His demeanor in private is nothing like the "public" Larry Ellison. I'm not sure I would use him as a role model but whatever the combination of ingredients that produced him is, it seems to have worked out pretty well. As far as "Barbarians Lead by Bill Gates" I think it is interesting historical fiction with little relationship to what really happened. On those occasions where the book covered events that I was involved in, the book was way off. Kind of "urban legend". What makes you think that Allen was the driving force behind the MSFT GUI? I can probably refer you to some better historical material that paints a rather different picture. Most people in the early 80s recognized that GUIs would be the eventual interface. I personally designed a GUI for a medical system in 1979, which saw fairly wide deployment in 1980. It used a trackball as a pointing device but aside from that, it had many of the features that later became the standard, including overlapping sizable windows represented by Icons when minimized, cutting and pasting of graphical information, and sidebars to navigate. I did not invent any of that stuff, it was widely discussed in the industry at that time. You did not have to be much of a genius to see what was needed. BTW I was corresponding with Allen at the time (1978-79) and he was not particularly tuned in to why GUIs were cool or how they might be done on a PC. I think Paul Allen is a bright guy who does not care very much whether any of the stuff he backs ever gets to fruition, he just likes to fool around.

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