My 15 minutes with Bill Gates

In the early days of PC computing Joshua Greenbaum crossed swords with Bill Gates. Greenbaum thought he had the best of the encounter. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Once upon a time, when Bill Gates still flew with the public and I was a budding journalist in need of a haircut, I had a number of opportunities to interview and otherwise interact with him.

These occasions were often contentious, intriguing and frustrating. Part of the problem was that my job in the mid-1980s was to cover a thing called Unix and a related group of individuals travelling under the rubric of the open software movement.

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Gates was rabidly anti-Unix, for reasons too complex to detail here. Consequently I was persona non amata, if not non grata, in Gates' presence.

We sparred on a number of issues. To Gates' credit, he usually managed to curb his wrath enough to hear most of my questions before ripping me to shreds, or at least trying to.

But one incident sticks in my mind for both the audacity of my question and the cluelessness of Gates' answer.

The date and time of the incident are lost in the fog of memory but the topic of the press conference was Microsoft's introduction of its multimedia PC concept, which puts it around 1988.

We're talking of the stone age of PC computing. Think 64KB RAM, 10MB hard drives and monochrome monitors. The spreadsheet and word processor were the killer apps. Windows hadn't even made it to its 3.0 version.

I was sceptical about how far Microsoft and the PC standard could go.

So there I was, in the audience, as Bill Gates was trying to warm up the market with the newest cool thing, which he was calling the multimedia PC. I wasn't buying.

Before becoming a journalist I had had a real job as a computer graphics programmer, working with some very high-end systems that cost, believe it or not, upwards of $250,000. We had specialised graphics engines, specialised monitors and fancy plotters. It was all so hard to work with, you needed a programmer to make multimedia things happen.

And there was Gates pretending we were all going to do all this on a PC, and that it was going to be fun and useful. Yeah, right.

Then he went through the hardware and software spec that would be the foundation of this new computing platform, followed by a demo of what we could look forward to once this new era arrived.

As I recall the demo was a children's game with bad graphics and a lousy user experience. It was hard to see where Gates and company could possibly take this lame little spec.

So I raised my hand and said something cheeky like, "Bill, what is the killer app that's going to make this multimedia PC a must-have on every desktop?"

His answer was impressively unimpressive. It was apparent that there was no killer app to take this funny concept and make something of it.

He fumbled around and finally said the spec was needed to open up the unknown possibilities of multimedia. I left with my smirk well-justified, or so I thought.

The rest, as they say, is history, and it belonged as much to Gates' vision of a multimedia PC as anything else. As early thinking around the web emerged from some Unix-heads at Cern, it became obvious to me that I now had the answer to my question.

Regardless of Gates' hesitation, his vision was as keen as it needed to be. Instead of being present at another worthless press conference, I had been present at one of the key conceptual moments in the future of computing - the world wide web - and Gates had, once again, called it right.

So, as Gates heads off into retirement and I look forward to slaving away for another 20 years to pay for my kids' education, I see two lessons from this experience.

The first is he usually got things right, as long as you gave him enough time to let the market catch up. That was his singular gift, and hopefully he'll apply it to philanthropy with similar results.

The second lesson is if Gates is usually right, perhaps it's time I shifted careers and got into philanthropy myself. He is clearly on to something here and, who knows, in 20 years he may have figured out a way to put philanthropy on every desktop too.

Wouldn't that be a good idea?

Original article: My 15 minutes with Bill Gates, and how the Web was born from ZDNet Australia