Executives Love Bill Gates

BILL GATES HAS BEEN LAMBASTED with jokes from late night shows and computer moguls alike. Executives like Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison claim to hate him. Joel Klein and the DOJ love to open new antitrust cases against his company. But do these people really hate Gates?

With the recent events about Microsoft, you've got to be sorry for the guy. I mean, he goes on a PR tour to Belgium, and he gets smacked in the face by a pie! What more could go wrong?

How about your flagship piece of software crashing at the largest computer convention? At Comdex, a major convention of the computer industry, Bill Gates is like the Pope at the Vatican. He's been to all the Comdex conventions except for the first. He's made dozens of famous announcements there, like the original "vaporware" version of Windows in 1983. So when Bill Gates told the industry he was going to present a preview of his flagship product, Windows, all eyes were focused on him.

Then, just when he was trying to show the industry big shots how Windows 98 will make it easier to install products, it crashes! His assistant, who plugged in the scanner that made Windows 98 crash, didn't know what to do. But Bill did.

He joked about it! Imagine any other executive, standing up there, trying to joke about some bug in his software or hardware. 9 out of 10 would probably stand there and say red-faced, "Uh, well, I guess it isn't working right now."

Why can he joke about his chief product crashing in front of everyone? Because he knows no matter how much Windows 98 crashes, we'll buy it!

Meanwhile, Intel has been discovering bugs in its Pentium Pro and Pentium II chips--and they've been discovering the bugs in the privacy of their labs. Can Intel executives joke about the bugs? No. They know that if their chip is too inferior to a competitors, vendors will just use another chip, like they are doing with their cheaper chips. (No letters about NexGen and early Pentium chip; that was because NexGen used proprietary motherboards.) Even worse, if the public found out about the bugs and the press blames Intel for it, a market share decrease would be inevitable.

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