>And, speaking of questions about MS ..., just what did Gates contribute to
the success of the organization? Does anyone know? Is he a technical genius
and a business genius rolled into one? Or was he just a geek in the right
place at the right time?<
My reading suggests that BG is mostly a business -- i.e., marketing -- genius, though he's clearly not some non-computer industry exec brought in to whip a computer company into business shape (as happened at Apple). Win95, like Win 3.1 before it, is an imitation of the Mac OS, though now it's moving into improving on the MacOS. The various parts of MS Office are similar. DOS, Win's predecessor, is a version of CP-M (the pre-DOS OS) that BG purchased. BG's computing genius seems to be connected with MS Basic, a product long since forgotten.
BTW, a lot of evidence suggests that BG has a mild case of autism (a.k.a. "Asperger's Syndrome, like Albert Einstein, my son, and many "nerds"). Among other things, I am told, he has a trampoline in his house that he jumps up and down on to deal with over-stimulation. He, like similar folks, has an immense ability to concentrate intensely on individual issues for long periods of time. He also has a tendency to look at the world in a way that's very different from the way ordinary people do. Ordinary folks tend to get a lot of ideas intuitively from interaction with their fellow human beings. People with AS develop most of their ideas alone.
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned greedy." -- Herbert Hoover