Paul Allen’s raw retelling of the early days at Microsoft in his upcoming memoir, “Idea Man,” surprised some in the Seattle tech community who wondered why the reclusive billionaire would attack Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer after all of these years. Sour grapes? Dirty laundry? Maybe. But Crosscut’s Knute Berger today applauds Allen for stepping outside the rules of “Seattle Nice,” and simply telling his side of the story in what became one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
Berger’s piece is among the most thoughtful we’ve read on the topic of Allen’s memoir, and we’ve received permission from Crosscut to run excerpts from the essay on GeekWire (which can be read in its entirety here.) We also weighed in on the spat between Gates and Allen on last week’s GeekWire podcast, with both Todd and I saying that we believed that the Microsoft co-founder was doing more damage to his legacy than good with some of his recent efforts.
Berger, a former editor of Seattle Weekly who has had run-ins with Allen’s minions over the years, applauded Allen for sharing his story.
Allen’s memories and observations about the early years with Gates ring true. The teletype computer printer that clacked away in a closet-sized room at Lakeside is now on display at the school. I think it should be on display at the new Museum of History and Industry as an icon for what that now-antique piece of technology spawned. Allen’s description of Gates’ prickly and competitive personality, his brilliance, his ruthlessness, are not a surprise, being well-documented in other books and court records. But they mean more coming from someone who worked with Gates so long, who, like all your high-school and college buddies, has seen the best and worst of you while you were still in the making.
The page-turning element of these early years is twofold. One is the tension that builds as two computer geeks stumble toward making history; the other is in the yin-yang of their partnership, which in the early phases is kind of a Lennon-McCartney partnership of encouragement, tension, competition, synergy, taking their enterprise to new levels despite the odds. And it is clear that Allen wants to make the case for his place in the history of it all: It was he who suggested they start the company and encouraged Gates to drop out of Harvard to do it; it was he who came up with the company name, Micro-Soft, which not only brilliantly described their niche (software for microcomputers) but made them seem kind of cuddly, small and warm, when the goal was global domination, big and hard.
Berger continues:
What I take away is that Allen doesn’t claim to have made Microsoft what it is today, but he clearly says that it would not exist if it weren’t for his part in those early years. Is it true? A point of pride? A revision of history? A he-said-he-said we’ll never sort out? Historians will work on it, but they’re being helped mightily by knowing Allen’s version of events.
And he concludes:
If Gates is the exceptional billionaire, the one-of-a-kind who became rich and now devotes his time to philanthropy and the astonishing challenge of global health (his foundation also helps fund Crosscut), Allen is the 12th Man Billionaire, the guy who does the cool stuff that you would want to do too, who follows his intellectual passions, who experiments, who seems to truly enjoy what he has. It’s a life we can envy, at least from the outside, forgetting, of course, the battles with cancer that would darken any fairy tale. There’s something about Allen’s passions that portray a man of expansive interests, restless curiosity, the son of a librarian whose billions have opened up the book of the world for himself.
No wonder he wants to write new chapters.
You can follow Knute Berger’s columns on Crosscut here.