Happy birthday to Microsoft.
The tech behemoth turns 50 this month. While it has revolutionized personal computing and become one of the world’s biggest companies today, there are some things one of its leaders might’ve done differently if he could turn back time.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates recently talked about the advice he’d give his younger self on a podcast featuring the three CEOs who’ve led Microsoft in the company’s 50-year history: himself, his successor Steve Ballmer, and now Satya Nadella.
“Well, there was a lot of learning about how to grow the company and bring in different skill sets, how to manage people,” he said. “I certainly at first thought that engineering skill meant you would be good at other things. That turned out to be wrong. So we had to really build teams in a more mixed, diverse set of skills than I expected.”
Gates also said he’d have advised his younger self to be more politically savvy.
“You know, I might tell my younger self, watch out for the government,” he said. “I might have a little bit of a tussle with them. I didn’t anticipate that. I was pretty naive about not engaging in Washington, DC, as soon as I should have.”
Microsoft was the subject of a massive antitrust case in the 1990s brought by the US Department of Justice and several states, which alleged Microsoft was becoming a monopoly.
In 2000, a judge found that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws, and Microsoft was ordered to split into two companies. An appeals court later tossed the judge’s order, and the Justice Department gave up its effort to split up Microsoft. The DOJ and Microsoft settled in 2001.
Gates has mulled advice to his younger self before. He periodically does “Ask Me Anything” sessions on Reddit, and in 2017, one user asked him, “If you could give 19-year-old Bill Gates some advice, what would it be?”
Gates answered: “I would explain that smartness is not single-dimensional and not quite as important as I thought it was back then. I would say you might explore the developing world before you get into your forties. I wasn’t very good socially back then, but I am not sure there is advice that would fix that — maybe I had to be awkward and just grow up.”
