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The Conference Board Review® Article
Rewriting History
Just because Bill Gates says it doesn’t make it so.
By E.J. Heresniak
E.J. Heresniak consults for a variety of businesses, drawing on more than thirty years of experience with IBM, McGraw-Hill, Standard & Poor's, and academia. Visit his website at www.gatestreetpartners.com or e-mail him at edheres@aol.com.
In early January, I visited China's version of a Holocaust museum in Nanjing, a city of more than four million just upstream from Shanghai on the Yangtze River. From time to time, Nanjing has been the capital city of China. There, in the opening stages of World War II in Asia, Japanese troops apparently brutally killed scores of thousands of Chinese — military personnel and civilians — in a rampage recounted by Iris Chang in her book The Rape of Nanking. I say "apparently" because some Japanese officials and Japanese schoolbooks say it didn't happen.
History can be like that. Some parts of history are vigorously disputed long after what happened maybe happened, like whatever happened between the Armenians and the Turks. Some treaties between Native Americans and the U.S. government are still being contested, in and out of court, a couple hundred years after they were signed.
Judgments of history are often in the eyes of the beholders; winners usually write the accounts. Such judgments are challenged when even indisputable facts put people in difficult spots, like where some Japanese think they'll be if they ever own up to all the nastiness of their World War II-era militarism. Much of the eerily beautiful Nanjing museum is devoted to establishing the facts through the testimony of survivors and perpetrators recorded in contemporary diaries and photographs and late-in-life video interviews all on display. It's a compelling case.
Microsoft also provides a compelling case of rewriting history, albeit hardly on the same scale as denying that a massacre of thousands ever took place. Bill Gates, ruthless monopolist and now honored philanthropist, fudged some facts a few months back in defending Microsoft's track record of innovation. The company had invited nine influential bloggers to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., to give fresh-eyed, unbiased feedback on product direction and plans. Gates joined the group at the end of the day for some Q&A that got interesting, particularly from a historical perspective.
A young blogger named Jonathan Snook questioned Microsoft's culture of innovation, saying to Gates: "I've often felt that Microsoft has certainly been reactionary to the market."
"Oh really?" shot back Gates, whose extemporaneous response was a hit in the press as he bitingly defended Microsoft and his personal reputation. "The myth of all these things. We did 8080 word processors, 8080, eight-bit machine word processors. Every stupid thing, we did first." Gates went on to enumerate a number of items that he insisted Microsoft pioneered — and complained about an anti-Microsoft bias that erases its pioneering contributions.
His protests were heartfelt and not entirely off base — and more than a little revisionist. One fellow, reacting to the exchange between Snook and Gates, wrote: "I think Microsoft does innovate in some areas but the innovations never seem to become truly successful products even in the business world. Windows is successful because they have a choke hold on the industry." I agree. In his spirited defense to the innovation challenge, Gates said, "So, let history be rewritten at all times. But there's no way to get it straight, I guess."
I guess so too. Gates also digressed to claim fatherhood of word processing. Yet in college, on IBM's first PC, I was using a word processor called Easywriter, created by a fellow on work release from a jail sentence. It wasn't until three years later that Microsoft released an early version of Word, which itself was a derivative of a long series of inventions from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
Word processing, which usually means writing, changing, fixing, and printing all kinds of documents without having to retype everything the way people did with typewriters, didn't evolve from the computer business at all. It came from the electronic-typewriter business, which itself evolved from mechanical typewriters, ancient devices now found in museums, at an occasional garage sale, at the fingertips of self-important writers, and maybe with Andy Rooney. IBM scientists and mechanical engineers came up with all sorts of inventions to improve them, including using magnetic cards and tapes to reduce the chore of retyping things or making small changes.
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Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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