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The forgotten partner
By Gary Rivlin |
May 8, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
PITY Paul Allen. All those billions, but Microsoft's "other" founder doesn't receive the credit or respect he feels he deserves. Sure, those vast storehouses of cash Allen earned while he was still in his 20s have allowed him to buy a pair of big-name professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers. He can soothe his resentments riding the seas on a 126-meter yacht, tended to by a full-time crew of more than 50. The yacht holds a basketball court, a movie theater and a fully equipped recording studio, complete with killer ocean views, that has allowed him to rub shoulders with the fabulous - Mick Jagger, Bono, Paul McCartney and a long list of famous names that populate this memoir. "One of the greatest creative minds in the world of technology," writes Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seahawks and therefore an Allen employee, in a blurb gracing the book's back cover. Tellingly, no one remotely connected to the technology world echoes that sentiment.
Allen works hard in the pages of "Idea Man" to prove Coach Carroll's point that he is a tech visionary. He was in the 10th grade and Bill Gates in the 8th when they met in the computer room of the Seattle private school both attended. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, the two were eating pizza when Allen speculated about the possibility that one day people would read a newspaper via computer. Gates, Allen tells us, dismissed the idea as lame-brained. Ouch.
There are a lot of moments like this in a memoir that isn't so much Allen's life story as an extended brief arguing that Paul Gardner Allen deserves a prominent place in the pantheon of pioneers who gave us our wired world - to prove, as Wired magazine once said of him, that he is not just the "accidental zillionaire."
Allen spends chapter after chapter arguing (sometimes convincingly) that he was as critical to the founding of Microsoft as his legendary former colleague - but the more he stays with the topic, the more plain it becomes that Microsoft would have been nothing without Gates. Recovering from Hodgkin's disease but mainly just sick of fighting with his more forceful partner, Allen abruptly quit in 1983 to venture out on his own. Somehow Microsoft managed just fine without him.
The book reads well. (Allen writes in the acknowledgments that Jeff Coplon, a seasoned ghost writer, "helped me to realize the book I had envisioned.") And there's a refreshing candor to the prose, too. Allen spends the better part of one chapter demonstrating how a meddlesome owner can foul up a basketball franchise; in another, he shows that being too smart by half can mess up a professional football team. He confesses to losing US$8 billion investing in cable companies in the 2000s. And then there was his decision to sell the large stake he had amassed in AOL in the early 1990s. He kicks himself for letting Gates convince him that a pipsqueak like AOL stood no chance against Microsoft, but he also shares the colossal size of his blunder: selling was a US$40-billion mistake.
Yet bum advice and lapses of vision are hardly the worst Allen has to say about Gates. The Silicon Valley way had always been to divide ownership in a new startup 50-50, but Gates, the son of a prominent lawyer, had his own ideas about what was fair. Allen had the original idea for Microsoft. The two worked the same breakneck schedule in those feverish weeks when the company was born. Yet Gates wrote the program that served as Microsoft's first product, whereas Allen did the less glamorous work of creating the tools Gates needed to do his job.
The book is supposedly a "memoir" - the word is right there on the cover - yet the author reveals almost nothing about himself. Peter Gabriel, he tells us, is the kind of person who will offer you a spot of afternoon tea. But after 350 pages, it's not clear what kind Allen might be.
Allen works hard in the pages of "Idea Man" to prove Coach Carroll's point that he is a tech visionary. He was in the 10th grade and Bill Gates in the 8th when they met in the computer room of the Seattle private school both attended. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, the two were eating pizza when Allen speculated about the possibility that one day people would read a newspaper via computer. Gates, Allen tells us, dismissed the idea as lame-brained. Ouch.
There are a lot of moments like this in a memoir that isn't so much Allen's life story as an extended brief arguing that Paul Gardner Allen deserves a prominent place in the pantheon of pioneers who gave us our wired world - to prove, as Wired magazine once said of him, that he is not just the "accidental zillionaire."
Allen spends chapter after chapter arguing (sometimes convincingly) that he was as critical to the founding of Microsoft as his legendary former colleague - but the more he stays with the topic, the more plain it becomes that Microsoft would have been nothing without Gates. Recovering from Hodgkin's disease but mainly just sick of fighting with his more forceful partner, Allen abruptly quit in 1983 to venture out on his own. Somehow Microsoft managed just fine without him.
The book reads well. (Allen writes in the acknowledgments that Jeff Coplon, a seasoned ghost writer, "helped me to realize the book I had envisioned.") And there's a refreshing candor to the prose, too. Allen spends the better part of one chapter demonstrating how a meddlesome owner can foul up a basketball franchise; in another, he shows that being too smart by half can mess up a professional football team. He confesses to losing US$8 billion investing in cable companies in the 2000s. And then there was his decision to sell the large stake he had amassed in AOL in the early 1990s. He kicks himself for letting Gates convince him that a pipsqueak like AOL stood no chance against Microsoft, but he also shares the colossal size of his blunder: selling was a US$40-billion mistake.
Yet bum advice and lapses of vision are hardly the worst Allen has to say about Gates. The Silicon Valley way had always been to divide ownership in a new startup 50-50, but Gates, the son of a prominent lawyer, had his own ideas about what was fair. Allen had the original idea for Microsoft. The two worked the same breakneck schedule in those feverish weeks when the company was born. Yet Gates wrote the program that served as Microsoft's first product, whereas Allen did the less glamorous work of creating the tools Gates needed to do his job.
The book is supposedly a "memoir" - the word is right there on the cover - yet the author reveals almost nothing about himself. Peter Gabriel, he tells us, is the kind of person who will offer you a spot of afternoon tea. But after 350 pages, it's not clear what kind Allen might be.
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