Early Microsoft tended to clone or buy successful products. They were not really into core R&D, only improvement R&D. They let others be the guinea pigs. Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.
Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.
That doesn't happen in poker.
Bill Joy co-founded SUN - but also wrote ex, vi, the BSD UNIX tcp/ip stack, and other things.
Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic and Netscape - and is a famous VC person now (of Andreessen Horowitz fame).
Bill Gates, also very technical (wrote early MS programs, BASIC interpreters etc).
Eric Schmidt (ex Google CEO) wrote Lex (the lexer, now more known by its GNU port, flex) and was SUN's first programmer.