Big Tech Bosses Should Channel Gates
by Miki Saxon
Looking at founders, such as Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg, you get the feeling they believe they are all powerful — more so than even governments.
It’s not a new attitude; Bill Gates learned they aren’t the hard way.
The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, according to Mr. Smith, “learned that life actually does require compromise and governments actually are stronger than companies,” if only after a bruising confrontation.
Mr. Gates, who wrote the foreword in Mr. Smith’s book, recalled that for years he was proud of how little time he spent talking to people in government. “As I learned the hard way in the antitrust suit,” he wrote, “that was not a wise position to take.”
Lesson learned well enough that you don’t see Microsoft on the common list of big tech, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.
That lesson hasn’t hurt Microsoft, which is valued at more than a trillion dollars by investors based on profitability, not funding.
Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, is credited most often for the change in Microsoft fortunes, i.e., its culture. attitude and product mix.
You don’t hear as much about Microsoft president Brad Smith, but he’s the guy who made friends with government and helps with policy.
“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.”
Responsibility.
The thing that so many founders don’t see as being within their purview.
Unlike Microsoft, their future will be decided more in Europe than in the US.
But the revised interpretation of an old US law could change things drastically.
And that change is being driven in by a surprising source.
Join me next Tuesday to learn more about it.
Image credit: luquidat
