Turning the Microsoft pages

In his autobiography, Paul G Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, portrays his role during the company’s early years as the visionary and technology strategist, while Bill Gates is presented as a genius business tactician.

At one point in the book, which will be published on Tuesday, Allen describes Gates as a partner “who could take my ideas and magnify them.” At another point, Allen writes, “Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business.”

Nevertheless, Allen denied that the book was an effort to swing the pendulum of history in his direction, to claim more of the credit for critical decisions at the birth of the personal computer industry.

“I just think this is my side of the story told in an unvarnished, warts-and-all way,” Allen said.

Fiery confrontations between Allen and Gates drew attention last month after an excerpt of the book was published in the May issue of Vanity Fair and on the magazine’s website. The clashes came over product decisions, hiring plans and their shares in the young company.

In the book, Allen quotes from a letter he wrote to Gates in June 1982, explaining why he planned to leave Microsoft. “Over the years,” Allen wrote in the letter, “the result of these and other incidents has been the gradual destruction of both our friendship and our ability to work together.”

Later that year, Allen was told that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and while he was successfully treated, Allen resigned as a Microsoft employee in February 1983. That was less than eight years after the company was founded, and three years before Microsoft became a public company in 1986. Still, by 1983, Microsoft was well on its way to becoming a powerhouse company in the PC era.

“We had an amazing friendship and an amazing partnership,” Allen said.

Yet, as the book makes clear, the friendship was mended over time. When Allen was again struck with cancer in 2009, Gates was one of his most frequent visitors. “He was everything you’d want from a friend, caring and concerned,” Allen writes.

Their friendship was forged over many years, beginning at Lakeside School in Seattle, where they met and first encountered computing, on a time-sharing terminal there linked to a mainframe miles away.

Allen describes his years at Microsoft as being “like a failed romance. Parts of the relationship had been wonderful, but I remembered the negatives, too.”

But bonds, if loosened, remained. Allen was a member of the Microsoft board until 2000 and his stake in the company made him quite wealthy, worth an estimated $13.5 billion, enabling him to own two professional sports teams, the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks, and finance ambitious research projects.

Allen said he still owned a “substantial,” though undisclosed, holding of Microsoft shares.

Gates issued a statement when the excerpt appeared in Vanity Fair, saying his recollection of incidents differed from Allen’s, but that he still valued Allen’s friendship and his contributions to Microsoft.

The book’s title, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-Founder of Microsoft, captures Allen’s view of his role.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service