A couple of weeks back, Joel posted My First BillG Review which was mostly about the time Bill Gates reviewed his spec for the Basic programming language. While a very interesting read, there were a few quotes I just had to call out. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Microsoft has been very successful (sometimes employing questionable practices) and Gates is a key aspect of that - he’s a darn smart customer.
Joel has a couple of quotes that I just had to call out:
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
Amen. I have to admit, I find it very odd when manager types expose this belief that “management is management” - we don’t have to “get it” to sell it. Frankly, I don’t buy that, I think even at the c-level, these guys need to have a pretty darn good understanding of the limits of the products and technologies they sell. They don’t have to be able to program it, but they *must* understand what can be done and where the edge cases are. It’s pretty scary what happens when a technology company is run by an organization other than the one that produces it.
The next paragraph is just pure gold though:
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
Software isn’t the same as adult snack foods. In MBA-land, all the good little students were told it doesn’t matter what the peons do, as long as you have a degree from our school you’ll be able to run *any* company, no matter what it does. Sorry, software is just a different beast and you best understand what you’re getting into. Anyway - as usual, a great read!
