> в книге Аллена нет прачечных историй про отжим. ни на сто второй, ни на сто тридцать первой.Видимо придется таки тыкнуть командира носом:
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When Bill asked me for a walk and talk one day, I knew something was up. We’d gone a block when he cut to the chase: “I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave Harvard,” he said. “I deserve more than 60 percent.”
“How much more?”
“I was thinking 64– 36.”
Again, I had that moment of surprise. But I’m a stubbornly logical person, and I tried to consider Bill’s argument objectively. His intellectual horsepower had been critical to BASIC, and he would be central to our success moving forward. That much was obvious. But how to calculate the value of my Big Idea— the mating of a high- level language with a microprocessor— or my persistence in bringing Bill to see it? What were my development tools worth to the “property” of the partnership? Or my stewardship of our product line, or my day- to- day brainstorming with our programmers? I might have haggled and offered Bill two points instead of four, but my heart wasn’t in it. So I agreed. At least now we can put this to bed, I thought.
Our formal partnership agreement, signed on February 3, 1977, had two other provisions of note. Paragraph 8 allowed an exemption from business duties for “a partner who is a full-time student,” a clause geared to the possibility that Bill might go back for his degree. And in the event of “irreconcilable differences,” paragraph 12 stated that Bill could demand that I withdraw from the partnership.
Later, after our relationship changed, I wondered how Bill had arrived at the numbers he’d proposed that day. I tried to put myself in his shoes and reconstruct his thinking, and I concluded that it was just this simple: What’s the most I can get? I think Bill knew that I would balk at a two- to- one split, and that 64 percent was as far as he could go. He might have argued that the numbers reflected our contributions, but they also exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer. I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible. In my experience, he believed that agreements were open to renegotiation until they were signed and sealed. There’s a degree of elasticity in any business dealing, a range for what might seem fair, and
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My invention allowed Microsoft to share in that success. We
sold approximately 25,000 SoftCards in 1981 alone, worth about $8 million in sales, and continued our strong run into 1983 before imitators cut into our margins. For Apple II owners who’d been limited to a thin catalog of native applications, the SoftCard gave them two computers in one. Suddenly they had access to tens of thousands of CP/M- compatible programs written in BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL. On the flip side, the SoftCard represented a huge windfall for Peachtree Software, creator of the popular Peachtree Accounting, which with no development costs had a new market handed to it. And of course, our new product was a boon to Gary Kildall and Digital Research. More copies of CP/M would be sold for use in the Apple II, a hitherto incompatible machine, than for any other computer.
For Microsoft, the SoftCard provided a point of entry into the Apple environment. It gave us a new and substantial customer base for our Disk BASIC and other languages. Moreover, the SoftCard turned computer- pricing strategy on its head. In the old world, everyone from IBM to MITS had bundled software as a throw- in with the machine. Now we were bundling a cheaply made piece of hardware to help us sell BASIC and our expensive suite of software. The SoftCard was the razor; our languages were the blades.
The SoftCard lent Microsoft a needed revenue boost in an awful recession year. Perhaps most important, it gave us comfort in abandoning the 8- bit development world and turning our energies to software for the 8086 chip, a shift that would prove critical in landing our big contract with IBM less than a year later. As Bill noted in a 1993 interview for the Smithsonian:
[The] question was, “Should we spread those products over to other 8- bit chips, like the 6502 that runs in [the Apple II]? Or, should we immediately move up and do 16- bit software?” And I said, “No, we are going to do 16-bit software.” Everybody was a little bit disappointed because it meant that we wouldn’t be able to sell onto these machines. That is when Paul invented the idea of the SoftCard, so that we could actually take our Intel software and run it on this machine, and, at the same time, go ahead and devote our resources to being way ahead of everybody else in developing software for the 8086.
I had already been instituting the move to 16- bit software, but Bill wasn’t wrong about the SoftCard’s importance. Under the circumstances, I felt that our 64–36 partnership split was out of whack. Bill had set a precedent by claiming extra equity for his work on Altair BASIC, another exceptional contribution. Now it was time, I thought, to augment my share. A modest adjustment in the ratio seemed only right.
But when I made my case, Bill would have none of it. “I don’t ever want to talk about this again,” he said. “Do not bring it up.”
In that moment, something died for me. I’d thought that our partnership was based on fairness, but now I saw that Bill’s self- interest overrode all other considerations. My partner was out to grab as much of the pie as possible and hold on to it, and that was something I could not accept. I didn’t have it out with Bill at the time. I sucked it up and thought, OK . . . but one day I’m out of here.
