| IDEA MAN A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen New York: Portfolio/Penguin, September 2011 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59184-382-5 | ||||
| ISBN 1-59184-382-0 | 358pp. | HC/FCI | $27.95 | |
Most everybody knows Bill Gates as the founder of Microsoft. Paul Allen is the other Microsoft founder. They met at Lakeside, which Allen describes as "the most prestigious private school in Seattle", when Allen was in tenth grade and Gates was in eighth. Both were bright and had a knack for technology; growing up at the dawn of personal computer technology, the two friends naturally gravitated to projects using computers. The basic outline of their story is well known. Allen fills in considerable detail in these pages, and not all of it is complimentary to Gates.
But Allen is a man with broader interests than computers and software.1 A precocious child, he was reading on his own before kindergarten. He loved reading about mechanical things, especially any kind of engine, from lawnmowers to rockets. His early avid reading of science fiction and experiments with rockets led to a fascination with space. He was, to borrow a line from Yellow Submarine, "a born lever-puller",2 and also had the natural desire to take things apart and see how they worked. And he loved music. His parents encouraged all this, buying him books on steam shovels and other machinery, chemistry kits, and the like — and enduring the occasional mishap. His father was the handyman, with a home workshop; his mother was an avid reader and had thousands of books. They were fairly well off, but not wealthy; his father was assistant director of the library system at the University of Washington.3
The wealth he earned from Microsoft enabled him to try his hand at numerous ventures and adventures. He invested heavily in cable television, trying to jumpstart what he called "the Wired World": everyone connected by some sort of computer network. His vision was spot on, but this venture didn't go so well, for complex reasons. He also took a flyer with Dreamworks, learning somewhat about Hollywood promises.
He bought up the Portland Trailblazers and later the Seattle Seahawks; though it was touch and go for a time, both these teams turned around thanks in no small part to his active participation. With his sister Jody's able help, he created the Experience Music Museum at Seattle Center, near the Space Needle. He pledged millions to revitalize an area of Seattle's waterfront with an industrial park, but voters twice rejected it. (He's still working on improving that area, but doesn't give details.) He's currently funding three seminal projects which could have far-reaching impact:
In the annals of the personal computer revolution, Paul Allen and Bill Gates represent a unique partnership. They both were bright and had awesome abilities at programming. (That includes not only coding skill, but a certain perfectionism: the dedication to sit at a terminal for hours, repeatedly submitting a routine for compilation or other processing and then poring over the source code to pin down what went wrong with that run.) Both also had an above-average acumen for business.
Beyond that, they were complementary. Gates had the competitive drive to push Microsoft into new markets and up to new heights; Allen was the technological visionary: he foresaw the sorts of things that could be done with computers, and what the public would go for, better than Gates. He was also better at the hardware.
"Sometimes it seemed that Bill so utterly identified with Microsoft that he'd get confused about where the company left off and he began. I didn't feel the same way. The business was hugely important, but it did not define me." – Page 168 |
That difference in perspective put them more and more at odds over the years, and ultimately drove Allen out of the company. He simply got tired of being browbeaten for no good reason, and of Gates pushing at every perceived opportunity to expand his own share of equity in the company, and reduce Allen's. Allen severed his formal ties with Microsoft in 1982.
The two brain studies are under way at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, which grew out of a 2002 charrette, a brainstorming session with 21 scientists aboard Allen's yacht Tatoosh anchored offshore at Nassau in the Bahamas. The Institute launched in 2003.
Finally, Paul Allen underwrote the initial phase of the Allen Telescope Array, a radio astronomy facility whose primary purpose is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. When expanded beyond its current 42 antennas to the full complement of 350, it will be the world's best tool for that search. By means of a company called Mojave Aerospace Ventures, he funded Burt Rutan's development of White Knight and SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.
From Chapter 16, Space:
"The remarkable thing about MAV (Mojave Aerospace Ventures) was that it built a manned space program from scratch with a staff that averaged around thirty people. And they didn't just engineer a spacecraft; they also built the launch airplane, flight simulator, avionics system, and rocket motor test facility." – Page 225 |
The story told in this chapter, with its white-knuckle moments, is easily the most gripping in the book. Pulling an all-nighter to code the final iteration of a BASIC interpreter has its moments, but does not compare to launching a human to the edge of space.4
"We still weren't certain that SpaceShipOne had gotten to space. Mike told Sally that he didn't think he'd made it; Burt was more confident but still had concerns. According to the low end of our in-house calculations, we'd cleared it by an infinitesimal sixteen feet. At last we received word from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, which had tracked us on radar. SpaceShipOne's apogee was officially 328,491 feet, barely a tenth of a percent over the threshold. After flying sixty-two miles straight up, Mike had passed the magic line by the length of a 5-iron to the green. If the plane had been eight ounces heavier, Burt said, we'd have come up short." – Page 234 |
Not everything into which Paul Allen put his hand and his considerable resources has turned to gold (either monetary or intellectual.) His track record, though, is very good. That, I think, is because he has the wide background, fueled by curiosity, and the wide-ranging vision to see future implications of current technology. He really is an Idea Man. As he puts it:
"Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead. The creative path is rocky, with the risk of failure ever present and no guarantees. But even with its detours and blind alleys, it's the only road that I find fulfilling." – Page 332 |
I enjoyed reading most of this book. I am not a sports fan, so I only got through about half of the chapters on the teams he owns. But I found the rest of it fascinating. It's well written, and Allen is reflective and not at all self-congratulatory about his impressive achievements. I was tempted to knock my rating down one notch because IMO he omits some important parts of personal computer history (like the Amiga) and glosses over some details of the Microsoft antitrust case. But then I reflected that he's not all about Microsoft (see sidebar) so I bumped it back up to the top. There is a fine selection of color and black&white pictures. (Check out the one with the stack of books.) An Appendix (hidden behind the Acknowledgements) sets forth ten problems that must be solved in order to realize Project Halo. Despite all that, however, I do not rate this book a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.