Bill Gates is unde­ni­ably one of the most suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs in the world. He is also one of the most derided due to the poor usabil­ity of many Microsoft appli­ca­tions. The fol­low­ing arti­cle and this email are going a long way in repair­ing Gates’ image. Joel “on Soft­ware” Spol­sky on his time at Microsoft:

Bill Gates was amaz­ingly tech­ni­cal, and he knew more about the details of his company’s soft­ware than most of the peo­ple who worked on those details day in and day out. He didn’t med­dle in soft­ware if he trusted the peo­ple who were work­ing on it, but you couldn’t bull­shit him for a minute because he was a pro­gram­mer. A real, actual programmer.

Watch­ing non­pro­gram­mers try­ing to run soft­ware com­pa­nies is like watch­ing some­one who doesn’t know how to surf try­ing to surf. Even if he has great advis­ers stand­ing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run orga­ni­za­tions that do things that you don’t under­stand. But often, you can’t.