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Looking back at those early days, if you could give that 21-year-old you just starting Microsoft some advice, what would you—is there something that you know now that you didn’t then that would have been useful?

Bill Gates: Not really. I mean, you can say, hey, you’re going to be successful, so don’t work so hard or something like that, but then it might completely erase the whole thing. Or learn that you’re going to need a mix of skills, not just engineering skills. But at first the fact that we were just over-the-top engineering-centric wasn’t so stupid.
Today, as you get a large company, having a push that says, hey, we’ve got to stay somewhat engineering-centric, even as you have all these different skill sets, you know, I could have told myself that guys’ IQ, it’s not as fungible to learn other things. If they show IQ in domain A, you know, I always thought, well, then just use them in domain B.
And that worked a bit. You even see another company in the industry doing this bit where you’ll hire somebody who’s a good scientist, and you say they can be a programmer, and you only—you interview them on sort of their—the depth of knowledge about the field they’ve spent in, and assume they can come to the other field. Some of that is true. But when you go into, say, management-type things or dealing with people-type things, then the number of people whose IQ is fungible is surprisingly low. The thing that I would drool over is to walk over to Microsoft Research and see that here are people spending full time on vision, full time on speech, full time on machine learning, full time on software proof, where at early Microsoft we couldn’t give back to the intellectual base.
I mean, that’s the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career is that you find people who are so good at one thing, and where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, very similar, and yet they’re very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other.

But when i walk into Scout Labs this young startup on top of the 13 floor of a gorgeous building on Fremont, the one thing that strikes me apart from the fact that the CEO is a woman and practically younger than me is the SPEED. The speed in which they talk and work and work the computer. The speed in which they zip around the interface. The speed in which their brains work, they way they map mental models to different applications online. i mean i am used to deep, intellectual, profound discussions made in classrooms, but these guys are machines. They are talking and moving a mile a minute. They are blazing. It’s exhilarating watching them. It’s fun to watch them with their ultra-thin lap tops, email and ichating and iMing and sending things to printers all at the same time. It’s fascinating watching how their minds work.

So what goes through the minds of executives who don’t sweat the small stuff? Don’t they realize that critics and bloggers will find and publicize the limitations? Don’t they realize that customers nowadays can compare notes, can warn each other away? And in a crowded field like digital frames, why on earth can’t they see that the only way to differentiate is to be better than the other guys?