“I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”
— In a new book, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen claims that after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1982, he overheard co-founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, now CEO, discussing how they could dilute Allen’s stake in the company. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft,” which will go on sale April 17, has created a rift between Gates and Allen, although both camps released statements saying how much they valued the other. Vanity Fair has an excerpt from the book, in which Allen details how he and Gates met as teenagers, how they both eventually realized their limitations, and the early days of Microsoft. The WSJ says “the book gives a revisionist take on some details of Microsoft’s history
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Likewise, you may remember from Steve Wozniak's book about how Jobs approached him to do some programming work for some company, promising to split that company's payout to them 50-50. But Wozniak later found out that Jobs had hogged lion's share of the money, and only given Wozniak a much smaller amount.
Sounds quite murky.
The same was said about Steve jobs ripping code off Charles Simonyi of Xerox.
This is really no big deal. This is a common phenomena when start ups finally start making money. There were clearly no hard feelings considering they still worked together after that. As usual, media is making much ado something trivial!
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