The feds, the little guys, and the importance of being Bill Gates

Whom do you most admire in the industry?
Whom do I most admire? There are a lot of people. Obviously Bill Gates. Gates is the richest guy in the world. It's very important to our industry that he is the richest guy in the world. That makes computers interesting to everybody, right?

He's sacrificing his life in a certain way for the rest of us. The interest he makes on the money he already has liquidated is more than most anybody needs to live well. And he could be living that way, but he's not. Gates likes what he's doing.

That's not good for a lot of other companies, but it's bringing computers to many people. He hurts some companies. I've been hurt by his stuff. He's copied my stuff, but I think it's been good for the industry. I admire that, other than personally how it might have been. He's a person to admire, his tenacity. CD-ROMs? Microsoft kept at it and kept at it. Pen computing? They kept at it when nobody else did.

I admire Mitch Kapor. He's a real entrepreneur, starting Lotus, then investing in Slate, and now Trellix. He also went and did the Electronic Frontier Foundation, went to Washington, and tried to change the world and represent our industry. For many years, he was the main voice of our industry to the public figures. The government can really mess things up for the PC business.

Does government understand the industry better now?
There is this problem with government in that it only sees one way of doing things. It's the old story of the blind men who encounter the elephant. One saw the leg and said it looks like a tree, the other said it looks like this and looks like that. It's really all of those things. A lot of legislators still are only seeing once little piece of the elephant and don't understand the whole picture. That's why it's helpful that our industry is becoming more pervasive. Normal people who are using [the technology] understand it. Youngsters who are using it in school and are getting older understand it, but a lot of people in the legislature are there because they weren't in technology, and they're older and too busy doing other things.

Obviously, they don't get the encryption stuff. When the telephone came about, the fact that you could tap lines was a bug in the system. We didn't make it purposely so that you could tap lines, but we figured out, "Oh, you could tap lines!" Well, law enforcement started depending on that. So now they think they must have that type of thing. Let's get real about this; let's let things move ahead.

There are only some people who think that because it is possible that some child may run into something on the Net, then we'll have stop it all. Now the fact that the child could go in a room, open up a drawer, pull out a pistol, and shoot themselves doesn't seem to bother them maybe as much. Let's figure out a way of just stopping the problem you're worried about without throwing out all the other good stuff. That involves understanding the technology.

On the other hand, the Clinton administration, compared to any one before, is so much more high-tech. If it weren't for [the White House site], the Internet may not have caught on as much. When the browser first came out, Mosaic, what did you do? How did you show it off? You went to "www.whitehouse.gov." Why? So you could see Socks and listen to Socks. It sounds so hokey, but it's true; that helped get things going. It's like Space Invaders got the Apple going. VisiCalc was the reason you supposedly bought the Apple, but you really bought it to play Space Invaders.

Is there a Bricklin's Law?
Yes, I've made one. When the product is a no-brainer to buy, when it pays for itself the first two weeks, that's when you really have something. That's how you know you have a real win. When we had VisiCalc, you could buy the Apple II, you could buy the Diablo printer, and you could buy VisiCalc--$5,000 total. It would pay itself back if you were using time-sharing in one month or two weeks, because that's what you were paying for it per month.

When you bought a Macintosh, a LaserWriter, and PageMaker--if you were sending out for typesetting--you paid it back the first time you used it.

VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative. Trellix is doing the same thing. You could put together a Web-style document as easy as you put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation.