MICROSOFT ROUND TRIP BALOON RIDES
Right now you’re reading a story that I’ve written, but actually I wrote this story as it was told to me by a woman by the name of Dona (Cookie) Miller, a pleasant lady, in her own words near as I can remember.
“When I finished my finals in Computer Science at Weber State, Microsoft hired me aboard. The date was June 3, 1993. I was in an excited state of mind, and within a few days of being hired, I jumped out of bed before the crack of dawn. I drove my car hastily to the Weber State football field located in the foothills of Ogden, Utah. I unloaded my car in preparation for my trip to Seattle in my hot air balloon. I then drove back to my apartment parked my car in the back yard. I then woke up my teenage boy, Raskel, called a taxi and went back to the football field, arriving there just as the sun was peeking over Mount Ogden.
We placed our belongings in my gondola and walked aboard. A quick blast of propane (100 million British Thermal Units), and the balloon launched upward carrying two excited individuals. As the ground grew farther away, ‘Midnight Blue’ extended herself eight stories top to bottom, and began silently moving west North West toward our destination, Micro-Soft Seattle. This was a first time record long trip experience for me. After many difficult wind changes and a problem with a fan prop blade in Boise, Idaho we arrive three weeks later in Seattle. We landed on Microsoft Corporation entrance lawn, can you believe it.
For all intents and purposes I was in the wonderful world of the famous alpha geek Entrepreneur, Bill Gates. After two weeks of indoctrination, I was given a job description of Chief Executive Facilitator and Public Relations Director. My office was a few doors down from Bill’s. At the time Microsoft had a serious problem with the United States Justice Department. This was before Microsoft spent money on lobbying. That came later, 900 million dollars on lobby money in 1996. The Justice Department claimed Microsoft had a ‘monopoly’ better known by the Geek Squad as a beta-mixer. You see, on the worldwide internet millions of civilians had to pay $19.99 a month to use the Microsoft windows operating system. And so, in the year of 1992, to no one’s surprise Bill was subpoenaed into a Justice Department hearing. The Justice Department’s lawyers, mainly the chief Prosecutor B. Sharp. Sharp was the same guy that lied and produced false evidence at President Clinton’s impeachment Monica Lewinski sex scandal hearings, discredited and no one has heard from since. President Clinton said, “He’s the only person I have ever disliked.”
Others in Congress raked Bill over the coals until you had to see it to believe it. The questions were asked one after another, after another. The hot air blowing around that hearing room was worse than a Texas tornado. The tech revolution of that era definitely had its share of mud-slinging. B. Sharp had made up his mind prior to the hearing, break up MSFT. Split it down the middle. It had easily been done a decade ago with AT&T, and Standard Oil a century before, but AT&T and Standard Oil was not Bill Gates.
Was there much sympathy for Microsoft? The answer is no! Most politicians, lawyers, and competitors considered Bill and his windows operating system (DOS) a bad thing and him a bad person. They thought of him as another John D. Rockefeller or worse. Some were even heard to say, “Bill had outright stolen Windows when he slipped out the back door at IBM, his former employer.
It was winners take all, and Bill made no plans for losing. It was red alert, full reconnaissance, take no prisoners.
On Bill’s behalf, I told the media and anyone else who would listen. The whole situation…the Justice’s thing is totally unfair…burro race, a simple case of political extortion. The blankityblank Justice Department isn’t Just, that is for certain.
In the meantime, my life was a bed of roses. Yours would be too. Hundreds of us were suddenly multimillionaires. Profits were doubling each year; money was no object, wages commissions, stock options, golden parachutes, bonuses up, everything was going up. Long gone was my Ogden days of drinking beer, begging for food stamps and welfare handouts. No more oppressive duns in the mail, or hiding behind knocks on my door. Real money was coming in. The boom times were rolling, $100s, $1,000 bills, not the $20s that spew out of ATMS into the hands of the rank and file. Real money, good whiskey. No working under the table at the “Cocomo” Bar on Two Bit Street.
I was now posing as a “Tree War Writer” A tree war writer writes dancing baloney and useless Animations, used simply to impress clients. Tree war writers live in a rarefied organizational layer; they are above the regular employees. For example, I did dancing baloney for Lucent’s Tech Division in the advertising manuals department located on the Eastern Rim headquartered in Peking.
Yes sir, I had left Ogden and my “404” mouse brain boyfriend, Mortimer Bolivar, left behind for good when I left Utah. Mortimer is a long haul truck driver, who works for Neil Trucking, transporting cars, trucks and wrecks, headquartered in North Salt Lake City. Mortimer is short and of a talkative personality. He holds himself very stiff, straight, and upright as short people usually do, and he is careless with his paychecks. The whole time of our relationship, he was skating on thin ice. He showed no interest in my son Raskel. When he would come to my apartment, it was on the spur of the moment, and only for a day or two at the most. He usually came on an urge for salsa chips, twelve pack, TV football, and anything else he could get. What kind of a boy fiend is that? Sometimes, to top it off, the son of a gun, would park his rig in the back alley and not come in at all, instead preferring to go drinking with his loser friends. If you added in his whiney conversation there decidedly was more bad than good.
Were there any other changes in my life, like say, social? Sure. There was a hundred and eighty degree about face. I met a rich lawyer shortly after starting my job, a barrister by the name of Mark Anthony IV. He would give Raskel five silver uncirculated dollars at fancy restaurants, hotels and other places. Tony was tall, stood straight as an arrow, handsome, and held a job paying a shade over two hundred grand a year. He had gray matter between his ears. Life was heavenly.
Back to the business. The Justice Department put an injunction on Microsoft. Suddenly in need of
respectability, to try and win public and political support to Gates views, I would compromise with people. I would present the positive aspect, which was the convergence of a worldwide internet that would interface with any and all hardware for a minimal price. Bill’s vision was to give free e-mail, and movies or music for a small server fee. Computers for all the people on and off the planet using one common system without curbs or government intervention. Software competition was often bought up, or sent on a ‘Salmon Run’ upstream to die out in the end. Microsoft would continue to dominate if the politicians and lawyers would go where I won’t say.
Bill put me in charge of propitiating these elements. I enjoyed my job and the competition. My apartment was open for entertainment. I was friends with respectable executives like the CEO of Net Speak for instance, a fierce competitor. Whereas Bill fulminated, I would present reasonable arguments for the Microsoft cause. I was making ten thousand clams a week and giving twenty plus speeches a month. My shrewdness was the talk of the town, I heard say. I might sit at the dinner table next to an ego surfing phobic from a cube farm or maybe a chainsaw consultant brought in to reduce the employee headcount or someone bat MO billing emotional shields or surrounded by circles of the old nobility, who had been diminished, or killed by the fall of Apple. They were all there at one time or another. Each filled a niche in the prairie dog era called ass kissing. They all came and went as most of them lost market share to Microsoft.
But then my balloon started leaking slowly at first. Gates and his wife, Melinda, left to be philanthropic (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and with them went 30 billion MSFT stock. The foundation became the world’s largest private philanthropy. Steve Ballinger took over as CEO all by himself. And worse yet he inherited Bills 12,000 legal men, and as any sane person knows anything bad that can happen with just one lawyer will, let alone 12,000. The housing bubble of ‘07 came second. The lenders foreclosed on my condo. I lost my 500K down payment. Next, the stock market went “South.” I lost my leveraged stock holdings first; big holdings like LU fiber optics at $80 a share, was taken off the stock exchange as it nosedived into 4 cents a share penny stock, then sent to the junk bond market. My Microsoft stock was $140 a share took a dive to $20. I couldn’t cover my margin and it went by the wayside. The Federal Reserve was plastering the streets with trillions of dollars of useless paper dollars which cut the value of a dollar down the middle.
You can guess the natural result. I was broke. Hopelessly, I climbed aboard ‘Midnight’ with little more than my innocent Raskel. The Japanese tail wind pushed us SSE, bobbing us along the skyline past strip malls, into Oregon, Idaho, over the City of Rocks, the desert, across the Great Salt Lake, on into Ogden, and over Mortimer’s Semi-Truck in the alley.
I was back to square one, generic America. I turned the propane off, ‘Midnight’ softly landed at the 50 yard line, her last descent, worn out and useless. I wonder if the Cocomo could use a good bar maid?.
KARL WALLACE
To read more Karl Wallace stories go to: karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
Right now you’re reading a story that I’ve written, but actually I wrote this story as it was told to me by a woman by the name of Dona (Cookie) Miller, a pleasant lady, in her own words near as I can remember.
“When I finished my finals in Computer Science at Weber State, Microsoft hired me aboard. The date was June 3, 1993. I was in an excited state of mind, and within a few days of being hired, I jumped out of bed before the crack of dawn. I drove my car hastily to the Weber State football field located in the foothills of Ogden, Utah. I unloaded my car in preparation for my trip to Seattle in my hot air balloon. I then drove back to my apartment parked my car in the back yard. I then woke up my teenage boy, Raskel, called a taxi and went back to the football field, arriving there just as the sun was peeking over Mount Ogden.
We placed our belongings in my gondola and walked aboard. A quick blast of propane (100 million British Thermal Units), and the balloon launched upward carrying two excited individuals. As the ground grew farther away, ‘Midnight Blue’ extended herself eight stories top to bottom, and began silently moving west North West toward our destination, Micro-Soft Seattle. This was a first time record long trip experience for me. After many difficult wind changes and a problem with a fan prop blade in Boise, Idaho we arrive three weeks later in Seattle. We landed on Microsoft Corporation entrance lawn, can you believe it.
For all intents and purposes I was in the wonderful world of the famous alpha geek Entrepreneur, Bill Gates. After two weeks of indoctrination, I was given a job description of Chief Executive Facilitator and Public Relations Director. My office was a few doors down from Bill’s. At the time Microsoft had a serious problem with the United States Justice Department. This was before Microsoft spent money on lobbying. That came later, 900 million dollars on lobby money in 1996. The Justice Department claimed Microsoft had a ‘monopoly’ better known by the Geek Squad as a beta-mixer. You see, on the worldwide internet millions of civilians had to pay $19.99 a month to use the Microsoft windows operating system. And so, in the year of 1992, to no one’s surprise Bill was subpoenaed into a Justice Department hearing. The Justice Department’s lawyers, mainly the chief Prosecutor B. Sharp. Sharp was the same guy that lied and produced false evidence at President Clinton’s impeachment Monica Lewinski sex scandal hearings, discredited and no one has heard from since. President Clinton said, “He’s the only person I have ever disliked.”
Others in Congress raked Bill over the coals until you had to see it to believe it. The questions were asked one after another, after another. The hot air blowing around that hearing room was worse than a Texas tornado. The tech revolution of that era definitely had its share of mud-slinging. B. Sharp had made up his mind prior to the hearing, break up MSFT. Split it down the middle. It had easily been done a decade ago with AT&T, and Standard Oil a century before, but AT&T and Standard Oil was not Bill Gates.
Was there much sympathy for Microsoft? The answer is no! Most politicians, lawyers, and competitors considered Bill and his windows operating system (DOS) a bad thing and him a bad person. They thought of him as another John D. Rockefeller or worse. Some were even heard to say, “Bill had outright stolen Windows when he slipped out the back door at IBM, his former employer.
It was winners take all, and Bill made no plans for losing. It was red alert, full reconnaissance, take no prisoners.
On Bill’s behalf, I told the media and anyone else who would listen. The whole situation…the Justice’s thing is totally unfair…burro race, a simple case of political extortion. The blankityblank Justice Department isn’t Just, that is for certain.
In the meantime, my life was a bed of roses. Yours would be too. Hundreds of us were suddenly multimillionaires. Profits were doubling each year; money was no object, wages commissions, stock options, golden parachutes, bonuses up, everything was going up. Long gone was my Ogden days of drinking beer, begging for food stamps and welfare handouts. No more oppressive duns in the mail, or hiding behind knocks on my door. Real money was coming in. The boom times were rolling, $100s, $1,000 bills, not the $20s that spew out of ATMS into the hands of the rank and file. Real money, good whiskey. No working under the table at the “Cocomo” Bar on Two Bit Street.
I was now posing as a “Tree War Writer” A tree war writer writes dancing baloney and useless Animations, used simply to impress clients. Tree war writers live in a rarefied organizational layer; they are above the regular employees. For example, I did dancing baloney for Lucent’s Tech Division in the advertising manuals department located on the Eastern Rim headquartered in Peking.
Yes sir, I had left Ogden and my “404” mouse brain boyfriend, Mortimer Bolivar, left behind for good when I left Utah. Mortimer is a long haul truck driver, who works for Neil Trucking, transporting cars, trucks and wrecks, headquartered in North Salt Lake City. Mortimer is short and of a talkative personality. He holds himself very stiff, straight, and upright as short people usually do, and he is careless with his paychecks. The whole time of our relationship, he was skating on thin ice. He showed no interest in my son Raskel. When he would come to my apartment, it was on the spur of the moment, and only for a day or two at the most. He usually came on an urge for salsa chips, twelve pack, TV football, and anything else he could get. What kind of a boy fiend is that? Sometimes, to top it off, the son of a gun, would park his rig in the back alley and not come in at all, instead preferring to go drinking with his loser friends. If you added in his whiney conversation there decidedly was more bad than good.
Were there any other changes in my life, like say, social? Sure. There was a hundred and eighty degree about face. I met a rich lawyer shortly after starting my job, a barrister by the name of Mark Anthony IV. He would give Raskel five silver uncirculated dollars at fancy restaurants, hotels and other places. Tony was tall, stood straight as an arrow, handsome, and held a job paying a shade over two hundred grand a year. He had gray matter between his ears. Life was heavenly.
Back to the business. The Justice Department put an injunction on Microsoft. Suddenly in need of
respectability, to try and win public and political support to Gates views, I would compromise with people. I would present the positive aspect, which was the convergence of a worldwide internet that would interface with any and all hardware for a minimal price. Bill’s vision was to give free e-mail, and movies or music for a small server fee. Computers for all the people on and off the planet using one common system without curbs or government intervention. Software competition was often bought up, or sent on a ‘Salmon Run’ upstream to die out in the end. Microsoft would continue to dominate if the politicians and lawyers would go where I won’t say.
Bill put me in charge of propitiating these elements. I enjoyed my job and the competition. My apartment was open for entertainment. I was friends with respectable executives like the CEO of Net Speak for instance, a fierce competitor. Whereas Bill fulminated, I would present reasonable arguments for the Microsoft cause. I was making ten thousand clams a week and giving twenty plus speeches a month. My shrewdness was the talk of the town, I heard say. I might sit at the dinner table next to an ego surfing phobic from a cube farm or maybe a chainsaw consultant brought in to reduce the employee headcount or someone bat MO billing emotional shields or surrounded by circles of the old nobility, who had been diminished, or killed by the fall of Apple. They were all there at one time or another. Each filled a niche in the prairie dog era called ass kissing. They all came and went as most of them lost market share to Microsoft.
But then my balloon started leaking slowly at first. Gates and his wife, Melinda, left to be philanthropic (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and with them went 30 billion MSFT stock. The foundation became the world’s largest private philanthropy. Steve Ballinger took over as CEO all by himself. And worse yet he inherited Bills 12,000 legal men, and as any sane person knows anything bad that can happen with just one lawyer will, let alone 12,000. The housing bubble of ‘07 came second. The lenders foreclosed on my condo. I lost my 500K down payment. Next, the stock market went “South.” I lost my leveraged stock holdings first; big holdings like LU fiber optics at $80 a share, was taken off the stock exchange as it nosedived into 4 cents a share penny stock, then sent to the junk bond market. My Microsoft stock was $140 a share took a dive to $20. I couldn’t cover my margin and it went by the wayside. The Federal Reserve was plastering the streets with trillions of dollars of useless paper dollars which cut the value of a dollar down the middle.
You can guess the natural result. I was broke. Hopelessly, I climbed aboard ‘Midnight’ with little more than my innocent Raskel. The Japanese tail wind pushed us SSE, bobbing us along the skyline past strip malls, into Oregon, Idaho, over the City of Rocks, the desert, across the Great Salt Lake, on into Ogden, and over Mortimer’s Semi-Truck in the alley.
I was back to square one, generic America. I turned the propane off, ‘Midnight’ softly landed at the 50 yard line, her last descent, worn out and useless. I wonder if the Cocomo could use a good bar maid?.
KARL WALLACE
To read more Karl Wallace stories go to: karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
