Bob Wallace

A programmer, Wallace was one of 11 people who in 1978 founded a new company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called "Micro Soft". (The company moved to a small town outside Seattle and is now known as "Microsoft".) He left the software giant in 1983 to found Quicksoft. His PC-Write program was one of the first professional software packages to be marketed with a new concept called "Shareware". Copies could be freely made, but if people wanted a manual and support, they had to register it by paying a $75 fee. "If I make enough money to live on, I will continue the experiment," he said when the program was released. "If not, I will approach software publishers to see if they are interested in marketing a PC-Write II version of the program for me commercially." It was a success: Quicksoft eventually grew to $2 million in annual sales, and he sold the company to another early Microsoft employee. His 450 shares of Microsoft weren't worth much until 1986, when the company went public. After a number of stock splits, the 450 shares became more than 100,000 shares. He died September 20 in San Rafael, Calif., from unknown causes at age 53. From This is True for 22 September 2002 Suggestions for further reading: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace, Jim Erickson Amazon Price: $12.21 Customer Review: This book was written in 1992 and covers only Microsoft's first 15 or so years but these were the most interesting and the most instructive in terms of lessons for the wealth creator. There are now many Gates' biographies, but Hard Drive: Bill Gates ...   Cloud Computing, A Practical Approach by Toby Velte, Anthony Velte, Robert Elsenpeter Amazon Price: $26.39 Customer Review: Product was everything it was said to be. Would have liked it to be shipped faster.   Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft by Marshall Phelps, David Kline Amazon Price: $19.51 Customer Review: As a patent attorney, I had hoped for quite a bit more substance in this book. Instead, Phelps provides an uninspiring account of how Microsoft transitioned from its strategy of using its near-monopoly power to force partners into patent non-asserti...   Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generatio... by G. Pascal Zachary Amazon Price: Customer Review: I received a copy of this book from the manager of a Release Engineering team many years ago. Not only did I find the book an easy read, but it also exemplified the mentality that *needs* to be instilled in Software Developers - "don't break the bui...   Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era by Mary Jo Foley Amazon Price: $16.54 Customer Review: Foley's writing is crisp and clear (as always). Surprisingly, the book is HEAVILY footnoted with extensive net references for details, making the book smaller (and better) than if it contained the full cited texts. All in all, it reads like a very ti...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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