tallpilot

The whole point of print journalism should be to take the extra few paragraphs to actually explain something. At least this one linked articles with additional information.

Neeleman's quote seems to blame the 'stress' of command as the primary driver. I suspect that's the minority of cases. The major driver would be loss of seniority. He's absolutely right that a line holding FO with a comfortable salary and a good home life with his family in a no income tax state isn't likely to choose to uproot them to the northeast or to commute, especially not for a reserve schedule.

GogglesPisano

Impossible. Bill Gates assured us business travel is dead and will never recover.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coro...;s%20aftermath.

DogPit

Bill Gates needs to take a long walk off a short pier.

PineappleXpres

Bill Gates somewhat backtracked when asked about how many business relationships he’s made not previously established on zoom calls. To his credit, he kind of ate his words and did concede the point.

DogPit

Thats because he is mostly wrong about everything.

word302

I don't really have any love for the guy, but you don't really become a gazillionaire being mostly wrong about everything.

WhyIFly

Many of the most successful people in the world got there by luck and on the coat tails of others. Bill Gates is no exception. Timing and luck.

CRJJ

I mean dude was brilliant, Microsoft is there, not that I like it or use it. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been wrong after that gold mine and still made billions. I wish he could just mind his business instead of telling the rest of the world how to live their lives and what to eat from his lab, while he enjoys his Wagyu meatballs.

Excargodog

But for a fortuitous asteroid strike ~65 million years ago, we'd all be lizards. That doesn't mean we can't benefit from good decisions, and we can certainly be destroyed by bad ones. Especially in our profession.

NuGuy

True, but it helps to come from money, but not too much money, so you probably have a better than average chance at understanding how money works and how to leverage relationships, while not worrying about food & shelter.

Bill was probably a better than average computer hobbiest back in the 70s. Those old 8 bit machines, while fairly simple, needed a little bit of TLC to run correctly, and every single brand was different. There was no standard. Heck, they were still loading stuff on front panel switches and off of paper tape when they first got going. But lots of people did it, and there were a lot of very smart people back then who weren't attached to the "big names", so he didn't have any monopoly there.

What he had going for him was an ability to see opportunity, surround himself with people more focused on the tech portion, while retaining enough to effectively manage his people and processes, and had a pretty good sense of seeing through the short term to strike deals that put him in the sole position to make deals long term. In other words, he knew how to run a business and plan for the long term, which many places back in the day didn't. If you could pull out a copy of "Computer Shopper" from the 1990s, you'd see how many of those companies evaporated.

The best example of this is MS-DOS. IBM first went to Gary Kidall, founder of Digital Research and owner of CP/M, which was the defacto (kind of) operating system of the day (outside of proprietary DOSes of the time, like Apple DOS, Commodore, etc). DR could have had the deal of the century, but they got too hung up on the short term deal, and IBM was done hassling with someone who was still seen as a big fish in a very small pond. You have to remember that some at IBM considered the whole PC thing as a fad, and not worthy of their attention, so they definitely weren't going to roll around in the mud. BG was able to see through that, licensed the system to IBM rather than an outright sale, and ultimately helped other companies compete against IBM itself. Heck, they didn't even write the first iteration of MS-DOS. They bought the code from some guy in Seattle.

MS up until that point was a little larger than a store front operation, maybe a larger building in one of those industrial parks. Their big claim to fame was Microsoft BASIC, where, and give credit where credit is due, it was on practically every type of personal computer, either in ROM or bundled with the unit, but while ubiquitous, it was still a product in a small business. They did some hardware stuff (such as the CP/M card for Apple ][s), but there were lots of other places that made more stuff and made more money.

The IBM deal basically gave them an unlimited spigot of money, and Bill was smart enough to capitilize on that. Practically everything they became was because of that deal.