I suspect there *is* a subtle but crucial difference between lacking experience and lacking any real interest in the product... Remember when Apple was run by a guy who did real well selling softdrinks? Yeah...
> Was Microsoft successful because Bill Gates wrote great code in the > beginning or because he was just a shrewd businessman who saw > something the business folk at IBM didn’t?
As far as i'm aware, Gates *never* wrote /great/ code. He wrote code that got the job done, wrote it quickly, and surrounded himself with people who did the same. And i'm not sure why you'd put "just" in front of "shrewd businessman" - the history of the software industry is filled with companies and products that died due to the lack of people who could get things done, whether that was writing the software or selling the software.
You can have one or the other and be yet another mediocre organization. The ones that go further are the ones that have *both*, and both know their jobs, and both *do* their jobs, and each leaves the other to his specialty.
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> Was Microsoft successful because Bill Gates wrote great code in the
> beginning or because he was just a shrewd businessman who saw
> something the business folk at IBM didn’t?
As far as i'm aware, Gates *never* wrote /great/ code. He wrote code that got the job done, wrote it quickly, and surrounded himself with people who did the same. And i'm not sure why you'd put "just" in front of "shrewd businessman" - the history of the software industry is filled with companies and products that died due to the lack of people who could get things done, whether that was writing the software or selling the software.
You can have one or the other and be yet another mediocre organization. The ones that go further are the ones that have *both*, and both know their jobs, and both *do* their jobs, and each leaves the other to his specialty.
Then again, there's SAP...