My dinner with Bill Gates
ZDNet | at | by Mike
On Wednesday, the eve of the Windows XP launch, I was among 15 journalists invited to a private dinner with the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft. The guests included people from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, BusinessWeek --and other news organizations you'd immediately recognize. Small talk still doesn't have much appeal to Bill. My brief, "How's your family?" got a three- or four-word reply that communicated, "They're fine," and that I shouldn't delve further. The reason that Bill challenges questions, I believe, is because he lives in a world almost totally dominated by facts and intelligence. So he questions things that don't seem factual, intelligent, or both. That is, perhaps, his greatest strength.