The Hard Part

The difference between Google and Microsoft is the difference between Larry and Sergey, on the one hand, and Bill Gates, on the other.

Gates was a college dropout. Larry and Sergey were graduate school dropouts.

Gates and Jobs and Wozniak all came out of West Coast garages. Larry and Sergey came out of the academic world of Palo Alto.

Gates was a smart programmer, but he never imagined anything bigger than a PC. McNealy said, "The network is the computer," but he didn't know what that meant. Larry and Sergey took the idea seriously and solved the problem of scale with creative architecture and parallel programming.

The programming was easy. The hard part was taking the idea seriously enough to do it.