Bill was NOT the best programmer of his generation. I've read his code. I've read Paul's and Monte's. And the reality is that the company's original crown jewel, the BASIC interpreter, is, in fact, pretty genius. Especially for young guys. But it's not the best code ever written, or the best code I've ever seen, or anything like that. It's good, solid assembly code written by kids to pack a LOT of functionality into 8K. Code to be proud of. BASIC didn't establish Microsoft's foothold because it was new, unprecedented, or even that hard to do. It was the right solution at the right time in the right place. The hardest parts - the floating-point math - were heavily inspired by the DEC Focal interpreter, to which they had source code access. And they had access to other DEC interpreters to see how they worked. None of this was rocket science. But it was something Bill was very good at: fast following. That's a real skill, and it shouldn't be minimized. It doesn't matter what you can ship 3 years from now. It matters what you can ship 3 months from now. That sense of angst and dread that likely drove them - afraid that someone else would get there first - that was the key battle. Not the technical side. Not "how will we ever write this" but rather "how will we write this before someone else does it". And they were first, and it was good, and the rest is history.