A well-known story to that exact effect about Bill Gates in the early days. www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/m...

My First BillG Review

In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…

This blog was huge to Younger Me. This 2006 story contains this funny parenthetical: > (how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it away free?)