Bill Gates, Hero
blog.redfin.com
It's hard to believe we once saw Bill Gates as the pie-splattered villain and others as the idealists.
blog.redfin.com
Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake.
Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts? He fucked anyone who got in his way, always to the benefit of Microsoft, and usually to the detriment of the industry.
When others wrote better code, he called his lawyers. When other developers wanted to collaborate, he stole their intellectual property. When customers or vendors balked, he crushed them. And when the citizens saw how unfair it all was and took action, he called his lobbyists.
So now maybe he wants to be like Andrew Carnegie in his next act, conveniently forgetting all the lives destroyed in the hope of "giving it all back". If so, good.
I really try to keep upbeat and optimistic in my posts here at hn, but I also understand how much we have forgotten, and sometimes I just can't resist. Every time I read about Bill Gates worship, I can vomit. Sometimes I really wonder how much better things would be for all of us hackers is he had just gone to law school and left our industry to develop as it could have.
</rant>
Oooh, that feels better. Now back to work.
He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements.
It's ludicrous to say that he's destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself.
It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates.
I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.
You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft.
I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick.
Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying.
Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did.
I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices.
If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years.
We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.
Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another. Consumer adoption was nonexistent because switching from one OS to another required learning everything all over again. You couldn't simply go to Best Buy, get some software or hardware, and assume it would work. Hardware fragmentation kept sales down, which in turn kept pricing high, which in turn kept sales down, etc.
Either way, none of that "good old days" stuff is really the point when analyzing whether or not the world would be better off without Bill. The industry progressed, as it would have without Microsoft. We know it would have evolved, we just don't know exactly how. It seems virtually impossible to me that it wouldn't have ended in one OS on most people's desks, but I am willing to admit I may be wrong. If it weren't for Bill, we may all have been running IBM's OS for the last 20 years instead. Or maybe we weren't buying them at all, because they cost too much and were too fragmented. Would either of those universes really be better? Nobody could possibly know.
Microsoft's standard operating procedure was part of the game. You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball. That was the case long before Bill Gates arrived and will be so long after he's dead. You're hating the player instead of the game.
Not quite correct. Companies ported programs, even assembly-language programs, to different processors all the time. Visicalc ran on z-80s, 6502s (on Apples, Ataris and Commodores) and 8086s. the hard part is to write it the first time. Porting then is more or less straightforward. OSs were so minimalistic at that time they didn't create any significant difference.
> Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another
Most business software for microcomputers in the high 70's and very low 80's ran on CP/M. Even the first DOS blockbusters were straight ports of CP/M titles. CP/M (I am talking about CP/M 80) machines were all based on 8080-like processors, but, besides the common processor, had very different hardware - disks from one computer often could not be read on another. Transferring through serial ports usually solved this.
The market that was more fragmented was the home computer market. There Apple IIs, Ataris, TRS-80s and Commodores competed with one another. Choosing a home computer could be confusing at that time.
The higher end of the spectrum had mainframes, just as incompatible with each other as they are now (I think Unisys still makes them and they are incompatible with IBMs), minis that ran proprietary OSs or UNIX-based OSs. There were a couple high-end multiuser "supermicros" that ran Unix-like OSs. I have used Cromix for some time.
Most of the software was not easily portable at that time because it was written in hand-tuned assembly language. I remember how revolutionary Unix seemed for being written in C and, thus, being portable across different architectures. Faster computers and HLLs (can't believe I am calling C a HLL...) eased the pain of porting.
My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors, with cross-platform software being used in combination with open formats (like GIF was intended to be) to exchange data between non-portable (or non-ported) programs. There would be large software companies but hardware makers would compete with far more latitude than they can now and those software companies would do their best to use the tricks those hardware makers would bring.
> You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball
You're right. I don't like it. I think software companies should gain market through technical merits that benefit their users, not backstabbing each other.
My bet for what would have happened: one of two things.
1. Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did and you'd be complaining about them instead. Except maybe you wouldn't be complaining because nobody would have written this article because whoever benefited from it would have hoarded their money as most billionaires do rather than becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time.
2. Hacker News wouldn't exist for you to comment on, because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it.
I don't think any other result is possible (and I don't think the 2nd is practical). Users simply aren't savvy enough to deal with fragmentation. You wouldn't have the web we know today without cheap home PCs anymore than you'd have man without the apes.
Office was never "born". Not even designed as a suite. It was cobbled together. Word and Excel were independent products developed originally for the Mac. PowerPoint was acquired and Access developed internally.
> Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did
Striking a deal with IBM, retaining the rights to the OS and cooperating with OEMs so they could clone their client's hardware? It takes a devious mind to come up with a plan like this.
> because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it
I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun with my Apple II. Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer. In fact, he may something to do with the demise of the home computer of the 80's and its replacement by bulky, noisy, beige boxes with 12-inch CGA monitors running MS-DOS (a most home-unfriendly OS). My Apple II+ had 2 screens, one 14" white monochrome soft-switching between the motherboard video and the 80-column card and a 17" color TV directly connected to the motherboard composite output. Sadly, the IIe could not do the same trick (I used to have text on one screen and graphics on the second)
Anyone heard of Microsoft BASIC? How about Applesoft?
Bueller...?
And, BTW, Paul Allen deserves more credit for MS BASIC than is usually given.
... any of which you can buy for $5,000.00.
It seems that anti-Microsoft arguments always ignore the benefits of network effects and economies of scale brought about by DOS and Windows. They are usually posted by Linux nerds running sub-$1000 3 GHz PCs that they couldn't possibly have afforded in a world where Apple, Commodore, Atari, and ten more companies like them kept building mutually- incompatible proprietary hardware.
I read a thoughtful comment and have no choice but upvote it because it's very thought provoking and I'm nodding all the way through it. Then I read the opponent's comment ... and feel the same way!
I am an old hacker and I always feel better when I remove Windows from a laptop.
Because they're different. Craftsmen like to learn and make distinctions and use the best tool for the job.
Not that I wrote that, I also noticed I no longer use any Microsoft software. That can also explain the pain medication...
Of course, I live in Eastern Europe, maybe you guys in the US have been more lucky in regards to access to mainframes / Unix operating systems ... I wasn't.
There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.
It seems you missed the years when the first S-100 personal computers appeared, the time when they ran CP/M, the Apple II, the Commodores, the Ataris... IBM-PCs were introduced in 1981 and didn't became as important as they are today until they were successfully cloned, a couple years later. Basically, you just skipped the 70's. And the minicomputers where VMS (the granddaddy of NT) and Unix were born.
Youngster here: I'm guessing when you say OSX you mean something other than Mac OS X?
The rest of your post is very insightful, but this part above strikes me as petty - I was low born myself, was given almost nothing except birth in the USA in the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.
Meanwhile the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs, who has broken plenty of laws himself (backdating is fraud), done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them (and only didn't do the rest because he didn't have the necessary market share) and by all accounts hoards his money along with black mock turtlenecks. It's rather hypocritical to type about how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro.
You see what you want to see I suppose.
Would have jobs with or without Gates
> make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people
Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W).
> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history
He is the richest man in history.
> the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs
False dichotomy alert! Not the case here. Jobs is flawed too.
> done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them
Until now Apple is not guilty of monopoly abuse. Nothing even close to what Comes vs. Microsoft shows.
> how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro
I use a Dell running Linux. At home I use an Acer. Running Linux too.
Small nitpick, adjusted for inflation, no he isn't, not even close. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were all much richer. Also, it needs to be said that these were the richest Americans, not necessarily richest ever worldwide.
Exactly. If you're a multi-billionaire it's very easy to be a philanthropist. Now instead be somebody making say $30k a year with a net worth of say $10k, and if that person is a philanthropist, I'm much more impressed by that person's character.
Sorry if it came across that way; that was not my intent.
Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine.
With those gifts comes responsibility. Whenever I have an opportunity to use my gifts to do good things, I think of how proud those who made sacrifices for me would be. I imagine many people here on hn feel the same way.
Bill Gates never used his tremendous gifts for the greater good, only for the good of Microsoft. He never cared how big the pie got, only how close Microsoft's share of that pie approached 100%.
The point of the paragraph wasn't to be petty or jealous; it was just to point out how the one with perhaps the biggest gifts of all didn't choose to share them like the rest of us would. Sorry if I implied anything else.
Wait, what? Are you arguing that his foundation is some kind of elaborate scam?
But it is somewhat reminiscent of a capo getting absolution for his sins in return for a gift to the church.
I wouldn't rule that out. It has donated Microsoft products (in markets where alternatives could gain a foothold) and money for vaccines (we shouldn't forget Gates has a lot invested in the biotech sector). In the end, some of those donations return to him.
I am not saying his philanthropism is inherently evil. I am just acknowledging the possibility it's may not be completely devoid of self-interest.
Paris Hilton was also given a lot of freebies early in life...looked how that one turned out.
Early advantages don't always produce exceptional results, often times it can lead to the exact opposite.
I don't have too much more to add, just wanted to say we fairly similar to you, and think you're an awesome contributor on HN, and wanted to let you know that. Absolutely no disrespect intended and it'd be good to break bread sometime if we're ever in the same place, I've learned a lot from your comments.
I very slightly disagree that with gifts comes responsibility, because I think only an individual can assign responsibility to themselves outside of the basics of not intruding on other people. But I'm probably strange, most people don't think that way. With that said, I assign high responsibility levels to myself (service, charity, helping people, good citizenship, protecting the weak, serving the strong and virtuous, and those who wish to be strong and virtuous). Anyways, that's somewhat a minor point - I wanted to comment more to show some respect. You're one of the best commentors in HN history and I've learned a lot from you.
Bill Gates did his legal duty. When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft. The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to the best results.
So the question is what do most people with the gifts Bill Gates was born into do? The answer is that they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society and getting paid quite handsomely for it.
Bill on the other hand founded a company that has, at current time, almost 90,000 employees. He helped bring computers to the masses.
It's not petty jealousy that drives your comments, it's anti-capitalist sentiment. You also have a highly debatable view of what the universe would look like if not for Microsoft (I for one suspect you wouldn't be on this site) but that too is a side effect of zealousness rather than the result of careful reasoning.
Interesting. In the 1970s, ITT's CEO Hal Geneen gave $700,000 to Jorge Alessandri to help him beat Salvadore Allende in the Chilean Presidential Election, correctly believing that ITT's financial interests were best served by defeating Allende. When Allende won anyways, Geneen gave $1,000,000 to the CIA to help finance a coup d'etat in Chile. Would he have been acting immorally to refrain from financing bloodshed?
We can also look at Hershey in Cuba, tobacco companies, companies lobbying for the right to destroy the environment, companies that engage in bribery and contract rigging, even companies that lie about whether their products are healthy. In each case, I think we can find a healthy proportion of people who do not agree that the unrestricted pursuit of "what is best for the company" on the part of its officers, managers, or rank and file employees is automatically moral.
The second point of interest in your post is that you talk about the theory of free market capitalism. This is a very interesting point in any discussion about Gates and Microsoft, and that's why I gave you an upmod and replied. I think it is very possible for someone to be rabidly pro-capitalist and anti-Gates precisely because many of his and Microsoft's actions were anti-free markets.
Business and free markets are not synonymous, in fact the usual case is that when left to act without restraint or oversight, businesses act to make markets as closed and unfree as possible. It is possible to be anti-business and pro-markets.
I do not accept your statement that the theory behind free market capitalism is that with enough companies doing the same that things "average out to the best results" as applying to morality. I think you should be more precise about what you mean when you use the word "best."
Unfettered business is a little like pure democracy. There's a reason that our respective countries thrive under a constitutional democracy: There is a notion of right and wrong that is independent of the notion of what wins an election. Likewise, I believe there is a notion of right and wrong that is independent of the notion of what makes the most money.
I don't disagree with you about the restraints on the free market, and us technically not being one. Microsoft probably did cross some lines there, and they paid for it dearly. I just don't think that's what the argument is really about, for if it were, people wouldn't be so religious about it. You can detect a zeal when words like "ruined lives" come into the argument and realize that the sentiment at some point long ago was divorced from logic.
By best results I mean better than the results of any other economic system.
It's quite strange that the Criticism of Microsoft page doesn't even mention BeOS.
There's also the incident of designing Windows to crash if run on DR-DOS (they didn't simply not support it, they went out of their way to crash on purpose).
--
Regarding the complaints about capitalism and "ruined lives," I think it might be helpful to decide whether one wants to maximize, minimize, or ignore the worst case, average case, and best case quality of life. It seems that pro-capitalist arguments support the average and best cases (i.e. middle class and wealthy), while disregarding the worst cases (the ruined lives). Anti-capitalist arguments, on the other hand, appear to focus on the worst-case outcomes.
That phrase is sufficient to earn an upmod all on its own. Reading your reply, I immediately thought of people huddled in a church listening to the Vicar preach against Microsoft's evil. But it isn't a passionate speech full of fire and brimstone, it's a standard reading that he has given so many times, his voice is now a monotone and the parishioners know every word by heart.
My position is that Microsoft nudged the line of business practices and spent a lot of time in the gray area between generally acceptable and illegal. Most of it was a hard to judge because it involved holding MS to a different standard due to their size and weight. They got nudged back by the courts and the public.
In hindsight, I think they are almost certainly better off for having had them.
Bill may not have been an exemplary moral model in his practices at that time, but he wasn't an extreme example of immoral CEO either. It was a relatively short period in MS history that was like that. He is an extreme example of a moral billionaire now.
See? Sounds like a boring compromise.
Amen. I have several times tried to comment to that effect, but couldn't come up with the words. Thanks for saying it. Especially irksome to me are comments that go something like "You're on HN, you're better than that." in response to a comment on which the poster disapproves. Let's skip the childish reverse psychology attempts, shall we?
You left out the part about how this only works if (a) the market is actually “free” and “competitive” (what this means is a complicated topic beyond the scope of this text box), and (b) the interests of the company and the interests of the broader society are aligned. (Which is why we have all sorts of specialized regulation of companies, various kinds of guaranteed rights attached to consumers and contract-signers and so on, a court system, and ultimately elections). In the specific case of Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, they clearly were not. The idea that Microsoft’s corporate strategy embodied some kind of Adam Smith small-firms-in-a-competitive-market ideal is hogwash. Notice that Microsoft’s actions were found to be illegal in several court battles.
It is definitely not a company’s fiduciary duty to break the law.
If you're going to go preaching on the free market and such you should bloody well learn what it is. Go read a book on market theory (if Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Palin or any of those people are on the book, put it down and keep looking). I'm serious. This "passionate ignorance" movement is doing more damage to the US than anything else I can think of. Do you even know who Adam Smith is? He would have been very anti-Microsoft [1].
I apologize to everyone else on HN for this post, but this kind of ignorance needs a major slap down every time it's encountered so hopefully these people will either educate themselves or at least stfu and stop framing every debate around insanity and ignorance.
Look how loved the company is today. Was what he did really the best he could have done for Microsoft? Wouldn't a kinder, gentler Microsoft, one that helped a healthy market thrive, be better? Would the smaller slice of a larger pie be larger than Microsoft's current pie?
> they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society
I suppose you assume VCs exist in a vacuum. No.
> He helped bring computers to the masses.
No. Jobs and Wozniak did. Jack Tramiel did. Gates did nothing like that.
On Tramiel thing, Commodore built some very popular personal computers that were incredibly capable for their prices. Many of us (I am not among them) got introduced to personal computers with Commodore boxes. He later moved on to Atari and brought some of the cheapest 32-bit home computers one could buy, years before 386s could be called home computers.
Attributing to Gates what others did does not help further your argument.
Yet how one may deny that Gates brought the PC to the masses with knowledge of the above are beyond me. Maybe a comparison with GEOS is in line..
I don't think so. You had a handful of self-sufficient ecosystems to work in. Apart from having only one software ecosystem, I can't see why you may think we are better off now.
> how one may deny that Gates brought the PC to the masses with knowledge of the above are beyond me
Since it's your own assessment of your own shortcomings, I assume you must be right.
PS. Also, there are plenty of "digital ecosystems" for us to play with, even today. Billions over billions of ad hoc, embedded, portable, desktop, mainframe and all the other platforms in between. Thankfully some unification now exists (where it matters).
This is a meme that desperately needs to die. I don't care how true it is legally. If the law says that then the law is an ass. Some moral principles override legal requirements. If you're in a position in which you can't do what's morally right within the bounds of the law then you shouldn't be in that position in the first place.
There is a difference between making money and making money at the expense of everything else.
Whether or not Bill Gates did this is another question entirely.
I do not mean to detract from the accomplishments Gates did achieve.
Plus your next statement is just baloney. The greater good? You mean the good that would have affected you? The man can do with his money as he sees fit, who are you to tell him what to do or judge him when he does it.
He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away.
It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that.
That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.
What do you think will be the repsonse to, say, a 50% tax rate on the wealthy that they are able to distribute as they see fit (with strict controls such that it doesn't end up back in their own hands, or their family's)?
Yeah, good luck with that.
I see the "but government is inefficient" argument a lot - it would have some merit, if there's even the slightest hint of evidence that the rich would pay the tax even if the government were the most well-greased machine in the world. As it is it sounds like a lame scapegoat for wanting to keep all of your wealth.
I'm not rich, and I'm grumpy about what my 20% federal taxes are going to. The financial and GM bailouts, "homeland security", ag subsidies, congressional pork, federal taxes to pay for local schools, "war on terror", "war on drugs".
If the gov't was efficient in the things it did, and did the things I believe it should, I wouldn't complain about my taxes at all. But the combination of being inefficient and misguided is one of the largest wastes of human productivity ever devised.
This is a bigger waste than building the pyramids by hand.
The point is, the whole "big, inefficient government" argument, IMHO, is more often used in place of simply "I want to keep more of my wealth", and while a valid argument in theory, in practice its confused usage has caused it to lose credibility.
The fact that so many people are unwilling to just come out and say "I want to keep my wealth", and instead try to divert the debate to some other tenuously-related argument shows that they themselves believe that wanting to keep your wealth is wrong.
Personally, I've yet to make my mind up in this regard. I would like to keep my wealth, but the myriad of things that tax money supports I find necessary. Personally I see nothing wrong with wanting to keep more of your wealth, but the fact that many rich people feel such guilt about it, and society's perception of it, seems to imply that we've already made a judgment, collectively, about this issue.
Oh, and btw, this company also has to defend our shores, find cures for disease (or at least fund them) and manage distribution to those affected, assess and remediate damage on massive scales when emergencies strike, set standards and regulations of measurement and safety so that industries can interoperate and first-responders can (for example) plug their water hoses into a hydrant and it actually fit, etc.
It's not just a couple rich charitable dudes that can handle all that. Sorry if I don't worship them as much as anti-tax crusaders do.
Source: http://www.ballardnewstribune.com/2010/09/15/news/bill-gates... (includes some very interesting figures)
- Taxation and philanthropy do not represent (usually) a direct benefit to the payer. For better or for worse, we as a society look more highly upon selfless gestures than selfish ones. Philanthropy is the voluntary form of selfless giving, taxation is the involuntary one.
- Philanthropy and taxation have an intent to benefit others. Creating market-based value is often merely a side effect of generating direct gain to oneself. Beyond the selflessness argument, we as a society are conditioned to look more highly upon intentional acts of value creation.
The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has.
--
Written on a MacBook Pro
Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same.
Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses.
Would the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.
Really? I think that's discounting the booming home PC market that existed before Microsoft got involved and giving a lot of credit to someone for an achievement that wasn't fully there. All Gates did was ensure that his company's software was on every computer.
There was huge real value in creating "the standard", not least because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor.
In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...
If MS didn't exist, someone else could have easily replaced them. It was also mainly due to Intel, who created such a cheap processor, that we have cheap computers today. Not Microsoft.
And you shouldn't be using a SPARC 5 on 1994 anyway.
Whereas in the Windows era you were likely to fnd machines running the same applications everywhere, even at home.
The home computer space was much more fragmented and was where Apple, Commodore, Atari, BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair competed. BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair were important only in Europe, further fragmenting that market. It later became dominated by the same IBM-PC clones that took over small businesses.
No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter?
And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would have won by an insignificant 0.01 seconds less. By the same vein, it is inevitable that someone else would have stepped up had Microsoft not existed.
So why is it a problem to worship these people that have had all these advantages?
The biggest excuse why these people are against taxation is because they feel their wealth was earned 99% by hard work rather than circumstance. Conversely, many of them feel people on welfare don't deserve it, and it is 99% due to their personality.
It is a classic case of the fundamental attribution error.
To use your example, recent figures have shown that there are 4M adults in the UK who have never worked and spent their entire lives on the dole. Paying them to do nothing while there is stuff in the public good that needs doing, is simply not a good use of taxpayer's money.
This is a common euphemism for "you don't deserve my money because all my money came from hard work and all your poorness comes from your laziness, regardless of circumstances".
And about that 4M figure, I couldn't find any evidence of that on Google, but I did find numerous results for 1.4M, which you were off by more than a factor of two. In addition, half of that is due 16-24 year olds choosing not to be janitors fresh out of college due to the recession that was by no means their fault.
That 1.4M also includes the terminally ill, disabled, and housewives. So for you to even bring this up as evidence is dishonest.
http://www.walletpop.co.uk/2010/09/14/1-4-million-brits-have...
In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman.
Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?
Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty.
Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?
And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.
Are we talking about Microsoft as in "Comes vs. Microsoft"?
> Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased
He was not the first and didn't push particularly hard. The first "serious" computer I had was an Apple II (the first one was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone) and a lot of the software I ran on it was acquired well after the purchase.
Your recollection of the history of software is different than mine. I recall Microsoft being one of the biggest pushers of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.
They always had a strong stance against piracy, something that's understandable even when you consider they had limited exposure to it in those early days because of their OEM deals with computer makers.
Why are you so sure 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs would be unable to give the world something better? Too many eggs in too few baskets...
Granted, it's not quite 20 years.
We don't know that avoiding 20 years of "frustrated tech entrepreneurs" means that this just got missed. Who knows what was loss by Gates' destructive policies. Maybe tech would be so much more advanced by now that 6 billion would be wealthier.
We can't know such things. All we can know is what actually happened. Things turned out ok, just as they always do, but that doesn't mean it was the best possible outcome and it certainly doesn't excuse what Gates did.
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter.
No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck.
He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it.
But he made good use of it.
Shame on you and all your upvoters.
It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.
Think of the ecosystem surrounding Microsoft: all of the hardware companies, peripherals, software, training, education and jobs that would not exist were it not for "a pc on every desktop." Not to mention the millions of people using Windows to run their businesses.
I might add also that Gates billions are not sitting in a vault. It gets invested and that capital is used by others to create their own empires.
Wealth is fractal. A major success can generate an explosion of wealth further down the chain.
Wether you agree with Billy Boy's tactics or not, it's petty to call him "evil".. he's had made an immeasurable impact on the world and done so in a way that directly or indirectly changed the lives of millions of people.
To fault him for giving away his fortune? Well that's just a whole other level of absurdity. He's under no obligation to give it away, and yet he is. One might argue over the efficacy of his plans, but surely humanity will benefit in the end.
The real questions are: Is it better to give away your wealth incrementally or in one lump sum at the end? Is more taxation better or less? Is a monopoly more effective at wealth creation or is a more diverse market better? It's impossible to answer.
I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real heroes: the people who work, create and strive to win in the market by creating superior solutions for the problems people have, not by striking deals with OEMs that restrict what kind of product end-users will be able to buy.
Also, don't forget that Gates didn't really risk everything (like so many entrepreneurs do). He had his family to back him up. I bet he would have a cozy job waiting for him if Microsoft failed.
Now that's a straw man. I never said it was easy to build Microsoft from its humble beginnings in Albuquerque into whatever it is now. I said it's easy to decide you'll try to start a company (Microsoft was his second attempt) when you know that your future is ensured whatever happens (the first company went bust). I also said it's easy to be the biggest philanthropist in history when you also have the deepest pockets in history.
And no, I am unwilling to forget his unethical, borderline criminal behavior, his despicable disregard for the law and the damage he did to what was once a competitive, diverse and flourishing industry. Microsoft's monopoly (and the consequent lack of diversity) has set the advance of technology back years, if not decades. Like many HN'ers you call "holier-than-thou", I have lived - and worked - in the pre-monopoly years and I can tell you, from first-hand experience, the world is a much more boring place because of him.
He may donate all his money to whoever he wants, but that won't erase his past.
How does your track record measure up to Gates'? Which companies have you bootstrapped? Which charities have you founded? Or are you just a bitter salaryman complaining from the cheap seats on the sidelines?
I was never involved in anti-competitive practices. I probably had more girlfriends and went to better parties. Girls considered me hot.
> Which companies have you bootstrapped?
None. I am not a billionaire.
> Which charities have you founded?
I regularly donate to several local charities.
> Or are you just a bitter salaryman complaining from the cheap seats on the sidelines?
The chair I am using now is cheap, but seems well built. While I could be called a salaryman for the past couple years, I cannot be described as bitter.
And, more interestingly, how does comparing me to Gates reduces in any measure the harm he has done? Are you attempting an ad hominem after the straw man and the false dichotomy failed to prove your point?
Ideas should not be judged by anything other than what they are.
> So I was wondering if you had done anything in your career that I would consider hard. If you had, I might be inclined to give your comments more respect than they deserve on their face.
The respect you give to my comments is not important to me. You may give the respect you think they deserve, for I will not give your thoughts any more respect than I think they deserve.
> so you have no standing to criticize Gates in my book.
You must know your book is not a very important one for anyone but you.
Don't forget the lawsuits.
It's a good thing, but I don't think it's deserving of altruism.
But being less than altruistic can still be very laudable.
edw519 does not like Bill Gates worship.
Therefore, edw519 has something against powerful people.
the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought.
if you really hate microsoft, go build something better.
the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.
And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then:
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above:
Not the worst person to have in your rolodex.
Giving to charity by way of the residue of the profits of a monopoly like Microsoft is a very inefficient process.
My point is just, most leaders of industry are going to have skeletons in their closets. Most industry leaders don't then commit 98% of their wealth to charity.
Most big companies of Microsoft's size engage in unethical or illegal practices, and most of them don't have CEO's that become philanthropists. Gates is doing good, relatively speaking.
But I also think that praising Bill Gates as a "Hero" for his philanthropy without looking at how his wealth was generated, or how inefficient that process is misses the big picture.
Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have flowed through Microsoft over the years didn't go to Gates, and a lot of it was spent on unethical behavior which has held the industry hostage for years. For instance we've only relatively recently begun to see large transitions away from Windows, IE and Office, which might have happened much sooner in a more open market.
So who are my heroes?
My heroes people working in government trying to rain in monopolies and fostering healthy competition. My heroes are people that write software supporting open protocols that make it easy for everyone in the market to compete on equal ground.
My heroes are people in Africa and elsewhere using these technologies to bootstrap their local economies, so in the long term they can buy their own vaccines instead of getting them from Bill Gates.
None of these people will become billionaires, and you'll never know their names. But combined they'll do more economic good for humanity than Bill Gates ever could.
The man has started a movement among billionaires to use their wealth toward charitable purposes, and somehow you can pass it off based on his wealthy upbringing and a "Carnegie complex"?
Injustices in technology are much less important than the injustices Gates is trying to fix now.
You can be a graceful businessman and still make a profit, further a healthy market and win on it through a superior product instead of doing so through shady backroom deals that border the criminal.
How can anyone deny that he is a Silicon Valley hero and success story. He is going to save Sun.
When she connected the plight of many of the world's children to that of their own he got it.
So does two decades of merciless greed followed by a decade of giving some of that money away constitute heroism? To an extent, yes. But I think we ought to give simply taking a lower cash holding a better look also.
With $46B cash and short term holdings in the bank, I'm sure shareholders wouldn't bat much of an eye if Jobs compensated himself with a little bit more than $1/year, as Ellison and many other tech execs do. Jobs doesn't take that cash.
The last point I'm going to make is that it's probably immaterial to the argument the exact cause of the disparity. The fact that people point at Jobs and accuse him of not being more philanthropic indicates that they are ignorant of his cash position.
Plus he has on occassion been labelled the highest paying CEO in the world, due to his stock options. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/12/lead_07ceos_Steven-P-Job...
And in any case, most CEOs don't make a HUGE salary. Jobs would probably get paid $750k. The fact that he doesn't make this money is (a) hardly a dent in his wallet and (b) doesn't really make any effect on wealth allocation.
Now, Apple is trying to convince the market that the new Apple can function without Steve Jobs. People want to believe, but it's far from certain.
You should check out the banking industry.
I'll take that actual wealth over valuation on paper any day.
Generally speaking this is true, but if you look into the kind of charity work Bill Gates does, you'll find a lot of it is investing in setups that will be able to support themselves after a while and even pay back what was invested in them initially.
When the Devil gets old, he joins the abbey.
It's laudable when somebody gives so freely and I don't want to take away from that, but I find it hard to view him charitably because I know that even now, this is all about him, making him feel better about himself. Many others sacrificed much more for the good of others without having to tread so heavily.
It's swings and roundabouts. Gates and MS made good calls and they made bad calls, Jobs is the same.
For me I think Bill did OK, while I can imagine some using that sort of power in a more altruistic way, I can also see many doing far far worse things with it.
There are two separate aspects here, professional and personal.
Silicon Valley judges people based on their professional acumen and practices. And Gates did not please everybody in this department.
And the other aspect, yes, people in tech do admire his humanitarian efforts.
It's just that mixing two aspects of a personality and trying to come up with an overall score does not work.
Bill Gates is often seen as a villain because of the late 1990s behavior of Microsoft and the quality of some of their flagship products (Windows and IE). It can be hard to separate perceptions of Bill Gates the man/philanthropist from Bill Gates the businessman. Perceptions of Bill Gates are colored by BSoD's, IE's non-compliance to standards, Frontpage creating pages that only rendered in IE, and awkward conventions and interfaces in several popular pieces of software.
(I personally think very highly of Bill and Melinda Gates for their charitable work.)
OSX wasn't even properly exist.
I used it during that decade on an x86 desktop, on a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole, and on an HP PA-RISC "gecko" workstation. It was awesome.
And so it should be for what it cost back in the day. Windows PCs made computing affordable for Jo(e) Consumer, there's no getting away from that.
You should probably 'get over yourself' (I really hate that phrase, so I figured I'd throw that in there).
I also used web browsers from Mosaic through the Netscape line, Opera, and IE. As late as 2001, IE was doing its own thing with regards to certain standards, and Frontpage was putting out broken HTML that only IE would render (leaving off /table tags, for example.)
There was plenty to criticize Microsoft for in that era. Seeing as the discussion is "why don't people give Bill Gates his due", I think it's perfectly valid to point out that some people still harbor some resentment from that era.
If you go back to 1988, and compare a DOS machine to say, an Amiga - how could anyone say that Microsoft did the world good by ensuring that the primitive, clunky, non-user friendly junk that was DOS beat out the relatively amazing competition?
So, Gates shoved this awful crap on us to make himself rich, regardless of the consequences. I can't respect a software company that has never appeared to be concerned with or even understand software quality.
I am talking about STAC, Gary Kildall's family, etc.
Also perhaps an effort at MSFT to reverse the culture of lying and deceit that even now permeates their marketing.
I see no evidence of Gates doing that. Self-reflection would be required for that to happen.
In some respects I see Zuckerberg following the same path.
http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/09/microsofts-nevada-tax-d...
tax the wealthy, so long as it's not him.
Now, to be fair, he is a huge philanthropist and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does some amazing work, but praise what you preach, Microsoft needs to start paying its dues.
If not, then why do you think businesses should do so?
For what it's worth, Gates has been getting a lot of crap in the political sphere for this statement he made a couple of months ago. Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze, has been ripping him for his stance seemingly favoring "death panels."
I lean on the side of the blog post, even if his company's quality (as has been noted in the comments) has been downright abhorrent.
Microsoft's success in Redmond doesn't fit with the Silicon Valley narrative that ties creativity to geography.
In other words Microsoft's success challenges the value of Silicon Valley's terroir. It goes against the brand.
That's not to say that geography doesn't play a role - it's hard to imagine a Microsoft based out of Bentonville.
My point? No point really, just adding to the existing rubbish on this thread.
Creating new villains means there's room for the old villain to be rehabilitated. Even if neither of them have changed a lot as people over the last 10 years, the media perception becomes the reality.
However, as Jobs is so closely tied to the recent success of Apple, and Gates is still seen as Microsoft even though he hasn't been an employee for many years.
Steve Jobs = { it celebrity, celebrity, rich, geek god, arch rivalry 'Mac vs PC', ...}
Intersection = Bill Gates ∩ Steve Jobs = { it celebrity, celebrity, rich, geek god, arch rivalry 'Mac vs PC' }
Difference = { extreme public philanthropy }
So this difference goes hand in hand with arch rivalry 'Mac vs PC'. aka 'My penis is bigger than yours' to everyone but the subjects themselves.
Your hypothetical 1% productivity increase has to be balanced against the productivity loss of dealing with a bunch of different Unix variants on a bunch of different processors. The dominance of Windows surely delayed innovation in operating systems, but arguably spurred innovation in applications.
It is ok to rape half of the world for the good of the rest.
That makes you an instant hero.
No one has simultaneously done good and bad like that. If a person does bad, then change their views or themselves, and proceeds to do good wholeheartedly, then good, I'm happy about their actions. Why do people have to criticize stuff like this? Learn to forgive. Focus on what's being done now instead of just being upset about the past.
I'm sure all the Bill Gates hate affected him some back in the day (and apparently now too), but it's very doubtful that he cares all too much what other people think or he wouldn't have accomplished much, and still wouldn't be accomplishing much today.