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Comment by edkennedy | Hacker News Reader

I think he's villanized because of his main product, Windows. It suffers from the same plight Bill himself suffers as mentioned in the article. Awkwardness.

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As much as this seems like snark, it's a fair observation.

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.)

Get over yourselves , have you used *nix systems in 90s as desktops? If you not you can't compare Windows's quality with something else.

OSX wasn't even properly exist.

"NEXTSTEP is probably the most respected piece of software on the planet." -- Byte Magazine, October 1992

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.

Sure, it was.

I have a Next Color Turbo at home, it's an awesome machine.

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.

My 90s desktop experience included Windows, one of the pre-nix Mac OS's, and Red Hat. They were all terrible. Windows' propensity to crash was particularly bad, though.

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.

Yeah, they were as bad compared to Windows as Windows was compared to GEM on Atari and Amiga, or MacOS 10 years earlier.

Gem was Atari and C64, not Amiga. The Amiga used Workbench, so there was no need for Gem.

Oops. I was an Atari kid and I didn't know much about Amiga. Except, obviously, that we had midi and you didn't.

Yes, I used an Amiga as a desktop from 88-93 and it was so far beyond DOS/Windows 3.11 and the junk that came before, any comparison is shameful. Amiga OS was very, very close to unix in how the system worked from a user's perspective.

You should probably 'get over yourself' (I really hate that phrase, so I figured I'd throw that in there).

Sure, he's villainized because he aggressively forced his company's software on the world regardless of the poor quality and the negative effect it has had on essentially everyone. They bloodthirstily copied competing software to the pixel and bludgeoned innovators to death with it. I can't even calculate how much the simply poor ideas and execution of DOS/Windows has cost the computing world and everyone as a result.

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.

At the same time I think we need to remember the motto of Microsoft up until a couple years ago: "a computer in every home." Without Microsoft I'm not sure that would have been done so effectively or quickly and I'm positive that the tech world which we build in now is a direct result of that fact. The reason Microsoft changed their motto is because they actually succeeded, which is simply amazing.

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