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Comment by inciampati | Hacker News Reader

He robbed value from society by monopolizing the operating systems market with extremely nasty business practices. We are still suffering. Now he gets oodles of credit for throwing the change back at humanitarian projects which sometimes bear fruit. I'll change my mind about him when he donates 10 billion to open source software to offset the damage his company has done. It would be ideal if he gave the rest of his loot to democratic systems that allow local people to decide where to put the money. We don't need kings or emperors.

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Nah, I lived through the entire period. Human nature is the reason we had a Microsoft monopoly. Apple didn’t care enough. The Linux people wanted lots of distributions, and couldn’t build a consumer business model with a gun to their heads.

Open Office was, and is, a piece of garbage.

I wasted a lot of time explaining to people that if we all bought our cars from GM, they would suck. That’s what Microsoft was.

Just let it go.

Although, it sure would have been nice if the Amiga carved out 10% market share.

> Human nature is the reason we had a Microsoft monopoly.

They straight up bribed the regulators. If Office stored data in an easy-to-parse open format, society may well have already created a universal flu vaccine.

> If Office stored data in an easy-to-parse open format, society may well have already created a universal flu vaccine.

Help me connect those dots please.

That’s a really narrow view of the world by someone that’s probably never sold to business. MS products worked exactly the way people who were paid for them care they worked.

> Now he gets oodles of credit for throwing the change back at humanitarian projects which sometimes bear fruit.

They're thought to have saved 6 Million lives...

And a monopolized OS market has probably cost zero lives.

I'd let corporations get away with way worse if the profits were always used like this.

It's a counterfactual- I suspect we'd have more advanced technology in other sectors and more global economic opportunity across the board if Microsoft hadn't abused their monopoly power and slowed progress in computing advancements, which could also have saved lives indirectly... but we'll never know.

> slowed progress in computing advancements

What? How does your operating system limit the kind of computing that you can do?

Furthermore, how can you say that Microsoft's monopoly position didn't actually allow them to accelerate the progress of computing even further than their competitors might have otherwise?

Look up what "counterfactual" means. Sure, it's possible the world is a better place because of the Microsoft monopoly, just as the Microsoft apologists claim.

I’d argue the business practices of Microsoft in the 1990s and 2000s have set the technology industry back at least a decade. The side effect of this is lives of toil instead of productivity. May have saved six million lives but cost a billion people a future they could have had.

Could you elaborate? Setting us back by a decade seems like a pretty bold claim. And I say this as someone that, on balance, despises the Microsoft of the past (for monopolistic behaviour) and present (for spyware and normalizing hardware lockdown).

It's definitely a bold claim and one people don't want to discuss. Bar the points you mentioned, mainly that they seriously stunted the rise of the Internet and world wide web. When it did take off, due to market share and mindset, they actively locked people into their vision of it. People are still, right now in 2018, trying to escape some of their grasp. There's still ActiveX out there. Plus the damage they did to Java for example.

> I'd let corporations get away with way worse if the profits were always used like this.

You must be kidding right? Its like saying stealing is OK as long as its used well.

Stealing from the (relatively speaking) super rich can be, in some circumstances, according to a sufficiently utilitarian moral framework. One could argue that's what progressive taxes are all about.

I admit it's hard for me to quantify the damage Microsoft's business practices have caused (any helpful links/sources?), but it's extremely difficult to imagine it being worse than not saving millions of lives.

Gates could be, with little imagination, be a modern-day Robin Hood. Stealing from those rich enough to be able to worry about computers and bit sequences, and then giving back the money to the truly needy in the world.

I have zero knowledge of ethics and philosophy, but in the grand scheme of things, when you consider humanity as a whole and ignore Silicon Valley, it's all good. Even admirable.

To put things in perspective, people felt something similar towards Alfred Nobel before his death and the establishment of the Nobel Foundation. He was nicknamed "The Merchant of Death".

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/m...

Andrew Carnegie wasn't exactly a saint either when he was in business.

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