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.