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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices (that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet) and isn't it likely that Bill Gates most likely has the world's greatest PR team? Also, do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion?

I'm sincerely asking these questions: I agree he seems like an OK guy these days... but the rational part of me kinda wonders what evidence we have that he isn't just the product of a giant PR campaign.

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I don't know that I've seen anyone say Gates is "The world's greatest guy." He seems intelligent and genuine in interviews and in his writing. He's accomplished big things. He has good taste in books. He's working on worthwhile philanthropical topics.

That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above. He is who he is. In my view, a good person. If Gates turns out to be involved in Epstein's pedophile ring then of course I'd change my opinion. I deeply hope he wasn't though.

>That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above.

i mean doesn't it? this "playing a game well" as a proxy for fairness/justice/merit metaphor as a source of legitimacy i think is strained in business. if you play basketball well and win a championship then you showed merit because the rules are tight - it's very hard to win by another means than being talented (i.e. cheating). the exception that proves the rule is how upset people get when basketball players "flop". business is the one game where the only rule is "don't get caught" so it doesn't seem correct to reason that since he did well he played fair.

Anyone who plays sports knows the rule is "don't get caught" there too...

of course but no one venerates the cheaters (lance armstrong has fallen from grace)

I feel like we have at least 10 weekly front page articles on "<billionaire> is a terrible person, if I was a billionaire I would use my fortune much more morally" (sure you would). It takes a certain amount of obliviousness then, to go into these comments sections and declare "I don't know why everyone thinks <billionaire> is a great guy!". Are these people self aware? Are they androids?

You've probably heard "<whatever-celebrity> is the nicest person I've EVER met!"

There must be a named bias for this particular type of statement.

Usually when people say things like that, I wonder a lot (for a very short period of time, though) about what kinds of company they keep.

But chances are, if you've met one, you haven't met them all. Over time people change. Bill was pretty nasty as a business man if you were competing with him in any way whatsoever. As a philanthropist retiree he seems pretty awesome.

Blanket statements (like this one) are only true from the point of view they were made in. If you're lucky.

I think it's a combination of PR and probably some genuine development as a person. He has been pretty open about being maniacally focused on Microsoft's success in the earlier years, even to the point where he views it as a mistake or at least a mistaken approach. My impression is that Melinda has done a lot to help him soften his edge and do some introspection and grow as a friend, father, and husband. Warren Buffet, too, who has also taken what I think is a pretty impressive trajectory of maturation as a person.

So overall I agree with you there is probably some of the titan of industry reforming his reputation kind of thing going on (like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al). But I think there is probably a little more than that going on, as well, and I think that deeper authenticity is probably what gives people hope, although that hope culturally may end up distorted through the infatuation with his power to get to the "world's greatest guy" thing. Which I think he would probably reject, himself, if you asked him.

What did Bill Gates do in the 1990s? Bundle IE with Windows? Pay Dell not to install BeOS? Maybe those are antitrust violations, and bad business conduct, but they’re not inherently immoral. Meanwhile, spending billions and tons of personal time and expertise to solve world problems is inherently moral.

I think strong arming PC manufacturers to stymie the creation of a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows (which in early iterations was really a terrible product, in my opinion, and very hostile to developers) may have hindered the computer revolution by several years- But obviously we can never know the outcome of counterfactuals for sure.

Let’s not be so dramatic about a capitalist business decision to strategical maintain their market share. The computer wasn’t stymied and competition still exists.

There was a period of 10 or 15 years or so (up to around 2000) where the de-facto standard microcomputer operating system, supplied by MS, was much worse at using the hardware than it should have been.

(In the earlier part it wasn't able to access all the memory without jumping through hoops; throughout the period it wasn't using the available protection mechanisms to isolate processes properly.)

This was for business reasons, not because the human race didn't know how to write a better OS.

(I don't think this makes Gates an evil person, but I think it does make it fair to say that Microsoft stymied the computer revolution to some extent.)

It was an attack on the free market. Concerted effort to prevent better products from being available for sale. We lost a decade of progress, and never even managed to claw back the money.

Businesses in power want to remain in power and will do what they think is "right" to protect their position. I'm not sure how this delayed innovation, it just made it harder to compete in the existing market.

I have mixed feelings about BillG with my only conflict being around his stance on being pro-Intellectual Monopoly laws and anti-open source/intellectual freedom:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists 2. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_... 3. http://techrights.org/2009/06/25/bill-gates-office-patents/

It's a real intellectual struggle for me because his recent Netflix, his writings, his book recommendations, the company he built, the Melinda + Bill Gates Foundation, he's done so much good for the world but I still haven't seen him come out against Intellectual Monopoly laws, which due so much bad for the world (and which he has made such a fortune off of). The examples of the evil that Intellectual Monopoly laws do are numerous, but take the recent opioid epidemic—the root cause was patent law! You make 100x+ more money off selling patented drugs, regardless of the outcome on the patient, so we have a whole industry that is focused on making patented drugs, and not actually helping cure or heal people, and we get horrible horrible things like the opioid crisis (disclosure: took the lives of a number of my friends).

If BillG comes out against Intellectual Monopoly laws of copyrights and patents, then I will think he is a true saint.

Bill Gates made his money almost exclusively from exploiting copyrights and patents, from his very first contract to license DOS to IBM, a contract he got due to his mother's nepotism.

A whole mess of anticompetitve actions. Plenty of quotes to choose from, I'll keep it to two, from the Novell DRDOS case:

"Bill Gates ordered to all application business units to include checking routines of operating environments and if it is Microsoft DOS, nothing will happen. But if it is non MS-DOS (such as DR-DOS), application will display messages saying that 'This application has been developed and tested for Microsoft MS-DOS. Since you use different environment, this application may not work correctly . . .' "

B. J. Bahk, Microsoft, August 9, 1989

"Microsoft's unfair contracting practices have denied other U.S. companies a fair chance to compete, deprived consumers of an effective choice among competing PC operating systems, and slowed innovation."

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, July 16, 1994

http://www.maxframe.com/DR/Info/fullstory/factstat.html

Or if you prefer the full findings of fact from US vs. Microsoft:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

That seems fully compatible with rayiner's comment.

Destroying businesses, livelihoods, and holding back an industry by a decade or more, is more than just "bad business".

What antitrust violations would not potentially destroy businesses and livelihoods?

> "Bill Gates ordered to all application business units to include checking routines of operating environments and if it is Microsoft DOS, nothing will happen. But if it is non MS-DOS (such as DR-DOS), application will display messages saying that 'This application has been developed and tested for Microsoft MS-DOS. Since you use different environment, this application may not work correctly . . .' "

That seems entirely reasonable. If you're selling software and you've tested it for a particular OS, and someone using it isn't on the OS, why wouldn't you notify them that issues they experience could likely be resolved by switching to a supported OS?

Anti-competitive would be preventing it from working at all on different operating systems.

In the context of many other cited statements and testimony, the warning had no basis in fact, and was aimed principally at chilling the market for DRDOS.

We have the same today. Web apps will have sometimes been tested for only one browser. I've definitely seen a warning stating to switch to Chrome for example when using FF.

My thought exactly. I just don't see the big fuss over these things.

The fact that you're quite flippant about MS's conduct in the 90s makes me think that Gates' PR has been amazingly successful. Does no one remember the default Borg icon for MS stories on Slashdot?

Here's another great example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... . MS deliberately displayed false incompatibility error messages when Windows detected it was being run on DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS in an effort to crush any fair competition. MS was absolutely ruthless in the 90s, and I can only hope you are younger than 30ish or so if you don't think MS's behavior then was immoral. It's interesting to me that Google gets so much shit for their practices these days on HN when MS was easily an order of magnitude worse in the 90s.

> Does no one remember the default Borg icon for MS stories on Slashdot?

Drcode remembers...

It's amazing what founding a charity and donating to noble causes will do for one's reputation. Neither Microsoft nor Gates apologized for the things they did.

He didn't spend his $billions, he spent $billions he ripped off from customers and competitors. Why is he getting credit for spending my money?

> Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices

Another idea: maybe Bill Gates, like many of us, is a morally complex person who has done immense good and also done some bad things, some of them possibly very bad.

nah, that makes brains hurt. can't be that.

Here is my opinion on the matter: given that that the probability of me interacting personally with Gates is on the order of a rounding error, I don't really care if he's actually a nice guy or if he's the greatest actor in the world, because in the end he's still one of the people who's putting money on making the world a better place, whether it's just for making him look good or not.

That money also does things like corrupt education with newfangled "business oriented" theories unsupported by evidence, and generally displace scientific consensus with whatever his pet theories are.

Gates was massively successful in using philanthropy to burnish his image and somehow become seen as a role model for anything related to ethics. It’s like people forgot the whole antitrust/crushing an entire industry with shady practices thing.

Gates never acted ethically in business. Billions of dollars in donations don’t change the fact that his association with Epstein is perfectly in character for him.

Possibly due to the philanthropic efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

You're missing my point. Other rich people donate anonymously or through a foundation that doesn't have their name on it.

> Other rich people donate anonymously

How do you know?

Charities report anonymous donations.

There are a lot of museums, historic sites, schools, etc with names of donors on plaques hanging on some wall, and many of them attribute very large donations to "anonymous donor."

Maybe that donor is Bill Gates.

Also: it's possible to make an "anonymous" donation and let your friends and family know you're doing it. That way, to the people you know and want to impress you seem both like a generous philanthropist and a humble private person.

My point is, it's possible to read any action in a bad light and assign a bad motive to it. In my view giving money to worthwhile causes is good, even if you're doing it to rehabilitate your image or make yourself look good

Seems unlikely since his name is often also on the wall and on nearby walls.

> You're missing my point.

You asked what could be the reason why "are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy?"

I'm pointing out it might have something to do with a $50 billion philanthropic organization.

Unpopular opinion: I think a lot of people use charity/philanthropy as a cover to prevent scrutiny against other less than stellar things they have done. See Clinton Foundation, McCain Institute, etc.

Cover? That's your response to the Gates Foundation's philanthropy—that it's cover for shady stuff? Really? Whatever did they do that was so horrific compared to everything the foundation has achieved?

Aggressively normalize US companies conceding to Chinese Communist Party censorship and surveillance demands.

I read a really interesting article some years ago how the rich setup charity foundations to hide from taxes. I donate to your foundation some large amount and you do the same.

Then employ your family members to run the foundation and pay them a huge salary.

I can’t validate this, but I recall the article.

Alfred Nobel:

http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/how-alfred-nobel-read-an-...

The list is long. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Pew, Kochs, ...

I liked this link from that dead post below

https://twitter.com/nickwiger/status/1183086808046829568

He used to be reviled enough during the 1990s to receive literal pies in the face. [0]

He has done some good of course, but some people tend to see anyone "giving away money" == faultless saint.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6SS8CXYZo

>> He used to be reviled enough during the 1990s to receive literal pies in the face. [0]

all it takes is one person to do that.

If you read the news or forums at any frequency during that time, you'd recall that Gates was the Tall Poppy back then, before Steve Jobs became successful enough for his haters to adopt Gates as the hero figure against Jobs.

How often do you see bad guys create something comparable to the Gates Foundation?

Rockefeller, Carnegie, Barnum, Kraft, Walton, Koch?

If you find one, you might want to give them a Nobel Prize....

He can be both a ruthless business man and a generous philanthropist. (I'm not expressing a view on either.) Humans are full of contradictions.

I don't think he is seen as the worlds greatest guy, but typically he is seen as positive. Big part of it is probably him admitting his bad behavior when building Microsoft (the business). He matured as a person. But more importantly, the fact that he know tries to actively do good things.

Look at other super rich, and what they do in comparison...

Really? I think if you forced "people on the street" to formulate a list the 5 greatest living people, I bet 80% of them would have "Bill Gates" on that list.

> why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"

I literally never encountered a person who was convinced that. Neither I heard about anybody being convinced so. You seem to be fighting a straw man of your own building. We all know about Gates' dealings in Microsoft and his other faults. No need to preach to this particular choir.

> do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion?

I think when a person gives away as much, we can excuse him for wanting his name on it. But when you will be giving away your billions, you are free to do it completely anonymously and in secret, that's fine too.

There's plenty of concrete criticism levelled at his foundation as well. See the wiki page for an good overview, but there are more concerns.

> that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet

In 1998 internet explorer was the dominant browser and many websites refused to load on anything else. That condition persisted for several years thereafter.

I think the antitrust probe was probably the turning point you're noticing.

Perhaps it's partially an overcorrection of his previous reputation and an inevitable comparison to the low bar that Steve Jobs set in his personal life. The thinking being that Gates was a nasty shark in business that was ruthless but at least he wasn't as bad as Jobs in abandoning his daughter.

What evils has he committed that outweigh the good that he has done for computing and humanity?

Good marketing and PR changed his image.

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