Hacker News Reader

Comment by colourgarden | Hacker News Reader

Could you give a summary of how Bill Gates is viewed by "the average American"?

As a Brit, I think he's just viewed as "the rich computer guy". It's hard to fathom that people think he's involved with political topics.

View on HN

Much less so than any owner of Twitter, Google or Facebook is anyway. Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world. Out of all FAANG they’re the least politically aligned.

Hell, they're so not FAANG, they're not even in the acronym.

But I get it. If I were slotting tech companies into eras, they'd be before Facebook/Google, but after the real old school guys like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and if FAANG means “big tech companies with continued big growth”, M is more deserving of the title than, for instance, G. FAAN all have over 300% return over past 5 years, as does M. G however is at like 130%, roughly the same as the Nasdaq. Which to me roughly means they aren’t growing faster than the average tech company (NASDAQ being roughly an index of tech)

(Work at M, may be biased :) )

I also felt that the N was out of place as its market cap is about 1/3 the next smallest (FB at $0.77B vs. $0.22B). The rest (and MSFT) are all > $1B. NFLX has a lower cap than NVDA, ADBE, and PYPL (and TSLA and BABA).

> Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world

You have to be satirical right? Microsoft is notorious for lobbying everything to this day. Browser monopolies, OS monopolies, they pretty much invented EEE, made whole cities switch to their OS and the whole xbox platform is very political regarding software, gambling and IP politics.

He asked about how the average American views Bill Gates, not how the average person who read /. in the 90s views Bill Gates.

I have mixed feelings about Bill Gates. He is doing good things with his fortune now, but Microsoft are/were not the good guys.

Microsoft always stole from the rich. Now Gates is giving to the poor. It could be worse :)

Check out the work of the Gates foundation, working to eliminate Polio, etc.

My sense is that in America, people outside the tech world don't even think of him as the founder of Microsoft anymore. He's just Bill Gates the incredibly rich philanthropist.

Are you not familiar with the very prevalent conspiracy theories about him wanting to microchip people, how the coronavirus vaccine is his attempt to do, etc? It's been all over the internet.

Here's a bbc article: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648

On the internet, things can be "very prevalent" to one person (figuratively speaking) and "never heard of" to most other people.

> It's hard to fathom that people think he's involved with political topics.

Maybe hard to fathom, but just have a closer look and you'll see he has a lot of irons in the fire

Reply on news.ycombinator.com