Paul Allen breaks his silence, calls Gates a rip-off artist in new book | Hacker News Reader

Paul Allen breaks his silence, calls Gates a rip-off artist in new book

blogs.seattleweekly.com

It amazes me Paul Allen ever managed to become filthy rich in the first place. He just doesn't seem like a savvy person. Why even bother criticizing Gates at this point? True or not it just doesn't make much sense to attack someone who is now primarily recognized as one of the individuals doing the most good in the world right now. Between this and his ridiculous patent lawsuits I think he's just getting old and mad that no one worships him as a legendary figure in technology the same way they do guys like Jobs, Woz, Ellison, Gates, etc. Sad really. He made out like a bandit -- he should be happy with that and stop trying to tear down other people.

Paul is telling his side of the story. Who thought Bill Gates was a saint? He probably thought that he was working a lot harder than Paul the entire time. He was driven. When Paul got cancer, I imagine he realized there's a lot more to life than work, and started enjoying life even more. Microsoft was Bill's life.

This probably happens in lots of successful startups. Some people slack off and want to enjoy life, while others are driven. What's the best way to handle it?

In the end, it's great that we hear the real story, warts, and all.

> one of the individuals doing the most good in the world right now

In what world do you live?

> he should be happy with that and stop trying to tear down other people.

So, the truth deserves to remain hidden and people should continue to worship borderline psychos just because they got rich?

What's your opinion of the Gates Foundation's work?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

Lots of PR, money being directed towards maximizing media impact and arguably more bad than good being done.

While I agree that there is a lot to criticize about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it strikes me as fairly silly to claim that because there is a lot to criticize they are not one of the largest / most influential charities in the world or that they are not doing good.

Let's imagine it's the Ernst Stavro Blofeld Foundation deviating attention from SPECTRE through a series of arguably good deeds that are coincidentally profitable for its mother organization. Blofeld always dreamed with being remembered as the new Carnegie for all the good his kind heart brought upon mankind. That or world domination, whatever comes first.

It would be awesome if they had a missile base inside Mount Rainier ;-)

On a more serious note, they may well be one of the most influential charities in the world, but, unless the net result of their activities is good, they are not, really, doing good. Most of the criticism is because their activities are worsening the situation where they are trying to help. It also doesn't help when they push Microsoft (or other companies owned partly by Gates and his satellites) stuff along with their fully tax deductible good deeds.

The Gates Foundation does a lot of good in the world. However I remember seeing cases where their willingness to do good work sure looked like it was contingent on the government of the place signing lucrative Microsoft contracts. That left a foul taste in my mouth.

I don't know whether that was the actual case. Or whether they have changed their policies. But it left me suspicious about motivations.

Anyways the whole purpose of the foundation seems to me to be to whitewash the reputation of a very bad person. Bill Gates committed a lot of crimes to put Microsoft on top. He got off for free from most of them, and lightly from most of the rest. But thanks to the Gates Foundation, history will remember him kindly for some time. Just like it did for Andrew Carnegie.

It might be harsh, but I think it makes business sense to reduce a co-founder's influence in a startup when it becomes uncertain if that person will be able to continue contributing.

When I read that Bill Gates was called a rip-off artist, I was thinking of a couple of other decisions that made the company what it is now.

> it makes business sense to reduce a co-founder's influence in a startup when it becomes uncertain if that person will be able to continue contributing

Then call him for a meeting, tell him "you know, there is a 50% chance you will die in the next 6 months and we should take steps to reduce the risk to the company". Starting from this point, I am sure some arrangement could be made to protect both the company and his family in the event of his death.

You should treat other people with respect. Gates and Ballmer, obviously, don't have such burdens.

from the article: [Gates and Ballmer] also wondered how they might reduce Allen's company stake...

That's different from reducing his influence; this reads like they were trying to take away vested stock. That's not the same as saying "because of your illness, how about stepping down from Executive VP (which Allen was at the time)? Obviously you can't get as much stock in the future if you're not able to commit to Microsoft."

The best way to do this is to make all founders go through vesting from the beginning. Under that standard, Allen would likely have been fully vested by the time he left and it would have been clear that he earned his stake. According to wikipedia he was the one who found QDOS which has to be one of the most important and valuable acquisitions for early MS.

I like how his version of the story makes it sound like he rolled QDOS himself in a few hard evenings. He neglects to mention that they found and bought it.

Here's the full segment from 60 Minutes: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363070n

"He was too angry and proud to tell Bill Gates 'Some days working with you is like being in hell.'"

Wow, the interview was great to watch. I don't know if it was spun like this or not but Paul Allen comes off as someone with almost no social skills - he rarely looks the interviewer in the eye, shows no sense of humour, his private collections seem to show him being lonely and his words do sound like him being bitter. I think the least he could have done is sent a draft copy to Bill Gates saying this is what I'm planning to publish and wanted to give you a heads up.

Go cry in your MiG-29, Paul.

I'm sort of reminded by this quote by Pablo Picasso Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal . Just because you are making a copy of some one doesn't take away that you are either changing or improving on the design or taking it in a new direction...

It is uncertain whether Pablo Picasso ever uttered those words. There's no record of it. However, it is certain that T.S. Elliott wrote [1] something along those lines:

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

[1] http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

Comparing Windows with the Lisa, the Macintosh, the Xerox Star or even Smalltalk 80, or MS-DOS with CP/M, you arrive at the inescapable conclusion Microsoft has always been really, really short on good poets.

> or taking it in a new direction...

Even a cheap, incomplete and buggy ripoff can be qualified as a new direction... I believe Gates' true big innovation was the way he cornered the OEM market into paying the Microsoft tax in a way that made it prohibitively expensive to sell PC clones with software other than Microsoft's.

That's one innovation that had the deepest impact in the personal computer, probably dragging evolution back a decade or more.

I get so mad when I see multi-billionaires getting pissy at each other over bullshit. What the fuck do they have to complain about?

Not much, except that his friends were trying to rip him (along his soon-to-be widow and children) off while he was very busy dying.

That excepted, nothing very serious... Just a lot of drama.

A small correction: he has no wife or kids.

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