Seeing him speak so candidly like this makes me think of how unfairly Bill Gates was vilified during Microsoft's peak in the 90s.
Bill Gates is, I suspect, a much better person now than he was in the 90s, and the world is a better place because of it. His current laudable campaigns do nothing to detract from his past misdeeds, however. He was evil, now he's good. I'm glad that he's devoting the same energy and passion to stamping out Malaria and AIDS as he did stamping out Netscape and Linux. Hopefully he'll be more successful, as well.
That standard is more immoral than anything Microsoft ever did. It requires companies to kill themselves once they achieve too great a level of success.
Reminds me of something pg wrote in "what happened to yahoo"
http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
"It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them."
And this is how we got on the mess we are, when regard for what's right takes a back seat to how much money one can make.
No. I won't play by these rules.
It disturbs me that there's still no real restitution sought from people who knowingly, deliberately attack our society's mechanism for allocating most all resources.
I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.
That's interesting. From my perspective of growing up with computers in the 80's and 90's, Microsoft was a net positive for the industry.
They took a really fragmented and immature industry and helped push it to the mainstream and helped allow computers to be a part of pretty much everyone in the first worlds life.
But I think historically, we will look back on him as having some of the most influential and profound ideas (and decisions) of the 21st century.
No one person has done as much for humanity as Bill Gates has, perhaps in the history of the world. The only comparisons are perhaps to someone like Jonas Salk.
Ok, now its clear you're in love or delusional.
What has he done but spend money? I haven't heard of a single breakthrough from that money, btw. Not that I'm really expecting any, these things take time.
Your placement of a ruthless business person (now giving away to charity) above einsteins and saints feels creepy frankly.
If your product is mediocre, then you can't really depend on it to sell itself, can you? So you have to use whatever leverage you can get to get it adopted and to keep out competition.
And bundling a web browser with the OS.
In the early 2000s Steve Ballmer himself visited my (rather unimportant) East-European country and had a one-on-one with the then PM about the software-procurement decisions the Government was about to take. Soon enough it was decided that all Government-run institutions in the country should be fitted with Windows-run computers, using only Microsoft software.
A lot of my compatriots' tax money (and my own money) went directly into MS' coffers (when it could have find a better use in other, more important places), but I can see that 10 years from that moment some of it is invested in trying to cure malaria. Well, at least we weren't robbed for nothing.
Microsoft only stopped being evil once Gates left.
Also, Microsoft's "evilness" during Gates pales in comparison to what Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon are doing right now.
Having worked there and talked to the employees, I'd blame the consent decree more than Gates leaving. But I'm curious what your sources are.