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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it was entirely fair. Microsoft only stopped being evil once Gates left. Its predatory and monopolistic behaviour was driven primarily by him, personally.

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.

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     Microsoft only stopped being evil once Gates left.

Since Gates left, Microsoft stopped winning or creating products people want, turning slowly into a patents troll instead.

Also, Microsoft's "evilness" during Gates pales in comparison to what Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon are doing right now.

Evil will be passing your personal information to governments which want to put your life in danger. Or destroying the environment. Or willfully having inadequate safeguards for profit.

And bundling a web browser with the OS.

> Or willfully having inadequate safeguards for profit.

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.

Maybe Bill Gates was never truly "evil". Maybe he just did what he had to do to amass the wealth that is required to do truly great things like stamping out Malaria and AIDS. Who is to say he wasn't planning his philanthropy all along? I certainly am. It's one of the main driving factors behind the business goals I work towards every day. I think Bill Gates has always been kind of misunderstood.

That's entirely possible, but it was never the impression that I got at the time. True, I could be grossly misjudging his motivations in the 90s, but I don't think so. I think he was driven to be successful for its own sake. I'm certainly glad that he's turned to philanthropy, but I think applying his current actions as the motivation for his actions 15 years ago smacks of revisionism.

Or maybe his current philanthropy is his way of assuaging the guilt over his prior evil, and not a planned "the ends justify the means" rationalization for his evil from the outset.

Does that mean that as long ends are noble you are not worried about the means ?

I think Bill Gates is generally misunderstood because we don't fully appreciate just how intelligent he is. He's not routinely creating or providing answers (in the way that a scientist like Einstein was constantly offering up new ideas), so it's hard to really measure. He's inherently private, which only hinders our understanding of him even more.

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.

> No one person has done as much for humanity as Bill Gates

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.

I suspect Gates' business methods were relied on because the product was so mediocre.

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.

"Microsoft only stopped being evil once Gates left"

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.

There's still evil at Microsoft, but it reportedly has turned inward, emanating from HR.

This is some of the most ridiculously biased shit I've ever read on HN. Please explain his past misdeeds that are so unforgivable that his $30 odd billion in charitable donations can't even erase.

I don't think anything erases the past. On the whole, the world is a lot better off for having Bill Gates in it. But just because he's doing a lot of good now doesn't mean the bad he did doesn't count.

He had aggressive business practices? That's what makes him evil? He wanted IE and Windows to win out over Netscape and Linux? Give me a break. That is as mundanely not-evil in the business world as you could get.

"Give me a break" == lazy. Being willfully ignorant of MS's numerous misdeeds is not an argument. And if you don't have all the facts available, perhaps you should refrain from commenting.

Aggressive isn't the problem. Illegal, immoral and anti-competitive was the problem.

I've yet to see a large company that wasn't illegal, immoral, or anti-competitive by the utopian-fairy-nerd standard.

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.

But there can still be an order of magnitude difference between what these large companies do. Just because they all fall short of a "utopian-fairy-nerd" standard doesn't mean they're all equally reprehensible!

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."

> the utopian-fairy-nerd standard.

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.

The money he's spending is extorted from our industry. If you believe the good somehow outweighs the harm, do you also believe that every tech company and every computer user should be robbed and the proceeds used to further help the poor, with no vote and none of the burden being shouldered from outside tech?

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.

Doesn't it depend on the harm caused by his misdeeds? If his business practices caused $100 billion or more of harm to humanity (by holding back the tech industry), could $30 billion wash that away?

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.

> 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.

Every time I buy a computer that has microsoft windows release 'x' installed which I then wipe to install Linux I subsidize Bill Gates' ability to be a philanthropist.

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