Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

So the main theme of the article is that Bill Gates was a "good" manager, and it enumerates through a bunch of examples of his innovative contributions.

I've always held the belief that even though Gates may have been an effective manager, he was a terrible person. IMHO, his repeated anti-competitive, deceptive, and often illegal behavior was the main reason for Microsoft's success.

View on HN

An excellent example of that:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

An interesting spin on a "real" BillG review:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

> how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it away free?

Microsoft made many mistakes, but I don't see how integrating a browser into Windows was one. I still can't fathom that we live in a world where that got Microsoft in such trouble, but acquiring Activision Blizzard was deemed ok.

I don't know where your quote is from, but trying to own the "default" web browser and tying it to your OS monopoly seems like a pretty great idea from a "making money" perspective, if perhaps not a legal or ethical one.

Legal problem, absolutely. But it is hard to spin bundling a web browser as an ethical concern - especially from MS's perspective. Everything they put in the OS is a component bundled with the OS. Some components being legally special and problematic would have been quite confusing to them when it first hit. Web browsers aren't special and there is an expectation that an OS can access the internet using a variety of protocols.

The ethical issue would be around making it technically harder for competitors to create a web browser. Eg, standard practice on mobile phones (which is worse than anything MS ever did and has always seemed fine to me).

It's from Joel Spolsky in that post linked by the grandparent, from 2006. And that's exactly what I'm saying - it was one honking great idea. Microsoft saw how central the web is becoming, and integrated it into the OS

As for legality, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not an antitrust one, but as I see it, an OS is almost by definition an amorphous collection of tools that users need to make proper use of their computer and nowadays I can't imagine an OS that doesn't come with a browser, so would argue that they were absolutely right in integrating it. If anything, I see much more merit in suing them for abusing their OS monopoly to go into the solitaire gaming space.

You're looking at it from the modern perspective. What Microsoft did was use their monopoly power to destroy a potential competitor -- the first step of the "EEE" trifecta.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I don't think that they, or anyone, should be disallowed to Embrace new technologies. There has to be a better approach to antitrust.

They never "destroyed" anyone who didn't have it coming.

I remember paying for Netscape 4, and I remember the pile of steaming garbage I got when I did that.

They destroyed MacBASIC --- as a person who suffered through using Microsoft BASIC for Macintosh, that's not something I'll forget.

Even if it's true, it doesn't rule out that he was a good manager (CEO sort of). In the jungle you have to be a bad guy to fight the other bad guys. We give our own bad guys power so that we can keep our hands clean.

Or maybe "good" in the sense of effectiveness is entirely separate from moral "good", and any notion of nebulous other "bad guys" is irrelevant to an assessment of Bill Gates as a manager. I'd argue they're not relevant to assessing him morally, either, but of course that's a very old debate.

>In the jungle you have to be a bad guy to fight the other bad guys.

One of my favorite places to go in the world is jungles. I've never really encountered bad guys there, and I've never fought anyone I've met in a jungle. I think you might want to work on a better metaphor, and also question your assumptions about any of this since on this I can't agree literally or metaphorically.

Worst people I've ever met have all been in ornate offices

I think billg and sjobs had something important that other CEOs just don't have.

They started the company. They were parents.

This is exactly why billg turned philantropist, in the footsteps of Alfred Nobel, the Merchant of Death.

Gates was an exceptionally good problem solver.

The trouble with great problem solvers is that they assume everyone else is also great at solving problems, and thus understand that if they are causing trouble for other people that those other people will step in and solve the problem that was created.

But, as you point out, not everyone is a problem solver.

Epstein really accentuated his bad side. I am interested to see what that was all about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com