How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates
philip.greenspun.com
philip.greenspun.com
Of course, this fails to take into account the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft.
Let's not forget that Steve Jobs came from a much more modest background and was a great competitor to Bill Gates and Microsoft. It wasn't all about having the background of a trust fund to fall back on.
I fear that people will take this article to heart without realising that it wasn't Bill Gates background that allowed him to succeed, but it was his instinct and drive.
Edit: And I will not forgive.
For anyone else:
"Speaking with CNN, [Melinda] Gates gave her diatribe on how she justifies her position as part of the global Elite who are actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90%; starting in the third world nations."
In order to appreciate this article, you'll have to accept that there is a global Elite with a capital 'E' actively seeking to depopulate the planet by 90% as one of many premises.
It embeds a video called Why is money being spent on contraception when people are starving?. It features a chubby man on a couch (username SPUCProLife) sincerely arguing that very point, seemingly unaware of the irony anyone with an IQ over 70 could readily perceive. With his bad hair, misaligned glasses and tragic fashion sense, he reminds me of Dwight from The Office, except rather less amusing as he draws straight-faced comparisons between contraception and the nazi Eugenics program.
As Obi-wan would say, michas, you should go home and rethink your life. This trash - for idiots, by idiots - has no place here.
As some one staying in a Developing nation(India), I can absolutely attest to the fact that excess population is root of all problems. Poor people have kids when they can't afford to raise them, give them education, health care or even as simple a necessity like food. The net result is poverty, which worsens with every kid they have.
If you look at it closely, many a times its due to total ignorance about contraceptive methods.
So educating the poor, especially in third world nations is actually a very nice way of tackling poverty. I would have great respect for people who are involved in spreading information and educating poor people about such methods.
A lot of people were born into a similar situation as Gates. Very few achieved what he did.
This was written in the time of Microsoft invincibility, where everyone was afraid that Microsoft would enter their market with a free offering. Now it's the opposite - Mircosoft's stock has been flat since then, and they're the ones more concerned about cheaper competitors. It takes a little of the hating edge off of Gates.
The question is: Could Gates have achieved what he did had he not been born into a similar situation?
So the person born in the current Gates' situation would prolly have achieved what Gates did - given that Gates is who he is because he won the ovarian lottery.
If he had a twin brother he's be, say Larry Ellison or Warren Buffet?
No doubt knowing that daddy is there for you if you fail and that Harvard will take you back is a huge relief and fall back strategy but Gates did make some amazingly good decisions. Some forty years later his company is worth close to $300 Billion and makes over $20 Billion in profit, year after year.
I know another child entrepreneur, self-taught programmer who read encyclopedias front to back as a kid... elon musk.
No. But we're talking about having access to that machine in the first place.
I don't begrudge him his wealth even though a bulk of ti comes down to luck. Someone had to end up with the desktop OS monopoly.
Contrast to Enron today.
Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal just as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microsoft_litigation http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107...
Sure, it was "clever" and "risky" and it probably was a lot of "hard work"...
Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?
Good food for thought there, thanks.
The folks who know BillG as a malaria guy, or who cheered MS back then, are the ones who tolerate the ends by all means.
Because those things were not as important to Microsoft's success as anti-ms people would like to think.
Reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/1118/
It was a bit more than just shipping it with Windows. IE was built into the OS. It was hard to remove, and the rendering popped up in unexpected places. People would view their email in Outlook Express. The advice at the time was "you're safe from viruses if you don't open the email", but people didn't understand the the preview pane of OE was opening the email for them, and infecting their machine.
I agree that the closed systems we're seeing now are worse.
I hate all the lock-in that's happening at the moment.
First MS would adopt the standard (embrace), then they'd start adding to it in ways which were useful but not available outside the MS products using the standard. Because they were so big their reach meant that these extensions would often become widely adopted and once this happened you effectively had to be running the appropriate MS software to have whatever it was work properly.
At which point the standard / technology ceased to be any threat to MS as while they may not control the paper standard, they controlled the vast majority of how it was being used in the real world.
The fear was that with IE being the defacto standard browser for 90% of machines, MS could have potentially take control of HTML and the other web standards and damaged or destroyed the open web.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
You can try to argue the same against Apple and Google in the modern day but that argument would fail because Apple has arguably as much clout as Google which also arguably has as much clout as Microsoft these days. And when you throw in “pure” web service companies like Facebook, the pie gets even more sliced. So even though everyone now has a proprietary stack of apps bundled with their walled garden of devices and services the fact that there is more than one garden makes it a very different situation than what was happening in the late 90s where the only garden in technology was Microsoft's.
Side note: I don’t think it was entirely Microsoft’s fault Netscape went under. It was my impression that Netscape’s management and direction had a lot to do with their downfall. I still have bad memories of trying to use the monstrosity that was the Netscape Communicator 4 suite. At the end of the day, bundled or not, what Microsoft offered was better. Compliance be dammed.
The Slashdot 'borg' icon for Microsoft is only of the few remaining relics reflecting the zeitgeist of then.
Microsoft still makes $70+B per year in revenues. MSFT is no where near being toppled, except in mindshare, they made record revenues last year. MSFT, AAPL, FB and GOOG are the top in their own separate verticals, and none can make a dent in the other's vertical. Arguably FB and GOOG are competing for ad revenue dollars, but FB is the leader in social networking, and GOOG is the leader in search.
Please can someone set me up a multi-million dollar trust fund and I'll do my best to become a billionaire.
When somebody is one of the three richest people in the world, is it our job to feel offended (or anything) for them in any context? They've won. They aren't playing the game of life or society any longer.
his instinct and drive.
His instinct, drive, and his mother's friendship with the CEO of IBM. Nice to have.
False. Both of things things enormously contributed to his success. There are tons of people with drive who never even got close to his achievements, and tons more with ideal situations who never created anything of value. Gates had an ideal mix of character and good fortune.
There's also the sad fact that personality derives a lot from upbringing and genetics, so you could say that the "instinct and drive" Gates had was also a facet of luck. In a way, most of what we are is roughly predetermined. Our character is a throw of the dice. We don't even know if free will exists at all. This is why I tend to laugh at libertarians who believe they owe nothing to anyone.
Face it, luck is perhaps 90% of any tremendous success. Just because Gladwell wrote about this doesn't mean it's not true. It's not a reason to diss Gates and his ilk and stay envious and bitter; it just means we should stop basing our self worth on whether we've changed the world or not, and stop adulating important figures or trying to derive lessons from their every move. Plenty of innately great people have failed and plenty of less than adequate people have succeeded immensely.
Could you write something to convince us that it is true?
(And if not, then why do you seemingly believe it so strongly?)
When you are born, there are already a ton a factors which will stay with you (well, mostly) till you die. Your health and innate intelligence will have a huge effect. Your carers and the early environment as well. As a biological creature, you can never be left untouched by your environment. You can never be truly free.
In fact, is there anything you can say is the sole result of your own person? That question is impossible to answer because the person you are has been molded by a ton of different experiences, both positive and negative and is not a static object.
The whole point of my post is that it's silly to to claim that some people have "deserved" their success or failure, or that you can do anything if you want it bad enough. The very fact that you are able to be deeply driven is the consequence of factors forever beyond your control.
I'm not saying you should give up and do nothing, just that we should have a more relaxed, forgiving and objective view of the moral and intrinsic value of individuals.
Thinking about it a bit, I see you're right. The key word being "tremendous". For simple success, hard work can get you there, but for the world famous one in a million++ success stories, luck likely always does play the largest role.
Some people I know with those funds just got very lazy in their twenties, went on drugs etc and are either dead or doing ok now. But most are very successful in what they do and as it appears never needed the trust fund as they made more on their own. I say they would never made the companies they made without that safety net firmly in place.
He did have more than a little entitlement to get him going but he didn't rest on it - when he was in the right time at the right place he worked hard to make it happen.
Plus he is now giving all his wealth to charity and virtually nothing to his kids as inheritance.
How about the Walton children or the Koch children.
(Edited for clarity.)
(I remember being so edgy in 1996 that I had the Bill Gates Wealth Clock as my start page. And a few years later my screensaver was "don't touch anything in Bill Gates's half." Fun times, fun times. 1999-me wouldn't believe my current opinions of Gates vis-a-vis Jobs.)
He still is:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/
(BTW, if memory serves, back then he didn't have an actual blog, per se, but posted essays occasionally such as the one being discussed here.)
Yep, that worked out well for them.
WebTV was just too early. It wanted to be a tablet experience on a TV with a remote keyboard. What it should have been is modern day AppleTV/Roku (which wasn't possible back then with dialup and 1.5M DSL speeds).
From a business perspective it's very questionable whether MS really achieved anything with either purchase.
Essentially the OP uses the acquisitions to suggest that you can just buy what you don't invent, but history says that that approach really didn't work out well at all for them in either the short or long term.
I asked, why is it sad? Care to enlighten us with some words of wisdom?
So I think the feeling was not so much jealousy, but more that they didn't compete fairly. Especially in the Linux world (where Greenspun was from), and more so after the Halloween documents leaked.
That feeling was even more pronounced in 1998, when Microsoft dominated computing and it seemed like _any_ attempt to do it big in software would either have to mean getting bought by, or killed by the sheer hugeness of Microsoft.
Nowadays Gates has set up a huge charity, and Microsoft has stumbled on so many things that we kind of feel bad for them instead.
In part due to MS antitrust violations, such as exclusivity deals with major PC manufacturers, buying and shuttering competitors, lying about vaporware, and stealing trade secrets frok technology partners.
WinNT came about in part due to scamming IBM on OS/2 development partnership.
'Train your CEO' Yea, that Ballmer guy worked out really well.
Do as HP does in regards to profits? Months after this article was written, Carly Fiorina took the reigns of HP. Oof.
I agree that you cannot micromanage it but you also have to pass it on to someone who is capable.
"However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job."
The above point is true but the quality of code obviously leads to less bugs and security holes. I have had horror stories of my friends hiring coders in India. The work that was given back has been a mess and 90% of the time requires a whole rewrite.
Point - Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.
This article didn't make things better.
How true is this,especially the last sentence?
If you send me a mail you don't know where I'll be or what sort of machine I'll be using when I open it. If you write a blog post you don't want to have to care what browser I'll use.
Sure there's a base level of functionality that any OS will need to provide to be a workable computing device (mail, web, maybe the ability to at least view PDF and Office-type documents, that sort of thing) but there are already dozens of OSes providing that and it feels unlikely that there could ever be anything big enough to move us all back to a single platform.
Open standards rock.