It makes me feel incredibly guilty for how much a lot of people (myself) hated this man over things that seem so petty now a mere decade or so later.
The nerdrage over all that was a little hard to take seriously even before we had historical perspective on it.
edit: I'm actually HAPPY that MSFT were found guilty of abusing their monopoly power. I just want to keep it in perspective, not just in the omg BillG is saving the world perspective, but frankly in perspective relative to all the evil that corporations are capable of doing...
Let the people die from malaria, do nothing about kids getting crippled from polio, let kids suffer from malnutrition??
What do you suggest he should do instead? Play golf and write management books all day?
A man made richest fortune on earth, and has now gone on a mission to tackle tough problems for the betterment of humanity and all you can do is find mistakes in his work?
Even if you were right, I don't think the lives of Silicon Valley yuppies have been "ruined" in quite the same way as some of the victims of Chinese factory production lines....
Indeed, while you are getting your panties in a twist about things you think happened in the 1990s, Gates has saved millions of lives.
Have you considered worrying less about a few capitalists being "ruined" (while living in the world's richest society and consuming a huge proportion of the world's resources) and worrying more about the millions suffering from war, starvation, disease and various other afflictions?
I don't recall any of them being being brought up on anti-trust charges and losing.
And no amount of saving lives wipes away those you ruined.
You want to compare the effects of these lives "ruined" (whose exactly?) with the Chinese workers making your products committing suicide?
Second, Gates wasn't uniquely bad, and he had plenty of equally ruthless rivals including Jobs, Ellison and Noorda. He was, as mentioned, held to much higher standards.
Third, it still shows a profound lack of humanity to think that what was mostly antitrust-theatre has anything like the same importance as real life and death issues in the wider world.
Well fuck off then, we're done. I'm not going to waste my time reiterating Microsoft's crimes to someone's who apparently blind to them and continues to throw out red herrings.
Chinese workers... red herring, nothing to do with this.
Re Chinese workers, denial of concrete evidence is a good way to show you lost the argument. Also, that you are desperately short of common humanity.
No, it's a good way to throw out irrelevant red herrings from someone who doesn't know how to even make an argument. Let it sink in to that tiny little brain of yours, how Chinese workers are treated by others has no bearing at all on whether Bill did something wrong in his past. Lacking any real argument, you're just flailing around foolishly looking for something to grab onto.
Anyone with a sense of proportion uses their bile to fight things that actually matter. No rational person today thinks that includes what Gates did in the 1990s.
(1) Fraud and conspiracy on a massive scale, plus money laundering, insider trading and other crimes. (2) Using Nigerian children as guinea pigs. Dozens died. (3) Illegally dumping thousands of tons of highly toxic waste in landfills.
You've been told multiple times to stop throwing in those other companies as red herrings and since you're unable to have a rational discussion, we're done here. Take your ignorance somewhere else, I'm not interested.