Reddit is a great opportunity to be more direct and poignant (always in an educated and intelligent manner).
For the people that don't know, the general "consensus" on reddit is that Bill Gates is awesome and Steve Jobs sucked, of course it's oversimplified but you see it around.
I for one would have liked to know if now with hindsight, he sees Microsoft's actions in the past over aggressive maybe hindering the progress of open source and stuff like that.
I don't want to accuse him of anything, I just would like to know his perspective on some of the controversial topics in which he is involved.
I can read in 150 thousand traditional interviews where does he see the future of technology and how exited he is about the cloud.
Of course he was over aggressive in his running of Microsoft in the past. Does it matter if he says so? Or does it matter what he does today with his billions?
His charity efforts are small in comparison.
His energy right now is behind a really great thing and a great inspiration for all of us - to apply ourselves and our geek brains to doing something useful in the world, not just optimizing hip city limo rentals for inflated multiples.
So I think these so called soft ball questions are great. They set him up to hit the ball out of the park. Go Bill ! Hit that thing ! Let even the shallow and dull minded hear the message and see that this is what great people do when they have the opportunity.
Public opinion is fickle and there is far too much snark and strife. He is going in the right direction so God speed.
But I'm not going to start using SQL-server or anything.
Take your pick from:
1) Why do you think Bill Gates cares about open source given that he made his fortune from closed source software?
2) Sure it hindered the progress of open source, that was the whole point, open source was a potentially significant competitor to the corporation Bill Gates was running and he'd have been negligent in his role as CEO if he'd not looked to undermine and damage it at any opportunity.
You may not like those positions or agree with them but it would be somewhat odd to think that they weren't relatively close to what Bill Gates was thinking at the time and still thinks.
Neither of those would be what he'd say of course, he'd almost certainly point out that MS do embrace FOSS far more these days and also that while Windows may have been closed, by becoming a defacto standard for desktop computing it did an enormous amount for standardisation (in a practical, that is what people are actually using, rather than an open standards sense) and spreading computing to the masses.
Ultimately it might be an interesting subject, but it's not one you can expect to get an honest answer on. Even if he weren't involved in MS day to day and a major shareholder still, he's very unlikely to perform an about turn that says "I was basically wrong about my entire career".
This is not the way to look at it.
The answered questions were just that: answered. More hardball questions were ignored by the VIP. The VIP chooses which questions to ask. In short reddit IAMAs are basically free marketing exercises masquerading behind some kind of idea of "we did it, reddit" - that the audience has some kind of power. It doesn't, it's basically a false idea.
[1] - http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Topics/Pages/Nex...
That's like the elevator pitch for Reddit comments. It really just depends on what you find humorous I guess.
Reddit is a large community, and the average post quality reflects that.