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Comment by dude_abides | Hacker News Reader

Loved this comparison of 3 visionaries of our times by one of the 3:

Gates praised Zuckerberg’s drive, but described him as “more of a product manager”, insisting that he was more of a coder starting with architecture where Zuckerberg “starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.”

Gates = sw engr; Zuck = Product Manager; Jobs = UX. (To add to it, I would say Page/Brin = research scientist.) These really reflect what each company has morphed into. MSFT ended up as the largest software company, FB is probably one of the most widely used product ever. Apple makes the best UI. And Google uses research ideas, spits them into beta products quickly and rinses and repeats.

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What's especially interesting is how reviled the software engineer is on HN. Maybe always doing the next logical thing to improve the bottom line rubs people the wrong way - even those same types of logical people.

the software engineer is reviled for completely separate reasons outside the scope of this metaphor.

Yeah, the ruthless monopolist systematically destroying other software engineers' companies/products/work is the part of Bill Gates that people don't care for. His work after M$oft has been awe inspiring. How he got from where we are to where he is now was kinda gross.

Can you give us some examples of this "ruthless monopolist systematically destroying other software engineers' companies, products, work"? I am honestly asking, I would like to have this knowledge too.

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish",[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors." From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

I don't know what Microsoft did to you personally to make you so bitter, so I'll ignore your tone and address your comments in the spirit of the post you replied to - I think the point is, when looked at from the point of view of sound engineering principles, isn't that behavior somewhat logical? Having one common operating system is just exercising DRY, once-and-only-once architecture... and Microsoft's 'embrace/extend' approach to 'not-invented-here' reimplimentation? That's just pragmatic refusal to take third-party dependencies, which any engineer can probably relate to. You can object to how that behavior manifests itself in the market when taken to corporate scale, but at least consider the validity of the analogy.

So what if embrace/extend/extinguish logical? Eugenics is logical, but pretty gross when you start applying it to actual people.

My favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. Even now I have this wishlist for Satya: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

Bill Gates is not "reviled" by HN. Some of Microsoft's practices in the 90s are, but it seems that most HN users have great respect for Gates as a hacker, founder and most of all thinker and philanthropist. Just look at any BG related thread here, you will see this (well deserved) respect.

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