In the 1990's, undoubtedly Gates.
> John offered three choices to rival refiners, cash, Standard Oil stock, or to get crushed
... is also a pretty good description of how Microsoft approached anyone they considered competition in the '80s and '90s: you either licensed your software to them ("cash"), sold your company to them ("stock"), or got destroyed by them.
Gates' charitable efforts have earned him a warmer and fuzzier reputation these days (another parallel to Rockefeller?), but back then he was an absolute barracuda.
Rockefeller had a strong Christian Soldier belief system, in which he was righteous and most other oilmen were sinners. (The 19th century oil business attracted a lot of hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing types.) He did good works with his money, while many of his competitors would have spent it on vice. Therefore, he was furthering God's plan for the righteous to inherit the earth by beating them in business.
It's a worldview difficult for moderns to relate to, but I think it was authentic for him.
That was eerily reminiscent for me, too.
I like to say yes. I think. I mean, he may have destroyed hundreds of people's livelihoods/jobs/companies, but his efforts these days are literally saving peoples lives.
Does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm a firm believer people can change and while this might not be Bill Gates changing, it might simply be him "atoning for his sins" so to speak, not that I'm religious, nor that he is either I think.
Microsoft wrote some software that was, I would argue, overall an improvement on the software against which it competed. So Microsoft did some good. However, in the process of extracting value, they actively - and, in my opinion, often unethically - suppressed the efforts of those with whom they competed. I don't pretend to be very knowledgeable on the exact value of these positive and negative effects, but I think it's pretty clear that all of the above effects more or less amounted making a bunch of computer nerds like us a little richer, or a little poorer. Not necessarily in money, but in power... like the power to track business expenses cheaply (which Microsoft enhanced, with Excel), or the power to collaborate on making productive software for ourselves and share it freely with the world (which Microsoft harmed, see the Halloween Documents, or other conspiracy evidence of your choice).
For the most part, this only affects a few dozen million humans, and even interpreted broadly it affects perhaps 10% of humanity. And the effects are small; for almost all of the affected, life gets less than 1% better or 1% worse, due to Microsoft existing. I mean, that's bigger than most companies, but.
I'm less able to give clear magnitudes of the impact of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. My understanding, though, is that they're playing a significant role in the attempts to eradicate polio. Frankly, you can inflict Windows95 on me for the next 50 years, if that's what it takes to save one person from polio. Suppose that it turns out that polio is eradicated, and the B&MGF is due 1% of the credit for that; wouldn't this be more valuable than all the harm ever done by MS, past and future? And then there's their malaria-eradication efforts, their money spent on education, their money spent on sanitation, etc etc.
Bill Gates seems to have stolen a very manageable amount of our first-world wealth, burned a good fraction of in an engine of inefficiency (for example, Ballmer got some money too), and given most of the rest of it where it could do the most good (modulo a small fraction kept for himself, to indulge in fabulous luxury). As far as I can tell, although it astounds and confounds me, Bill Gates is Robin Hood. wtf.
No. Changing doesn't remove your past sins and helping one person doesn't balance your hurting another. To believe so would mean saving a life makes up for taking another life, obviously it doesn't.
It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another. A better comparison would be saving many (millions?) of poor, non-white lives in exchange for stealing money from privileged white men (majority of people in the software industry during his era).
In the 1980s, Apple went round Hong Kong, Taiwan and China suing companies for making knockoffs of the Apple II (ie better, faster, more reliable and much cheaper versions of the Apple II). Then along came the PC industry, which welcomed them -- and their innovations -- with open arms.
How do you balance a handful of self-righteous American programmers against the wealth and the millions of jobs generated by Acer, Asus, MSI, Hon Hai, Wistron, Pegatron, Quanta, Compal, Inventec, etc?
Of course not.
> It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another.
It's exactly the right example because it makes the moral choice clear and that same choice applies to the lesser scenario.
> A better comparison would be
We don't need a better comparison, it's already been made clear that you can't make up for sins against one by helping another.
They did an absolutely unprecedented assault on the Internet on the developer, policy, and user front when they found out they could not compete there, until they turned that policy around. We only see vague results of this today, on that all development of the web itself was put on an 8 year hiatus, and in some of the crazy proprietary formats that still plague us.
But how do you put it in economic terms? How much is the break-ins at RSA, Cisco Google, Valve, and inbetweens unknown worth to the global economy, because bad business practice forced peoples email clients to have the ability to run code?
My candidate explanation, Melinda.