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Comment by hnnewguy | Hacker News Reader

>I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit.

First, the degree to which he "held back" the internet, when contrasted with what Microsoft did positively for home computing and the internet, is debatable.

Second, if Bill Gates can't be construed as a good person doing good things in the world-- as "not mean"-- then this debate is mostly pointless.

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Bill is good now, in his old age with a wife who apparently had a big effect on that part of him. Previously, he was a ruthless and immoral businessman who saw no problem ruining people and lives to get ahead and illegally and unethically pressing his monopoly advantage to prevent and destroy competition. Don't confuse the nice old guy image you see now with the actual personality that created the worlds largest fortune. There aren't any billionaires that don't have many people who'd like to see them dead for the lives ruined by their ascent.

Whose lives did Gates destroy? Yes, Microsoft was engaged in very anti-competitive business practices, but being beaten in the market is not equivalent to having your life ruined. Also, not that this excuses any actions, but "it's not personal, it's just business" plays a factor here as well.

> Yes, Microsoft was engaged in very anti-competitive illegal business practices

Fixed that for you. It's just business applies to legal business, not illegal anti-competitive tactics. Competition is beating the other guy, not preventing him from being able to play by locking him off the field. So no, it doesn't play a factor here, not at all.

While I'm not saying that Bill Gates is or was 'nice', I take issue with the thought that something that is illegal is by definition something that makes a person 'not nice'. I've known my share of people who were engaged in very illegal practices and still, by my moral standards, nice, and even good.

Conflating morality with legality feels a bit easy to me. It's just not always true.

I'm not conflating them, what Bill did was both illegal and unethical. They are both true; sabotage is never the ethical choice and preventing your competitors from being able to play by strong arming retailers into selling only your product is unethical and illegal sabotage.

Gary Kildall, for one.

Anyone subject to NSA surveillance via Skype, Hotmail, Outlook.com etc. MSFT was the first company to participate in PRISM.

>Gary Kildall, for one.

That would be Bill Gates mother. She was buddy buddy with IBM CEO and she was the one convincing them to go with Microsoft.

I was curious about who Kildall was so I read the Wikipedia entry. Seems tl;dr when IBM wanted an OS Kildall was to busy to meet up and then charged $240 each for his CP/M-86 while Gates shipped a compatible PC-DOS for $40. Unsurprisingly Gates won the market. Kildall still ended up a multimillionaire who flew his own Learjet. However he became an alcoholic and died from a fall in a bar.

Dunno if it's accurate to say Gates destroyed his life. His main problems seems self inflicted.

I think, crucially, the point is that he wasn't 'not mean' when he was actually in charge of things at MS. He was actively horrible from the beginning; there've even been suspicions for years that MS-BASIC, the very thing the company started on, was stolen.

It doesn't matter what Gates is like now. What matters, for this debate, is whether he was mean when he became successful. And from everything I know about the guy and his rise, if he can't be construed as "mean" at that time then this debate is mostly pointless.

I'm confused by your proposed definition of "mean." It sounds like you're just using it to mean "a net bad influence on the world," but to me it has a more specific meaning, something like "spiteful toward people in person." To me, there's no contradiction between being a very generous philanthropist and being mean.

Actually, in England, "mean" can also.. er, mean "miserly" or "not generous".

Indeed, but from context it seems pretty clear that Graham is using "mean" to refer to the attitude and tone of one's interaction with others, not one's generosity with money or resources.

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