[edw519]

Why do you think Silicon Valley has never quite come around on this guy?

Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake.

Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.

Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.

And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts? He fucked anyone who got in his way, always to the benefit of Microsoft, and usually to the detriment of the industry.

When others wrote better code, he called his lawyers. When other developers wanted to collaborate, he stole their intellectual property. When customers or vendors balked, he crushed them. And when the citizens saw how unfair it all was and took action, he called his lobbyists.

So now maybe he wants to be like Andrew Carnegie in his next act, conveniently forgetting all the lives destroyed in the hope of "giving it all back". If so, good.

I really try to keep upbeat and optimistic in my posts here at hn, but I also understand how much we have forgotten, and sometimes I just can't resist. Every time I read about Bill Gates worship, I can vomit. Sometimes I really wonder how much better things would be for all of us hackers is he had just gone to law school and left our industry to develop as it could have.

</rant>

Oooh, that feels better. Now back to work.

[mattmaroon]

Your argument is silly all the way through. He's got an IQ of 160, which means he actually is considerably smarter than most of the rest of us.

He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements.

It's ludicrous to say that he's destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself.

It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates.

I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.

[edw519]

I cannot see into alternate universes

You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft.

I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick.

Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying.

Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did.

I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices.

If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years.

We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.

[mattmaroon]

That's funny, my friend (who was a very early MSFT employee) tells a different story. There were a bunch of different competing technologies. Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over, so nobody did this. The market was small and fragmented, and nobody really believed you could get huge as a software company. Bill's parents wanted him to finish his schooling instead of dropping out to start Microsoft as a result.

Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another. Consumer adoption was nonexistent because switching from one OS to another required learning everything all over again. You couldn't simply go to Best Buy, get some software or hardware, and assume it would work. Hardware fragmentation kept sales down, which in turn kept pricing high, which in turn kept sales down, etc.

Either way, none of that "good old days" stuff is really the point when analyzing whether or not the world would be better off without Bill. The industry progressed, as it would have without Microsoft. We know it would have evolved, we just don't know exactly how. It seems virtually impossible to me that it wouldn't have ended in one OS on most people's desks, but I am willing to admit I may be wrong. If it weren't for Bill, we may all have been running IBM's OS for the last 20 years instead. Or maybe we weren't buying them at all, because they cost too much and were too fragmented. Would either of those universes really be better? Nobody could possibly know.

Microsoft's standard operating procedure was part of the game. You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball. That was the case long before Bill Gates arrived and will be so long after he's dead. You're hating the player instead of the game.

[rbanffy]

> Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over

Not quite correct. Companies ported programs, even assembly-language programs, to different processors all the time. Visicalc ran on z-80s, 6502s (on Apples, Ataris and Commodores) and 8086s. the hard part is to write it the first time. Porting then is more or less straightforward. OSs were so minimalistic at that time they didn't create any significant difference.

> Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another

Most business software for microcomputers in the high 70's and very low 80's ran on CP/M. Even the first DOS blockbusters were straight ports of CP/M titles. CP/M (I am talking about CP/M 80) machines were all based on 8080-like processors, but, besides the common processor, had very different hardware - disks from one computer often could not be read on another. Transferring through serial ports usually solved this.

The market that was more fragmented was the home computer market. There Apple IIs, Ataris, TRS-80s and Commodores competed with one another. Choosing a home computer could be confusing at that time.

The higher end of the spectrum had mainframes, just as incompatible with each other as they are now (I think Unisys still makes them and they are incompatible with IBMs), minis that ran proprietary OSs or UNIX-based OSs. There were a couple high-end multiuser "supermicros" that ran Unix-like OSs. I have used Cromix for some time.

Most of the software was not easily portable at that time because it was written in hand-tuned assembly language. I remember how revolutionary Unix seemed for being written in C and, thus, being portable across different architectures. Faster computers and HLLs (can't believe I am calling C a HLL...) eased the pain of porting.

My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors, with cross-platform software being used in combination with open formats (like GIF was intended to be) to exchange data between non-portable (or non-ported) programs. There would be large software companies but hardware makers would compete with far more latitude than they can now and those software companies would do their best to use the tricks those hardware makers would bring.

> You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball

You're right. I don't like it. I think software companies should gain market through technical merits that benefit their users, not backstabbing each other.

[mattmaroon]

Certainly porting happened, but the market was very fragmented. That was why Office was born in the first place.

My bet for what would have happened: one of two things.

1. Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did and you'd be complaining about them instead. Except maybe you wouldn't be complaining because nobody would have written this article because whoever benefited from it would have hoarded their money as most billionaires do rather than becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time.

2. Hacker News wouldn't exist for you to comment on, because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it.

I don't think any other result is possible (and I don't think the 2nd is practical). Users simply aren't savvy enough to deal with fragmentation. You wouldn't have the web we know today without cheap home PCs anymore than you'd have man without the apes.

[rbanffy]

> That was why Office was born in the first place.

Office was never "born". Not even designed as a suite. It was cobbled together. Word and Excel were independent products developed originally for the Mac. PowerPoint was acquired and Access developed internally.

> Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did

Striking a deal with IBM, retaining the rights to the OS and cooperating with OEMs so they could clone their client's hardware? It takes a devious mind to come up with a plan like this.

> because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun with my Apple II. Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer. In fact, he may something to do with the demise of the home computer of the 80's and its replacement by bulky, noisy, beige boxes with 12-inch CGA monitors running MS-DOS (a most home-unfriendly OS). My Apple II+ had 2 screens, one 14" white monochrome soft-switching between the motherboard video and the 80-column card and a 17" color TV directly connected to the motherboard composite output. Sadly, the IIe could not do the same trick (I used to have text on one screen and graphics on the second)

[CamperBob]

My bet? Were it not for Gates, today we would have a diverse computing environment, with different OSs and processors...

... any of which you can buy for $5,000.00.

It seems that anti-Microsoft arguments always ignore the benefits of network effects and economies of scale brought about by DOS and Windows. They are usually posted by Linux nerds running sub-$1000 3 GHz PCs that they couldn't possibly have afforded in a world where Apple, Commodore, Atari, and ten more companies like them kept building mutually- incompatible proprietary hardware.

[Evgeny]

This is the sort of discussions I love best on HN:

I read a thoughtful comment and have no choice but upvote it because it's very thought provoking and I'm nodding all the way through it. Then I read the opponent's comment ... and feel the same way!

[rbanffy]

> Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops

I am an old hacker and I always feel better when I remove Windows from a laptop.

[MaysonL]

I am an old hacker, and proud to admit that I have never owned a Microsoft product.

[storm]

I am a young(ish) hacker, and I'm proud not to engage in religious nonsense like this at all. Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares? Get on with the coding already.

[rbanffy]

A real craftsman cares for the tools he uses. And it's not a religious issue - it's just that the thing is taking up space on an NTFS partition. I can store better stuff in that space.

[mkramlich]

> Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares?

Because they're different. Craftsmen like to learn and make distinctions and use the best tool for the job.

[rbanffy]

Their keyboards and mice are excellent. My Z-80 SoftCard II probably still works.

[agentultra]

I cannot stand their keyboards. Gushy non-mechanical switches and awkward non-standard layouts. Pshh!

[bad_user]

I remember buying a 486 DX 66 Mhz from a local computer shop, and it was within my parents price range because that computer shop assembled the PCs themselves. And the best thing about it ... it was a standard, and I could find tons of cool shit to run on it.

Of course, I live in Eastern Europe, maybe you guys in the US have been more lucky in regards to access to mainframes / Unix operating systems ... I wasn't.

[flomo]

It is interesting that you are glorifying OS/2 as an alternative to "back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying" when it was the keystone of IBM's naked plot to monopolize the PC industry through patent-locked hardware.

There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.

[ohashi]

Reminds me of the comment about people not knowing what the real game being played is. They think the rules are a certain way when in fact reality has a very different set that they are incapable of operating within. They faced innovation outside the technical arena and got beat. Then they want to complain about the 'rules.'

[pyre]

Based on this logic, assassinations are 'fair game' so long as you don't get caught. Would I be an 'innovator' if I developed a way for corporate-directed assassinations to become a reality?

[ohashi]

You would be an innovator. Whether assassinations are within the rules is a question I am not qualified to answer. It IS within the rules in some places and not others, I suspect that evolves over time.

[hltan]

HA! Not 40, but am damn close to it. I remember those days. We had a billion different types of media. I still have CP/M disk I can't read. And nobody really knew how to run anything. Like the dinosaurs, it was a time of mainframes. Then everyone can do it, welcome to the PC world. And (oh my goodness) standardization. Oh wait, it's mainframe time again? Cloud what? You mean I can bring out my bell-bottoms again? for the nth time... I'm glad someone was a dick, because just image all the different ways we can do things today! Scary.

[rbanffy]

> Like the dinosaurs, it was a time of mainframes. Then everyone can do it, welcome to the PC world.

It seems you missed the years when the first S-100 personal computers appeared, the time when they ran CP/M, the Apple II, the Commodores, the Ataris... IBM-PCs were introduced in 1981 and didn't became as important as they are today until they were successfully cloned, a couple years later. Basically, you just skipped the 70's. And the minicomputers where VMS (the granddaddy of NT) and Unix were born.

[sdp]

> [...] and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OSX, CPM, & Pick.

Youngster here: I'm guessing when you say OSX you mean something other than Mac OS X?

[edw519]

Oops, I meant OS2. Original corrected.

[Tichy]

Well all these wonderful technologies were probably really expensive. Microsoft managed to make the cheap PCs usable, that is why they won. As for OS 2, I don't know why they failed, but I suspect it is not because of Microsoft.

[lionhearted]

> Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.

The rest of your post is very insightful, but this part above strikes me as petty - I was low born myself, was given almost nothing except birth in the USA in the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.

[rbanffy]

I think his point is that Gates was given some very generous gifts and, with them, "he fucked anyone who got in his way", "usually to the detriment of the industry".

[mattmaroon]

Another way to look at it is that Gates used his very generous gifts to give 100s of thousands of people jobs, make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people, then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history.

Meanwhile the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs, who has broken plenty of laws himself (backdating is fraud), done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them (and only didn't do the rest because he didn't have the necessary market share) and by all accounts hoards his money along with black mock turtlenecks. It's rather hypocritical to type about how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro.

You see what you want to see I suppose.

[rbanffy]

> give 100s of thousands of people jobs

Would have jobs with or without Gates

> make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people

Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W).

> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history

He is the richest man in history.

> the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs

False dichotomy alert! Not the case here. Jobs is flawed too.

> done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them

Until now Apple is not guilty of monopoly abuse. Nothing even close to what Comes vs. Microsoft shows.

> how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro

I use a Dell running Linux. At home I use an Acer. Running Linux too.

[gnaritas]

> He is the richest man in history.

Small nitpick, adjusted for inflation, no he isn't, not even close. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were all much richer. Also, it needs to be said that these were the richest Americans, not necessarily richest ever worldwide.

[rbanffy]

Nitpick accepted. Thanks.

[mkramlich]

> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history.

Exactly. If you're a multi-billionaire it's very easy to be a philanthropist. Now instead be somebody making say $30k a year with a net worth of say $10k, and if that person is a philanthropist, I'm much more impressed by that person's character.

[sdurkin]

To whom much has been given, much will be expected in return, with great suit comes great responsibility, etc.

[edw519]

...but this part above strikes me as petty...

Sorry if it came across that way; that was not my intent.

Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine.

With those gifts comes responsibility. Whenever I have an opportunity to use my gifts to do good things, I think of how proud those who made sacrifices for me would be. I imagine many people here on hn feel the same way.

Bill Gates never used his tremendous gifts for the greater good, only for the good of Microsoft. He never cared how big the pie got, only how close Microsoft's share of that pie approached 100%.

The point of the paragraph wasn't to be petty or jealous; it was just to point out how the one with perhaps the biggest gifts of all didn't choose to share them like the rest of us would. Sorry if I implied anything else.

[ced]

Bill Gates never used his tremendous gifts for the greater good, only for the good of Microsoft.

Wait, what? Are you arguing that his foundation is some kind of elaborate scam?

[jacquesm]

For sure it isn't a scam.

But it is somewhat reminiscent of a capo getting absolution for his sins in return for a gift to the church.

[rbanffy]

> Are you arguing that his foundation is some kind of elaborate scam?

I wouldn't rule that out. It has donated Microsoft products (in markets where alternatives could gain a foothold) and money for vaccines (we shouldn't forget Gates has a lot invested in the biotech sector). In the end, some of those donations return to him.

I am not saying his philanthropism is inherently evil. I am just acknowledging the possibility it's may not be completely devoid of self-interest.

[yosho]

I completely agree.

Paris Hilton was also given a lot of freebies early in life...looked how that one turned out.

Early advantages don't always produce exceptional results, often times it can lead to the exact opposite.

[dkarl]

Paris Hilton did a clever job turning what she was given (which didn't include talent or beauty), multiplying it manifold, and making a crapload of money out of it. From a purely economic point of view, she did much better than the vast majority of people born into her class.

[code_duck]

Seems to have turned out pretty well. She's famous for no other reason.

[statictype]

What good has she done for society? Isn't that the metric we're using here? Not whether she has done well for herself.

[loewenskind]

No one is calling her a hero.

[lionhearted]

> Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine.

I don't have too much more to add, just wanted to say we fairly similar to you, and think you're an awesome contributor on HN, and wanted to let you know that. Absolutely no disrespect intended and it'd be good to break bread sometime if we're ever in the same place, I've learned a lot from your comments.

I very slightly disagree that with gifts comes responsibility, because I think only an individual can assign responsibility to themselves outside of the basics of not intruding on other people. But I'm probably strange, most people don't think that way. With that said, I assign high responsibility levels to myself (service, charity, helping people, good citizenship, protecting the weak, serving the strong and virtuous, and those who wish to be strong and virtuous). Anyways, that's somewhat a minor point - I wanted to comment more to show some respect. You're one of the best commentors in HN history and I've learned a lot from you.

[mattmaroon]

From your comments its clear that you're zealously anti-capitalist and, as a result, anti-Microsoft, so you're simply not applying logic.

Bill Gates did his legal duty. When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft. The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to the best results.

So the question is what do most people with the gifts Bill Gates was born into do? The answer is that they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society and getting paid quite handsomely for it.

Bill on the other hand founded a company that has, at current time, almost 90,000 employees. He helped bring computers to the masses.

It's not petty jealousy that drives your comments, it's anti-capitalist sentiment. You also have a highly debatable view of what the universe would look like if not for Microsoft (I for one suspect you wouldn't be on this site) but that too is a side effect of zealousness rather than the result of careful reasoning.

[raganwald]

Bill Gates did his legal duty. When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft.

Interesting. In the 1970s, ITT's CEO Hal Geneen gave $700,000 to Jorge Alessandri to help him beat Salvadore Allende in the Chilean Presidential Election, correctly believing that ITT's financial interests were best served by defeating Allende. When Allende won anyways, Geneen gave $1,000,000 to the CIA to help finance a coup d'etat in Chile. Would he have been acting immorally to refrain from financing bloodshed?

We can also look at Hershey in Cuba, tobacco companies, companies lobbying for the right to destroy the environment, companies that engage in bribery and contract rigging, even companies that lie about whether their products are healthy. In each case, I think we can find a healthy proportion of people who do not agree that the unrestricted pursuit of "what is best for the company" on the part of its officers, managers, or rank and file employees is automatically moral.

The second point of interest in your post is that you talk about the theory of free market capitalism. This is a very interesting point in any discussion about Gates and Microsoft, and that's why I gave you an upmod and replied. I think it is very possible for someone to be rabidly pro-capitalist and anti-Gates precisely because many of his and Microsoft's actions were anti-free markets.

Business and free markets are not synonymous, in fact the usual case is that when left to act without restraint or oversight, businesses act to make markets as closed and unfree as possible. It is possible to be anti-business and pro-markets.

I do not accept your statement that the theory behind free market capitalism is that with enough companies doing the same that things "average out to the best results" as applying to morality. I think you should be more precise about what you mean when you use the word "best."

Unfettered business is a little like pure democracy. There's a reason that our respective countries thrive under a constitutional democracy: There is a notion of right and wrong that is independent of the notion of what wins an election. Likewise, I believe there is a notion of right and wrong that is independent of the notion of what makes the most money.

[mattmaroon]

Well, there's a line for sure. If Microsoft has done anything like funding coups it's not in the standard litany of complaints. It's more like "they saw Netscape and ran it out of business by building their own browser" or "they ate all of Apple's market share". That's not evil, it's exercising fiduciary duty. Same with vendor lock-in. Unless I'm just not understanding the argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft) it's quite a ways off of hiring CIA hit men.

I don't disagree with you about the restraints on the free market, and us technically not being one. Microsoft probably did cross some lines there, and they paid for it dearly. I just don't think that's what the argument is really about, for if it were, people wouldn't be so religious about it. You can detect a zeal when words like "ruined lives" come into the argument and realize that the sentiment at some point long ago was divorced from logic.

By best results I mean better than the results of any other economic system.

[nitrogen]

I find their secret OEM agreements banning dual-boot and OS-free systems to be far more egregious. Very few people seem to remember BeOS, and how Toshiba (IIRC) shipped thousands of computers with BeOS and Windows, but because of Microsoft's OEM agreements there was no boot menu, so very few people used the BeOS partition. Had those agreements not been in place, we might see a lot more use of CP/M-86, BeOS, or other operating systems.

It's quite strange that the Criticism of Microsoft page doesn't even mention BeOS.

There's also the incident of designing Windows to crash if run on DR-DOS (they didn't simply not support it, they went out of their way to crash on purpose).

--

Regarding the complaints about capitalism and "ruined lives," I think it might be helpful to decide whether one wants to maximize, minimize, or ignore the worst case, average case, and best case quality of life. It seems that pro-capitalist arguments support the average and best cases (i.e. middle class and wealthy), while disregarding the worst cases (the ruined lives). Anti-capitalist arguments, on the other hand, appear to focus on the worst-case outcomes.

[raganwald]

the standard litany of complaints

That phrase is sufficient to earn an upmod all on its own. Reading your reply, I immediately thought of people huddled in a church listening to the Vicar preach against Microsoft's evil. But it isn't a passionate speech full of fire and brimstone, it's a standard reading that he has given so many times, his voice is now a monotone and the parishioners know every word by heart.

[jacobolus]

> The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to the best results.

You left out the part about how this only works if (a) the market is actually “free” and “competitive” (what this means is a complicated topic beyond the scope of this text box), and (b) the interests of the company and the interests of the broader society are aligned. (Which is why we have all sorts of specialized regulation of companies, various kinds of guaranteed rights attached to consumers and contract-signers and so on, a court system, and ultimately elections). In the specific case of Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, they clearly were not. The idea that Microsoft’s corporate strategy embodied some kind of Adam Smith small-firms-in-a-competitive-market ideal is hogwash. Notice that Microsoft’s actions were found to be illegal in several court battles.

It is definitely not a company’s fiduciary duty to break the law.

[Bricejm]

Free market capitalism is supposed to be about innovation and competition. You have to weigh the good with the bad. Has Microsoft probably had an advantage that pushed others out of business - yes, but I'm sure they also inspired programmers to create new products that they could then sell to Microsoft/Google type companies. It's hard to say if large companies create or destroy innovation and competition. There will always be positives and negatives.

[adamtj]

What does "free" even mean? Does it mean free from any outside interference? So, no laws and anything goes? Then is it still free if a company uses that freedom to restrict the actions of others with "uncompetitive" strategies? Or does it mean free to do anything that isn't "unfair" or "uncompetitive", where somebody other than the actor decides if the action is fair and prohibits it if not?

[loewenskind]

Oh irony of ironies. You call someone a zealot and then go on to show how much vastly more of a zealot you are (but it's not clear to me that the OP even is a zealot).

If you're going to go preaching on the free market and such you should bloody well learn what it is. Go read a book on market theory (if Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Palin or any of those people are on the book, put it down and keep looking). I'm serious. This "passionate ignorance" movement is doing more damage to the US than anything else I can think of. Do you even know who Adam Smith is? He would have been very anti-Microsoft [1].

I apologize to everyone else on HN for this post, but this kind of ignorance needs a major slap down every time it's encountered so hopefully these people will either educate themselves or at least stfu and stop framing every debate around insanity and ignorance.

[1] http://www.pcdf.org/corprule/betrayal.htm

[rbanffy]

> He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft

Look how loved the company is today. Was what he did really the best he could have done for Microsoft? Wouldn't a kinder, gentler Microsoft, one that helped a healthy market thrive, be better? Would the smaller slice of a larger pie be larger than Microsoft's current pie?

> they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society

I suppose you assume VCs exist in a vacuum. No.

> He helped bring computers to the masses.

No. Jobs and Wozniak did. Jack Tramiel did. Gates did nothing like that.

[mfukar]

Really? What's the most popular OS, again?

[rbanffy]

Windows, but why is it relevant to this discussion? Windows appeared well after personal computers became popular. In fact, it only became relevant when business computers invaded the space previously dominated by home computers. Its dominance started in the 90's after 3.0 was launched.

On Tramiel thing, Commodore built some very popular personal computers that were incredibly capable for their prices. Many of us (I am not among them) got introduced to personal computers with Commodore boxes. He later moved on to Atari and brought some of the cheapest 32-bit home computers one could buy, years before 386s could be called home computers.

Attributing to Gates what others did does not help further your argument.

[tome]

When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft.

This is a meme that desperately needs to die. I don't care how true it is legally. If the law says that then the law is an ass. Some moral principles override legal requirements. If you're in a position in which you can't do what's morally right within the bounds of the law then you shouldn't be in that position in the first place.

[angrycoder]

...From your comments its clear that you're zealously anti-capitalist and, as a result, anti-Microsoft, so you're simply not applying logic...

There is a difference between making money and making money at the expense of everything else.

[yequalsx]

How is being anti-capitalist necessarily 'not applying logic'? Being anti-capitalist is not necessarily being illogical. It just means that one of the foundational assumptions of his/her point is something you disagree with.

[amalcon]

I don't see how it's "zealously anti-capitalist" to suggest that people with advantages should use them in a way that enlarges the pie, rather than primarily working to redirect part of it to oneself. The theory behind free market capitalism is that the best way to enlarge your portion of the pie tends to align with the best way to enlarge the whole pie, so it's actually a pro-capitalist suggestion.

Whether or not Bill Gates did this is another question entirely.

[Yzupnick]

Free markets only exist when trade is not forced upon anyone. When people are free to trade with whom ever they like, and for what ever reason they like. Gates used the only gun in town (ie: The Government) to shut down other competitors. He was therefore acting against the free market.

I do not mean to detract from the accomplishments Gates did achieve.

[TGJ]

There is perceived responsibility that comes with those gifts. He could have just blown the money and everyone would have moved on.

Plus your next statement is just baloney. The greater good? You mean the good that would have affected you? The man can do with his money as he sees fit, who are you to tell him what to do or judge him when he does it.

[macrael]

The title of this post is "Bill Gates, Hero".

[prototype56]

That was one of the Gladwell's points in his famous book outliers.

[Yzupnick]

See Fransisco D'Acconia's "Money" speech in Atlas Shrugged for some of the reasoning behind this view. (It is probably in some of Ayn Rand's non fiction but I just can't remember where off the top of my head)

[jakarta]

"And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts?"

He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away.

It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that.

That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.

[Gibbon]

Most of the wealthy I know are not against charity or giving away their wealth.. they are against an inefficient government deciding on how that should be accomplished.

[potatolicious]

Surely you're not talking to the same wealthy that I've been.

What do you think will be the repsonse to, say, a 50% tax rate on the wealthy that they are able to distribute as they see fit (with strict controls such that it doesn't end up back in their own hands, or their family's)?

Yeah, good luck with that.

I see the "but government is inefficient" argument a lot - it would have some merit, if there's even the slightest hint of evidence that the rich would pay the tax even if the government were the most well-greased machine in the world. As it is it sounds like a lame scapegoat for wanting to keep all of your wealth.

[arohner]

You're forgetting that people can have principled objections to the role of the federal government.

I'm not rich, and I'm grumpy about what my 20% federal taxes are going to. The financial and GM bailouts, "homeland security", ag subsidies, congressional pork, federal taxes to pay for local schools, "war on terror", "war on drugs".

If the gov't was efficient in the things it did, and did the things I believe it should, I wouldn't complain about my taxes at all. But the combination of being inefficient and misguided is one of the largest wastes of human productivity ever devised.

This is a bigger waste than building the pyramids by hand.

[megablast]

With you there, except for "federal taxes to pay for local schools". What is your problem with education? This does not compare to anything else you were complaining about.

[2arrs2ells]

I'm guessing the parent isn't upset about paying taxes for schools, but is upset about the increasing amount of federal control of education (i.e. No Child Left Behind) that has been coupled to the increased amount of federal ed funding.

[d2viant]

Why are you implying that wanting to keep your wealth is wrong?

[potatolicious]

I'm not ;) It seems that many wealthy people are, though.

The point is, the whole "big, inefficient government" argument, IMHO, is more often used in place of simply "I want to keep more of my wealth", and while a valid argument in theory, in practice its confused usage has caused it to lose credibility.

The fact that so many people are unwilling to just come out and say "I want to keep my wealth", and instead try to divert the debate to some other tenuously-related argument shows that they themselves believe that wanting to keep your wealth is wrong.

Personally, I've yet to make my mind up in this regard. I would like to keep my wealth, but the myriad of things that tax money supports I find necessary. Personally I see nothing wrong with wanting to keep more of your wealth, but the fact that many rich people feel such guilt about it, and society's perception of it, seems to imply that we've already made a judgment, collectively, about this issue.

[muhfuhkuh]

Show me a company that is willing to feed and take care of _every single_ poor, elderly, and infirm person without the need for tax-exempt status, without the need for spiritual conversion or religious dogma, and without the "overhead" of paying executives millions of dollars for "administrative" purposes, and I'll urge Congress to redirect ALL of my tax dollars toward that company.

Oh, and btw, this company also has to defend our shores, find cures for disease (or at least fund them) and manage distribution to those affected, assess and remediate damage on massive scales when emergencies strike, set standards and regulations of measurement and safety so that industries can interoperate and first-responders can (for example) plug their water hoses into a hydrant and it actually fit, etc.

It's not just a couple rich charitable dudes that can handle all that. Sorry if I don't worship them as much as anti-tax crusaders do.

[michael_dorfman]

...but Bill Gates, Jr., and most especially Bill Gates, Sr., are not at all against this. Bill Sr. has written a book calling for higher taxes, in fact.

[joelhaus]

As of today, Sr. is also advocating an income tax on individual Washington State residents earning over $200K. Currently, WA has no income tax on residents.

Source: http://www.ballardnewstribune.com/2010/09/15/news/bill-gates... (includes some very interesting figures)

[jacoblyles]

I'm kinda miffed that people measure the good that the ultra-wealthy do for society only through the taxes they pay and neglect the great value they have provided people through the market place. As if the volume of taxation and government spending a man generates were the only ways to measure a man's worth.

[potatolicious]

There are two fundamental differences:

- Taxation and philanthropy do not represent (usually) a direct benefit to the payer. For better or for worse, we as a society look more highly upon selfless gestures than selfish ones. Philanthropy is the voluntary form of selfless giving, taxation is the involuntary one.

- Philanthropy and taxation have an intent to benefit others. Creating market-based value is often merely a side effect of generating direct gain to oneself. Beyond the selflessness argument, we as a society are conditioned to look more highly upon intentional acts of value creation.

[jacoblyles]

I would argue that a great portion of the total wealth of society created over the course of history has been "unintentional", using this terminology. If we don't understand and appreciate this then it will be to our detriment.

[gaius]

Famously Warren Buffett's secretary pays more tax than he does...

[shasta]

I'm pretty sure it's that she pays a higher rate than he does. He pays more taxes every year than she'll earn in her lifetime.

[jakarta]

Exactly, which he says is stupid. That's why Buffett and Gates have been pushing so hard to get other billionaires to pledge to donate as much as them. Larry Ellison is one of the more recent tech execs to take the pledge.

[calloc]

Last I read Larry makes 1.6 BILLION US DOLLARS a year. I don't think you can ever spend that much money.

[blakeweb]

For what it's worth, Larry Ellison also personally started and funds the Ellison Medical Foundation, which distributes on the order of 100 million dollars (cite: wikipedia: Larry Ellison) per year to leading academic biologists for research into the diseases of the elderly and how to stop them. Grant recipients are selected by a panel of scientists.

[raganwald]

Larry seems to take this as a challenge.

[gaius]

Larry's taste includes fighter jets...

[mgkimsal]

pretty easy to spend that buying a few private jets and yachts. 1.6 billion ain't what it used to be.

[krishna2]

Not more in taxes but more as a percentage of total earnings. The tax bracket was higher for the secretary whereas for Buffett it was around 18% (iirc).

[Bricejm]

The capital gains/dividend tax breaks basically benefit the rich. Cap gains/dividend taxes should be on a marginal basis just like ordinary income.

[2arrs2ells]

The idea behind lower cap gains/dividend taxes is to incentivize investment (over consumption or savings). I'm no expert with the economics literature here, but I would worry about making changes that make it harder for businesses to access capital.

[loewenskind]

You don't have to throw the dice and hope, you can go look at most of the other 1st world countries that don't have this and how they're doing. Hint: just fine.

[d2viant]

So why isn't he campaigning for lower taxes for her instead of higher taxes for others?

[mikeklaas]

Because you will need to raise taxes for them to pay for lower taxes for her

[d2viant]

Not necessarily, you can reduce government spending.

[melvinram]

Yes, he had a few things going for him but to trivalize what he/Microsoft accomplished over the years with "no smarter and worked no harder" is quiet ludicrous as mega successes usually have an unusually perfect set of circumstances that allow the successes to happen, whether you're talking about Ted Turner, Oracle or Google.

The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise.

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has.

--

Written on a MacBook Pro

[gaius]

Oh please!

Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same.

Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses.

Would the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.

[generalk]

It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.

Really? I think that's discounting the booming home PC market that existed before Microsoft got involved and giving a lot of credit to someone for an achievement that wasn't fully there. All Gates did was ensure that his company's software was on every computer.

[gaius]

You're discounting the network effect of compatibility. I don't even mean "network" as in networking, but in the ability to save a Word document or whatever on a floppy on virtually any PC and load it back on another. This was long, long before every device could render a web page (and you could take for granted that it would have a TCP/IP connection!)

There was huge real value in creating "the standard", not least because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor.

In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...

[codexon]

IBM mistakenly asked Microsoft for an 8088 version of CP/M (the predecessor to DOS). Gates then bought a clone called 86-DOS and slapped the MS label on it.

If MS didn't exist, someone else could have easily replaced them. It was also mainly due to Intel, who created such a cheap processor, that we have cheap computers today. Not Microsoft.

[rbanffy]

I was able to save a wordstar document on any CP/M (including CP/M 86) machine and transfer it to any other, including my Apple II running CP/M through a coprocessor. Most other word processors of the time could exchange files in one format or another. I never had any problems with it.

And you shouldn't be using a SPARC 5 on 1994 anyway.

[gaius]

That is true, but it is also true that CP/M was never dominant in the same way that Windows became. At the same time as CP/M there were all the micros (BBC, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad), Japan had the MSX "standard" etc etc.

Whereas in the Windows era you were likely to fnd machines running the same applications everywhere, even at home.

[rbanffy]

CP/M was very important in the small-business microcomputer space, offering a measure of compatibility other platforms couldn't. Minis lived above that space and didn't compete directly with micros in the small-business.

The home computer space was much more fragmented and was where Apple, Commodore, Atari, BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair competed. BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair were important only in Europe, further fragmenting that market. It later became dominated by the same IBM-PC clones that took over small businesses.

[codexon]

Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian?

No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter?

And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would have won by an insignificant 0.01 seconds less. By the same vein, it is inevitable that someone else would have stepped up had Microsoft not existed.

So why is it a problem to worship these people that have had all these advantages?

The biggest excuse why these people are against taxation is because they feel their wealth was earned 99% by hard work rather than circumstance. Conversely, many of them feel people on welfare don't deserve it, and it is 99% due to their personality.

It is a classic case of the fundamental attribution error.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[gaius]

No, people are anti-tax because they believe government is an inefficient way to Get Stuff Done.

To use your example, recent figures have shown that there are 4M adults in the UK who have never worked and spent their entire lives on the dole. Paying them to do nothing while there is stuff in the public good that needs doing, is simply not a good use of taxpayer's money.

[codexon]

No, people are anti-tax because they believe government is an inefficient way to Get Stuff Done.

This is a common euphemism for "you don't deserve my money because all my money came from hard work and all your poorness comes from your laziness, regardless of circumstances".

And about that 4M figure, I couldn't find any evidence of that on Google, but I did find numerous results for 1.4M, which you were off by more than a factor of two. In addition, half of that is due 16-24 year olds choosing not to be janitors fresh out of college due to the recession that was by no means their fault.

That 1.4M also includes the terminally ill, disabled, and housewives. So for you to even bring this up as evidence is dishonest.

http://www.walletpop.co.uk/2010/09/14/1-4-million-brits-have...

[rbanffy]

> Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same

In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman.

Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?

[pchristensen]

"forgetting all the lives destroyed"

Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty.

Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?

[kenjackson]

And we should be really clear. Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. There are scant few developers in the world who can really argue that Gates hurt them, much less destroyed their lives.

And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.

[rbanffy]

> Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play.

Are we talking about Microsoft as in "Comes vs. Microsoft"?

> Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased

He was not the first and didn't push particularly hard. The first "serious" computer I had was an Apple II (the first one was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone) and a lot of the software I ran on it was acquired well after the purchase.

[kenjackson]

Yes, that Microsoft. The totality of damage in the Comes case, IMO, is very isolated. And a lot of what they was pushed against MS was tough talk, but not in itself illegal (but a lot was illegal too... I'm not letting them off the hook for that, but I'm not blindly jumping on them for everything).

Your recollection of the history of software is different than mine. I recall Microsoft being one of the biggest pushers of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.

[rbanffy]

Microsoft was a strong proponent of COTS only after the DOS deal with IBM. Before that they did lots of embedded languages for computer manufacturers. IIRC, I have used only Microsoft versions of BASIC in my early career.

They always had a strong stance against piracy, something that's understandable even when you consider they had limited exposure to it in those early days because of their OEM deals with computer makers.

[stan_rogers]

That anti-piracy stance goes back to Micro Soft BASIC for the Altair in 1976: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html

[rbanffy]

> Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?

Why are you so sure 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs would be unable to give the world something better? Too many eggs in too few baskets...

[jasonlotito]

/me points to Linux.

Granted, it's not quite 20 years.

[rbanffy]

I would point to Ataris, Amigas, Transputers, RISC workstations, Lisp Machines, Xerox Star, Connection Machines, supercomputers, ... Not to mention the software that would be developed today if we weren't stuck with glorified 8080s running 60's OSs (Linux is Unix and NT is VMS)...

[binomial]

It is not unlikely that many of those would end up as failed endeavors whether or not MS existed. We can only speculate though.

[pchristensen]

I figured MSFT's reign of terror was from the mid 80s to the early '00s, then rounded up as a courtesy.

[loewenskind]

Thank you for pchristensen for a proper demonstration of a straw man.

We don't know that avoiding 20 years of "frustrated tech entrepreneurs" means that this just got missed. Who knows what was loss by Gates' destructive policies. Maybe tech would be so much more advanced by now that 6 billion would be wealthier.

We can't know such things. All we can know is what actually happened. Things turned out ok, just as they always do, but that doesn't mean it was the best possible outcome and it certainly doesn't excuse what Gates did.

[Revisor]

Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.

Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.

With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter.

No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck.

He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it.

But he made good use of it.

Shame on you and all your upvoters.

[sutro]

I can't believe this is getting upvotes. Destroyed lives? Please. Get some perspective. And check your history. The guy bootstrapped Microsoft using nothing but sweat equity -- no investment, no inheritance -- working for years in very meager circumstances in New Mexico before getting some traction and moving to Washington. In short he lived the dream that many of us aspire to, and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. The article was spot-on.

It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.

[Gibbon]

Indeed, Gates has likely helped create more billionaires and millionaires than anyone currently living.

Think of the ecosystem surrounding Microsoft: all of the hardware companies, peripherals, software, training, education and jobs that would not exist were it not for "a pc on every desktop." Not to mention the millions of people using Windows to run their businesses.

I might add also that Gates billions are not sitting in a vault. It gets invested and that capital is used by others to create their own empires.

Wealth is fractal. A major success can generate an explosion of wealth further down the chain.

Wether you agree with Billy Boy's tactics or not, it's petty to call him "evil".. he's had made an immeasurable impact on the world and done so in a way that directly or indirectly changed the lives of millions of people.

To fault him for giving away his fortune? Well that's just a whole other level of absurdity. He's under no obligation to give it away, and yet he is. One might argue over the efficacy of his plans, but surely humanity will benefit in the end.

The real questions are: Is it better to give away your wealth incrementally or in one lump sum at the end? Is more taxation better or less? Is a monopoly more effective at wealth creation or is a more diverse market better? It's impossible to answer.

[loewenskind]

Gates was just the person in the right place at the right time. It was the computer industry that's made all those billionaires and millionaires. You think we'd have stayed at a standstill for the last 20 years if Gates hadn't stepped up? Come on.

[rbanffy]

> and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet.

I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real heroes: the people who work, create and strive to win in the market by creating superior solutions for the problems people have, not by striking deals with OEMs that restrict what kind of product end-users will be able to buy.

Also, don't forget that Gates didn't really risk everything (like so many entrepreneurs do). He had his family to back him up. I bet he would have a cozy job waiting for him if Microsoft failed.

[sutro]

No, what's easy is to sit here from our current vantage point and call what he did easy. So what if he had an upper-middle-class family willing to put him through college. He walked away from that when he dropped out of Harvard and lit out for the middle of nowhere with no significant funds or support system to bootstrap a "software company" before such a thing even existed. He wasn't given his fortune, he built it himself, painstakingly, with decades of hard work and sacrifice. And because he didn't always play nice with competitors you and the other holier-and-smarter-than-thou HN commenters want to call his incredible accomplishments "easy." Whatever. He has achieved more, not just as a philanthropist, but as a hacker-entrepreneur, than anyone on this thread ever will.

[rbanffy]

> And because he didn't always play nice with competitors you and the other holier-and-smarter-than-thou HN commenters want to call his incredible accomplishments "easy."

Now that's a straw man. I never said it was easy to build Microsoft from its humble beginnings in Albuquerque into whatever it is now. I said it's easy to decide you'll try to start a company (Microsoft was his second attempt) when you know that your future is ensured whatever happens (the first company went bust). I also said it's easy to be the biggest philanthropist in history when you also have the deepest pockets in history.

And no, I am unwilling to forget his unethical, borderline criminal behavior, his despicable disregard for the law and the damage he did to what was once a competitive, diverse and flourishing industry. Microsoft's monopoly (and the consequent lack of diversity) has set the advance of technology back years, if not decades. Like many HN'ers you call "holier-than-thou", I have lived - and worked - in the pre-monopoly years and I can tell you, from first-hand experience, the world is a much more boring place because of him.

He may donate all his money to whoever he wants, but that won't erase his past.

[sutro]

Saying it's easy to give when you have Gates' deep pockets negates the effort that it took to fill those pockets. Of all the crimes in the world to call Bill Gates a criminal is to have completely lost the plot. I don't particularly like Microsoft technology either, so I've spent my career (which has been far from boring) working on other technology stacks, and have always had plenty of opportunity to do so. Yet despite that choice, I acknowledge that I owe Gates a great debt for pioneering the business of software, a business which, divorced from hardware, didn't exist prior to 1975, and a business of which I, and I suspect you, have been a major beneficiary.

How does your track record measure up to Gates'? Which companies have you bootstrapped? Which charities have you founded? Or are you just a bitter salaryman complaining from the cheap seats on the sidelines?

[rbanffy]

> How does your track record measure up to Gates'?

I was never involved in anti-competitive practices. I probably had more girlfriends and went to better parties. Girls considered me hot.

> Which companies have you bootstrapped?

None. I am not a billionaire.

> Which charities have you founded?

I regularly donate to several local charities.

> Or are you just a bitter salaryman complaining from the cheap seats on the sidelines?

The chair I am using now is cheap, but seems well built. While I could be called a salaryman for the past couple years, I cannot be described as bitter.

And, more interestingly, how does comparing me to Gates reduces in any measure the harm he has done? Are you attempting an ad hominem after the straw man and the false dichotomy failed to prove your point?

[kmfrk]

I think we should do away with calling Gates's actions altruistic. What (significant) does he have to lose, or merely risk, by doing what he does?

It's a good thing, but I don't think it's deserving of altruism.

But being less than altruistic can still be very laudable.

[rbanffy]

I am not against Gates giving nearly all of his money away to charity. I am only against considering this very atypical episode represents what Gates is.

[ariels]

The same thing can be said of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and most of the tech titans. Sounds like you just have something against powerful people.

[zzzmarcus]

Bill Gates did bad things. Jobs, Ellison, most tech titans do/did bad things.

edw519 does not like Bill Gates worship.

Therefore, edw519 has something against powerful people.

[naner]

There's nothing wrong with criticizing how powerful people choose to wield and maintain their power. You are right that many of the same things can be said about Jobs and Ellison. I don't think anyone here would argue that they are saints.

[qasar]

In the words of Linus Torvalds "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems."

the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought.

if you really hate microsoft, go build something better.

the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.

[SkyMarshal]

Agreed. Most robber barons of their time seem to follow this same pattern - scorched earth rise to power, then spend their waning years in philanthropy.

And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then:

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above:

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

[kmfrk]

As I understand, he also met Warren Buffet at a young age through his parents and formed a relationship with him. (I think he was a friend of his parents and met Bill at a party.)

Not the worst person to have in your rolodex.

[stackthat]

As you said Bill Gates coming from a rich background which makes it even more amazing that how much he spends on charity (as a person who has never been poor)

[reader5000]

Many fledgling industries have "evil titans". Look at oil, trains, telephone, social media. I'm not intimately acquainted enough with the actual events that earn Gates/Microsoft's popular ire, but if they hadn't earned the evil titan role somebody else would have. The work Gates is doing now I think makes up for any rough play he may have engaged in in the past.

[avar]

So if I manage to extract money from you, governments and institutions with rough play it's all OK at the end of the day if I give some percentage of it to charity?

Giving to charity by way of the residue of the profits of a monopoly like Microsoft is a very inefficient process.

[reader5000]

Maybe you know something I don't but reading over wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft I don't see any misbehavior that most every other big company in the world has not engaged in or is actively engaging in. I mean, can you quantify roughly how much money Microsoft has "extracted" from you or other governments/institutions?

My point is just, most leaders of industry are going to have skeletons in their closets. Most industry leaders don't then commit 98% of their wealth to charity.

[avar]

I don't think Microsoft is worse than any other big company in their position, in fact I think they're probably much better given the charity Bill Gates is now engaging in.

Most big companies of Microsoft's size engage in unethical or illegal practices, and most of them don't have CEO's that become philanthropists. Gates is doing good, relatively speaking.

But I also think that praising Bill Gates as a "Hero" for his philanthropy without looking at how his wealth was generated, or how inefficient that process is misses the big picture.

Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have flowed through Microsoft over the years didn't go to Gates, and a lot of it was spent on unethical behavior which has held the industry hostage for years. For instance we've only relatively recently begun to see large transitions away from Windows, IE and Office, which might have happened much sooner in a more open market.

So who are my heroes?

My heroes people working in government trying to rain in monopolies and fostering healthy competition. My heroes are people that write software supporting open protocols that make it easy for everyone in the market to compete on equal ground.

My heroes are people in Africa and elsewhere using these technologies to bootstrap their local economies, so in the long term they can buy their own vaccines instead of getting them from Bill Gates.

None of these people will become billionaires, and you'll never know their names. But combined they'll do more economic good for humanity than Bill Gates ever could.

[m0th87]

If you think the unethical business decisions he made in the yesteryear outweigh the billions he has poured into philanthropic work in recent years, we have very different views of ethics.

The man has started a movement among billionaires to use their wealth toward charitable purposes, and somehow you can pass it off based on his wealthy upbringing and a "Carnegie complex"?

Injustices in technology are much less important than the injustices Gates is trying to fix now.

[garrettgillas]

Is it better to be a bully in business and do great things with the wealth or to be graceful in business and squander a fortune? I really don't know but my initial reaction says the former.

[rbanffy]

False dichotomy alert!

You can be a graceful businessman and still make a profit, further a healthy market and win on it through a superior product instead of doing so through shady backroom deals that border the criminal.

[garrettgillas]

I wasn't implying there there exists a dichotomy and that all businesses are one or the other. You did that on your own. I'm just saying that no business is perfect and having to choose between the two...

[mfukar]

An example would be most helpful (to me, at least).

[ch0wn]

I'm feeling better now too, knowing I'm not alone. This worshipping makes me crazy.

[billmcneale]

You probably meant Steve Jobs for this diatribe.

[theprodigy]

larry ellison is a true silicon valley hero and success story.

[theprodigy]

damn i didn't know people hated larry ellison so much. He did have a rough upbringing and didn't have the advatages Bill Gates had and founded one of the most successful technology companies in the world.

How can anyone deny that he is a Silicon Valley hero and success story. He is going to save Sun.