[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.