| 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. |
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.