[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.

[mattmaroon]

Ha, good visualization. I find much of what I read here to be like that. Especially when people or corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) are called evil. At that point it always feels like we've left the realm of enlightened conversation. There's never a recognized gray area. It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

[netcan]

Well.. when discussions get preachy like this it's hard to come in and make any impact with a gray area opinion.

My position is that Microsoft nudged the line of business practices and spent a lot of time in the gray area between generally acceptable and illegal. Most of it was a hard to judge because it involved holding MS to a different standard due to their size and weight. They got nudged back by the courts and the public.

In hindsight, I think they are almost certainly better off for having had them.

Bill may not have been an exemplary moral model in his practices at that time, but he wasn't an extreme example of immoral CEO either. It was a relatively short period in MS history that was like that. He is an extreme example of a moral billionaire now.

See? Sounds like a boring compromise.

[donaq]

It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

Amen. I have several times tried to comment to that effect, but couldn't come up with the words. Thanks for saying it. Especially irksome to me are comments that go something like "You're on HN, you're better than that." in response to a comment on which the poster disapproves. Let's skip the childish reverse psychology attempts, shall we?

[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.

[mfukar]

I don't really see how one could speak about wide adoption of the personal computer and not count Microsoft in the equation. The "diverse", as other fellow HNers have kindly put it, computing environment of Atari, Apple, IBM et al was a complete nightmare for developer and user alike. Even if it weren't needed, since Z80, 6502, Motorola's 68000 as well as the variants of CP/M were entering oblivion, Microsoft slowly helped change that gradually, and slowly came to dominance with Windows (the reasons are obvious now, with hindsight).

Yet how one may deny that Gates brought the PC to the masses with knowledge of the above are beyond me. Maybe a comparison with GEOS is in line..

[rbanffy]

> The "diverse" (...) computing environment of Atari, Apple, IBM et al was a complete nightmare for developer and user alike

I don't think so. You had a handful of self-sufficient ecosystems to work in. Apart from having only one software ecosystem, I can't see why you may think we are better off now.

> how one may deny that Gates brought the PC to the masses with knowledge of the above are beyond me

Since it's your own assessment of your own shortcomings, I assume you must be right.

[mfukar]

It's not my assessment, I just happen to agree with it. You disagreed with it yet came to the same conclusion (Microsoft's dominance over desktop). I simply miss the logical step in that process.

PS. Also, there are plenty of "digital ecosystems" for us to play with, even today. Billions over billions of ad hoc, embedded, portable, desktop, mainframe and all the other platforms in between. Thankfully some unification now exists (where it matters).

[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.