[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?