[lefstathiou]

I am rather grateful for Gates' contribution to the software industry. Standardizing the development environment was monumental toward facilitating innovation in software development. Imagine if Steve Jobs controlled the industry with as much power that Gates did, how much different would the world be? While I dont like to deal in "IF's," if we judge people/organizations by their actions, Microsoft has always been a relatively open environment whereas today Apple continues to tyranically control their platform. Seeing Apple rule would have sucked for everyone.

[Tyrannosaurs]

On the other hand OS X on the Mac is a relatively robust and usable platform and Windows on the PC still sucks for many users (I'm two days into a Windows rebuild at the moment).

It's swings and roundabouts. Gates and MS made good calls and they made bad calls, Jobs is the same.

For me I think Bill did OK, while I can imagine some using that sort of power in a more altruistic way, I can also see many doing far far worse things with it.