[tomelders]

This stuff is the reason I'll never hate google the way I hate Microsoft. Ok, hate is a strong word, but I just don't like or trust microsoft. I think the world is a worse place because of it. I Think the world is a better place because of google, but there's still a healthy portion of sceptisim that comes with that feeling.

The reason I mention this is because right now, it's all about google becoming the next Microsoft, but I don't think that's fair on google.

[InclinedPlane]

I think your hatred of MS is misplaced. The world is almost certainly a better place because of them. Maybe not as better a place as possible, but certainly better. The "MS is evil" meme always struck me as an immature response to MS's imperfections, few companies have done as much to put computing power into the hands of people, and that has had an amazing impact on the world.

As far as google, they'll lose more and more of the fire from their early days as they get bigger and older, but they still have a fairly strong ethical core for any company their size and I think that will help as they age.

[lsd5you]

I don't think you are giving enough credit to the companies and services that never were (because of Microsoft). Infact an uncharitable reading of what you've written would be that you assume no microsoft means some kind of industry void.

It is certainly pretty disputable that computing adoption was in anyway accelerated by the exsistence of Microsoft since they have essentially been rent collecting and pushing up prices for everyone to join in.

[InclinedPlane]

Sure, it would have been different, but in how many of those parallel universes would it have been better without MS? Keep in mind that the biggest competition for MS in those early days was Apple and IBM. Apple of that era coming out on top would have resulted in far fewer people gaining access to computers and far, far slower rate of innovation, especially in hardware. The same would have been true for IBM coming out on top as well.

Microsoft was one of the few companies which pursued an open platform for computing hardware and a licensed OS. That very much accelerated innovation in ways that most of MS's competitors did not.

[michaelchisari]

OS/2 was an open platform, and would have had more or less the same effect as Microsoft's dominance.

[InclinedPlane]

You have to draw a distinction between what IBM did as a response to competition in our actual history and what IBM would have done had Microsoft never existed. IBM would have almost certainly continued what it had done before and what virtually every other company was doing at the time: offering bundled hardware/software solutions, using customer lock-in and FUD like weapons, and pushing incredibly high profit markups on everything. It's certainly the same thing Apple did. And it's the same road that smartphones have for the most part taken up until very recently. It's easy to skip past the fact that Microsoft had a pretty significant impact on the structure of the entire computing industry and some of that impact was very positive. Granted, they certainly have their fair share of sins to atone for but in my judgment any of their likely replacements from the early era of personal computing would have had as many or more.

[michaelchisari]

the companies and services that never were

BeOS. Sweet lord, what BeOS could have been...

[protomyth]

Although I love BeOS, do look at who was running the company and what that same individual did to Apple. The amazingly bad moves made by Microsoft's competitors sure helped a lot. Much like Microsoft's bad moves are helping their competitors now.

[InclinedPlane]

BeOS seemed like a very cool experiment but from what I've heard it was sunk by its own faults, most especially from being nearly impossible to develop for.

[michaelchisari]

Hardly. I was a part of the developer program, and for the time, it was a dream to develop for. Because of the pervasive multithreading, development was a little bit more complicated, but the BeAPI was lovely, and very forward-thinking. And the benefits of the multithreaded architecture were immediately apparent to anyone who did even elementary development.

What killed BeOS was Microsoft strong-arming PC manufacturers to not allow BeOS as an option. Be had Hitachi and Compaq lined up for dual booting and an internet appliance, respectively. Microsoft used their OEM program to get them to go back on the deals.

BeOS alone is one reason I will never forgive the anti-competitive, monopolistic tactics of 90's Microsoft.

[mburns]

Be (the company) offered to give BeOS away for free to any OEM, but none would touch it... because the contracts with Microsoft at the time meant they had to pay a Windows license for every machine sold, even if BeOS and (not Windows) was installed on it.

It wasn't a good time to compete with Microsoft.

[protomyth]

That, not the whole Internet Explorer tangent, was the thing that ticked me off the most. The thought that any money for the Intel box I bought to run NeXTSTEP went to Microsoft was unbelievable. If the gov had put a stop to that one practice earlier, it would have been a different game.

[patrickgzill]

MS was evil, at least earlier in the company's lifetime. The theft of IP from Gary Kildall, the Stac case, the Wang lawsuit, the way IBM got shafted over OS/2, etc.

[tomelders]

For my money, the single greatest evil Microsoft has ever perpetuated is Internet Explorer. And they show no signs of giving up the ghost on that one. The World Wide Web would get my vote as mankind's single greatest achievement, and I think we're still right at the very beginning of it's chapter in history.

Sadly, my view is that we're 10 years behind where we should be because progress is anchored to Internet Explorer, and will be for another 10 years at least.

I will happily call IE evil because Microsoft have used it as a weapon in numerous attempts to seize control of something they didn't create, don't understand and above all have no right to mess with.

[loup-vaillant]

> The World Wide Web would get my vote as mankind's single greatest achievement,[…]

I'd place the Internet before the world wide web. The www makes great use of many-to-many communication, but the Internet enabled it (which was its entire point, I think).

[tomelders]

It's true, there's no WWW without the Internet, but I don't think the Internet would be what it is today without the World Wide Web. Perhaps something else (something better?) may have come along in it's place, but it didn't.

I think the success of the web is it's ease of use, which has enabled anyone with an internet connection to contribute, and it's these contributions, both large and small, technical and non technical that make it mankinds greatest achievement.

[6ren]

It's PR. As Page admits, it's how people see Google from the outside, but actually only 3-5 people somewhere in the company. There's none of the security that you might expect from a big company doing it - for example see what happened to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unladen_Swallow The main way that Google helps the project is providing publicity. Which aligns with Google's needs. It's PR.

PR is a crucial part of Google's strategy, because it's very easy to switch search engines.

[georgemcbay]

No Microsoft means no (or at least a very drastically different/less funded) Gates Foundation. No Gates Foundation means a world much worse off, particularly for those in the 3rd world.

Granted, Google is more directly involved in positive projects as a corporation than Microsoft has been, but "The world is a worse place because of Microsoft" is a very shallow view, and IMO very wrong.

[loup-vaillant]

If you really want to do the expected utility calculation, you'd need to ask if the absence of Microsoft and the Gate foundation would have permitted wealth to be created and moved elsewhere, perhaps to another foundation.

Anyway, if the goal is to slay Poverty, a private foundation probably won't cut it. We need to do away with the current fractional reserve banking system, nullify most national debts, localize production and distribution of common goods (especially food), build things to last (no programmed obsolescence), and stop thinking that GDP growth is a good measure of wealth (it was a good predictor, but now we tend to cheat).

But the amount of collaboration needed to do that looks so huge that it may be easier to build a Friendly AI.

[tomelders]

The Bill & Belinda Gates Foundation != Microsoft. It's true that it wouldn't exist without Microsoft, but the two are entirely different enterprises, with entirely different characteristics.

[ajross]

The Gates Foundation does great work. They are certainly one of if not the most effective anti-poverty charities out there. But positing a world "much worse off" is stretching things. Even huge charities are dwarfed by the sizes of governments. Almost all aid is delivered by governments. How much money has the Gates Foundation spent in total over its decade or so of work? What is the USA humanitarian aid budget for a single year?

Again, my point isn't to diss Bill's charity work. But arguing that we should tolerate abusive monopolies in our tech industry because the owners might one day get rich and give the money to poor people is ... borderline insane, honestly.

[dagw]

How much money has the Gates Foundation spent in total over its decade or so of work? What is the USA humanitarian aid budget for a single year?

US federal Humanitarian aid budget for 2009: $4.3bn

Gates Foundation total charitable distribution 2009: $3.65bn

Gates Foundation total grant commitments since inception: $24.81bn

So it seems you're either seriously over estimating The US Government spending or seriously underestimating the Gates foundation.

[Yrlec]

That sounds like a straw man. He wasn't arguing for monopolies. He was just saying that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should be added to the postitive effects which Microsoft has contributed to the world.

[lucasjung]

>Almost all aid is delivered by governments.

I'm pretty sure that the opposite is actually true. I don't have any stats on hand, but I've read before that private donors in the U.S. give more foreign aid than any government on Earth, including the U.S. government.