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by Rebelgecko 409 days ago
Why did Bill Gates get preferential treatment for his operating system over others like Steve Jobs or Vinod Khosla? Government connections?
1 comments

Sure. They ask him for government backdoors, to add stuff to it for military purposes. It's quid pro quo. Bill Gates gets to capture the lion's share of the wealth from his government-protected monopoly with all its anti-competitive practices and the public is left out in the cold.
So other OS's like Sun and MacOS refused to put in backdoors, and that's why Bill Gates is richer?
If you want to be reductive about it, be my guest, but don't infect me with that crap. People who get buddy-buddy with the government are allowed to enrich themselves. I don't know why it's such a hard concept to grasp. Been this way for all of human history. Tech billionaires are just the latest iteration.