Really? I thought people took objection to Microsoft but generally thought of him as an intelligent, charismatic and, more recently, very generous man.
No, I hate Microsoft because they destroyed Borland, Lotus, WordPerfect, etc. They gobbled up everything (Visio, PowerPoint, etc). They killed off Netscape the company, stuck us with IE6 for a decade by "making it part of the operating system." They embraced, extended, and tried to extinguish everything they could. (e.g. Java->C#, OpenGL->DirectX).
Bill, however, I greatly admire. He took no prisoners. :-) I've got his book on my shelf somewhere. It's 20 years old now. I should go back and read it.
Apple has arguably destroyed/killed off RIM. Microsoft's "destruction" is today's startups' "disruption". (At least in HN circles I think we applaud AirBNB or Uber doing damage to the hospitality or transportation industries). Twitter and Google are gobbling up and often times killing products of value.
I think Microsoft did a lot of things we value: disrupt and grow. Looking back, I think we see it through a different lens, but modern startups (or those who have eclipsed that label to be "big") can be Microsoft (or at least little Microsofts). Probably the only thing separating Microsoft from many companies is the presence of a moral compass at the company level.
Most of the companies you list failed to keep up with the changing marketplace and withered off by being complacent, while Microsoft doggedly kept improving their initially poor offerings(remember the adage, the 3rd version of a Microsoft product is when it gets real).
Being somewhat more divorced from MS and his charity effort have helped his public image a lot over the last few years but I'm sure we can still remember the days of the slashdot borg icon etc.
I don't remember the Slashdot borg icon (I was 10 in '96 when we got AOL, our first internet service) but I do remember the song 'Bill Gates Must Die', Micro$oft as a derogatory term,the blue screens of death, IE, antitrust, my printer doesn't work (again!), and on and on. I was just a kid but I remember the sentiment being that because of Bill Gates' ruthlessness as a business man the entire computer industry was suffering from a lack of any real competition, a stranglehold on vendors, customer lock-in, and on top of it all you always had to buy a new computer to upgrade to the newest Windows and it would only work for like a couple of months before everything stopped working one by one. I'm not stating all this as fact (though some of it is), that's just the sentiment others around me had at the time (like 1995 - 2001).
Since his departure from MS though I personally see him as a much kinder, gentler, and even more brilliant man than ever before. It's strange because there was a time when I loved to hate the guy but now that he's gone and seeing what Microsoft is doing these days I almost feel like "damn, I wish Bill Gates would come back, that guy was smart". Maybe this is a totally crazy thing to say but I'll say it: I feel like it's the same feeling people who followed politics in the 90's feel about Bill Clinton. They may have been pissed at him for reasons XYZ at the time but now many have a much different memory of him and kind of yearn for him to come back (if it were possible). Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
Good at what is the question. Not levelling anything at them specifically, but there are plenty of people with large followings that are basically 'good' at getting large followings and making money off of them (e.g. tele-vangelists).
Good at whatever the people following them liked in them or found worth the attention. It can be anything - good voice, other skills or just the looks. Anything. It depends on the person following what good was in the guy he/she follows.
There are plenty of intelligent and charismatic people who are loathed by many. BillG is amongst them. And bearing him a personal grudge for the actions of the company he ran isn't unreasonable in any case.
Where did all his generous cash donations come from? Just being good at selling software?
What's happening right now (ChromeOS, cloud computing, etc) is basically what Microsoft feared back in the day. They feared that the browser would become the operating system, which is why they engaged in anti-competitive behaviour in the browser space. It could be argued that they delayed this by acting to quash it for their own benefit.
(I realize that there are plenty of nuanced arguments to be had here.)
An abusive monopoly? Microsoft never had a monopoly, much less an abusive monopoly. If they had, there's a very long list of products and companies that did survive Microsoft that would not have.
They had market power, not a government granted right to a market (aka a monopoly). There's no historical evidence to suggest Microsoft was unbeatable. Rather, there's a lot of evidence to suggest very few companies tried to compete with Windows once it achieved scale. Neither Sun nor Oracle ever launched a full fledged Windows competitor in the consumer space, neither did AOL or Netscape. And Apple lost due to its own mistakes, more than admitted by Jobs after the fact; ditto IBM.
And if you want to talk market power. Microsoft beat Apple, who was ten times its size. And they beat IBM, which was 100+ times its size. How? The same way Android has beaten iOS in smart phones when it comes to market share: distribution across the widest selection of hardware vendors.
Re inflating prices. Actually Microsoft lowered prices substantially.
You should look up how much productivity software cost before Microsoft created Office, and how much easier it was to buy and sell their software. They undercut everybody at the time. Microsoft also was instrumental in vastly bringing down the cost of personal computing by leveraging a standard across consistent hardware. They also made it extremely easy to distribute software, courtesy of a standard, bringing down the cost for software by providing economies of scale. Meanwhile, competing platforms were far more expensive (including Apple's solutions). Also, Microsoft has always charged half or less for Windows than what Intel does for its good consumer processors.
The DOJ got involved because competitors who either screwed up and failed to compete (eg Netscape), or were simply scared (Sun), complained.
Wired's The Truth The Whole Truth article about the case more than spells out how much of a witch hunt it was.
The DOJ tries to control any wildly successful company with market power. For the government, it's all about power over the economy and bringing companies to heel. Anti-trust has little to do with monopolies (if it did, Verizon and AT&T would be broken up).
By commoditizing PCs by licensing to Compaq and setting off a pricing war among OEMs leading to lower prices and massive uptake of PCs.
By releasing a free browser when Netscape used to charge people for access to the World Wide Web (however when Google does the same thing with Android using their search profits and killing RIM/Nokia by dumping a free product, it's a good thing). And by releasing a better browser than Netscape during the 4.0 era.
No. Compaq, like many other PC makers of the time, made PCs that were compatible with IBM's because they reverse engineered the BIOS. BTW, the first company to do it was Columbia Data Products. Microsoft only licensed an OS, much like Digital Research licensed CP/M, to every computer manufacturer that wanted to distribute it. Their advantage was that PC-DOS was bundled with every PC and that was enough to create critical mass.
On the other hand, the dominance of the PC ecosystem also prevented other architectures from gaining a significant foothold and restricted the kind of computers people could get. If you enjoyed an inferior hardware standard encumbered by processors with convoluted instruction sets, having to set jumpers on expansion boards to resolve hardware conflicts and things like destroying monitor power supplies by setting wrong timings on the CRTC (6854 on MDA), you can thank them for that. I had an Apple II clone (yes, 1977 technology) and never had to set jumpers on an expansion board until I moved to a PC clone in the late 80's.
> leading to lower prices and massive uptake of PCs
I'd credit Commodore for that
> I've usually found it unproductive to argue facts with people with such an affliction.
> Or something, I don't know. Linus says it best though:
That's a very interesting read, especially with Microsoft's recent adoption of Git in its development tools. (Visual Studio and Team Foundation)
After all, Git was started by Linus, and even LibGit2 (which Microsoft is using) includes some of his original code. So in effect, Microsoft is now shipping code written by Linus. But then, Linus is also shipping code written by Microsoft. So they're even.
When you ignore the ideology and concentrate on engineering, good things can happen.
Understanding... how to sell software, the future of personal computing and its scale / importance, how to leverage markets, how to create a standard, how to hire top engineers, the importance of software and the margins in it, how to bootstrap and be financially disciplined, how to bundle, that productivity suites would rule, the way products can reinforce eachother, and on and on and on and on - yeah all that is exactly where his wealth came from.
> but generally thought of him as an intelligent, charismatic and, more recently, very generous man.
Er, Bill Gates is definitely a smart guy, but he's never been known as charismatic, or even nice. His reputation at MS was pretty nasty. [I'm talking about his "inside" reputation, to employees; his "outside" reputation tended to be conflated with that of MS (this is very different, for instance, than Steve Jobs, who left a pretty strong impression even on the general public).]
Of course, he's doubtless mellowed with age and with his new post-business role.
Even fearing downvoting I must say these articles, most of them I've been reading in the past month from that site are just plainly wrong assumptions. This article for example try to argues that you can be like BG and try to sell something without actually having it. I say BG had the OS in that time, he just didn't bought it but he knew the SO was right away to be bought (and cheap).
In the same vein as how Microsoft sold IBM an OS that didn't exist, one of my favorite stories is Excite bidding $3 million to be on Netscape's browser circa 1996 or so (while having $1 million in the bank), prodded on by Vinod Khosla (they didn't get the deal, but it's still a great move).
Don't forget that the businessman is the new political savior.
We all love the oh so charitable landlord who by day evicts his tenants and by night donates cardboard boxes to them for shelter now that they're homeless.
Isn't it so wonderful that the man that's taken more of a share of the world's wealth than any human in history gives some of it back? It should be obvious that if you want to change the world, don't vote or organize, buy more copies of Windows!!
Let's put that another way: if you're not afraid of being seen as the dark lord of an evil empire in order to get what you want (which, in Gates' case, seems to be "billions of dollars to solve the most important problems the world has to offer") then you should follow in his footsteps.
If you are destroying a part of the world to fix another, you are not good. You may be evil even. Because you are selfishly choosing the part to fix, in expense of the part you destroy. If you are good, you should do no evil, or at least strive to.
I was only pointing that one special situation, not his whole career. He behaved like a sales genius on that occasion and it doesn't have anything to do with his futher strategy. I wouldn't advise to copy the whole Microsoft strategy.
Seems like there is a lot of hate in what you are saying. Yeah they were fierce in the industry, but I think any company in their position would have done the same. What did Gates do to the rest of the world in the 90s?
Bill Gates also shipped the office assistant, windows ME was done mostly under his command and got the attention of the DOJ anaconda on microsoft. And I would recommend against doing this things.
All great people have a track record of good and bad decisions. And you cannot take only the ones you like.
Also I had this pretending to be done project once ... one year later we were still struggling, the customer was losing money daily and I was happy watching my management being roasted on a slow fire for not listening to us lowly techies.
You're also forgetting WinFS. WinFS was apparently his baby during the development of Windows Vista (aka Longhorn), but was one of the things cut when shedding cruft. I can't find a reference to it, but I recall hearing that there were grumblings from the rank-and-file about 'making a pig fly' (not exactly, but something similar) with regards to Gates' focus/drive on WinFS.
Really? I thought people took objection to Microsoft but generally thought of him as an intelligent, charismatic and, more recently, very generous man.