[afandian]

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?

[rbanffy]

> bearing him a personal grudge for the actions of the company he ran isn't unreasonable

Isn't it a bit of a contradiction?

He ran a company that engaged in actions that harmed society. Doesn't he deserve some credit?

[adventured]

How did Microsoft harm society?

[pyre]

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.)

[wslh]

And how companies like Google might have acted?

[rbanffy]

Monopoly abuse and other anticompetitive actions that ultimately inflated prices. Why do you think the DoJ got involved?

[acheron]

The DOJ "got involved" because Microsoft didn't want to play the lobbying game, so the government decided to teach them a lesson. http://washingtonexaminer.com/carney-how-hatch-forced-micros...

[tanzam75]

Well, they learned their lesson. Microsoft is now a prolific spender on DC lobbying. In the tech world, they are matched only by Google.

Bill Gates used to be a Congressional page, and his father was a lawyer. So I'm surprised he had such a naive viewpoint of the justice system. He ought to have known that it was more political than that.

The irony is that Bill Gates, a staunch Democrat, was hounded by the Clinton DOJ. It ended up being the Bush administration that rescued his company by terminating the lawsuit and signing that consent decree.

[adventured]

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).

[cooldeal]

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.

Or something, I don't know. Linus says it best though: http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

I've usually find it unproductive to argue facts with people with such an affliction.

[rbanffy]

> By commoditizing PCs by licensing to Compaq

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.

I don't know why we bother.

[recoiledsnake]

>Microsoft only licensed an OS, much like Digital Research licensed CP/M, to every computer manufacturer that wanted to distribute it

You say "only" as if the OS weren't a critical part of running a computer and that Microsoft specially included a clause in their agreement with IBM to be able to license to other manufacturers.

>Their advantage was that PC-DOS was bundled with every PC and that was enough to create critical mass.

You say as if that was a chance happening and not a deliberate and very insightful strategy to acquire that advantage compared to, say Apple. Just like how Google made Android free and open to counter Apple.

>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.

That's a nice comparison. If Apple had won instead of Microsoft, computer uptake would've been hampered by higher prices because of the lack of commoditization, having only a single vendor that's known to charge exorbitant margins. If you think Apple computers were expensive, imagine what their prices would've been without competition from PCs.

I'd take much cheaper prices and mutiple PC vendors that encouraged PC adoption in the third world over not having to set a few jumpers. Not to mention that Linux was first developed on x86 machines.

[rbanffy]

> You say "only" as if the OS weren't a critical part of running a computer

An OS is a critical piece of software, but the PC was also offered with CP/M-86 (IIRC, for a price DR considered suicidal)

> You say as if that was a chance happening and not a deliberate and very insightful strategy

Demanding non-exclusive contract was, in fact, brilliant. That single move turned Microsoft from a small niche software company to the powerhouse it was in the 90's. Had IBM said "no" (as they should), Bill Gates would still be filthy rich and a lot more popular.

> If Apple had won instead of Microsoft (...) having only a single vendor that's known to charge exorbitant margins.

I believe Commodore would have taken care of that. Or Atari. Or VTech, maybe Franklin. Or anyone else. Apple never had the dominance PC cloners have.

[tanzam75]

> 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.

[sreyaNotfilc]

Amen...

[adventured]

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.