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Bill Gates, Hero

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Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#91

Post by sdp »

edw519 wrote: post #62
mattmaroon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is silly all the way through. He's got an IQ of 160, which means he actually is considerably smarter than most of the rest of us. He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements. It's ludicrous to say that he's…

I cannot see into alternate universes You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft. I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the…

> [...] and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OSX, CPM, & Pick.

Youngster here: I'm guessing when you say OSX you mean something other than Mac OS X?

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#92

Post by m0th87 »

edw519 wrote: post #13

Why do you think Silicon Valley has never quite come around on this guy? Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake. Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman. Sure he wa…

If you think the unethical business decisions he made in the yesteryear outweigh the billions he has poured into philanthropic work in recent years, we have very different views of ethics.

The man has started a movement among billionaires to use their wealth toward charitable purposes, and somehow you can pass it off based on his wealthy upbringing and a "Carnegie complex"?

Injustices in technology are much less important than the injustices Gates is trying to fix now.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#93

Post by edw519 »

sdp wrote: post #91
edw519 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see into alternate universes You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft. I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the…

> [...] and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OSX, CPM, & Pick. Youngster here: I'm guessing when you say OSX you mean something other than Mac OS X?

Oops, I meant OS2. Original corrected.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#94

Post by agentultra »

rbanffy wrote: post #87
MaysonL wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an old hacker, and proud to admit that I have never owned a Microsoft product.

Their keyboards and mice are excellent. My Z-80 SoftCard II probably still works.

I cannot stand their keyboards. Gushy non-mechanical switches and awkward non-standard layouts. Pshh!

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#95

Post by mattmaroon »

edw519 wrote: post #66
lionhearted wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman. The rest of your post is very insightful, but this part above strikes me as petty - I was low born myself, was given almost nothing except birth in the USA in…

...but this part above strikes me as petty... Sorry if it came across that way; that was not my intent. Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine. With those gifts comes responsibility. Whenever I have an opportunity to use my gifts to do good things, I think of how proud those who made…

From your comments its clear that you're zealously anti-capitalist and, as a result, anti-Microsoft, so you're simply not applying logic.

Bill Gates did his legal duty. When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft. The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to the best results.

So the question is what do most people with the gifts Bill Gates was born into do? The answer is that they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society and getting paid quite handsomely for it.

Bill on the other hand founded a company that has, at current time, almost 90,000 employees. He helped bring computers to the masses.

It's not petty jealousy that drives your comments, it's anti-capitalist sentiment. You also have a highly debatable view of what the universe would look like if not for Microsoft (I for one suspect you wouldn't be on this site) but that too is a side effect of zealousness rather than the result of careful reasoning.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#96

Post by rbanffy »

kenjackson wrote: post #84
rbanffy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. Are we talking about Microsoft as in "Comes vs. Microsoft"? > Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased He was not the first and didn't push particularly hard. The first "serious" computer I had was an Apple II (the first one was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone) and a lot of the software I ran on it was acquired well after the…

Yes, that Microsoft. The totality of damage in the Comes case, IMO, is very isolated. And a lot of what they was pushed against MS was tough talk, but not in itself illegal (but a lot was illegal too... I'm not letting them off the hook for that, but I'm not blindly jumping on them for everything). Your recollection of the history of software is different than mine. I recall Microsoft being one of the biggest pushers…

Microsoft was a strong proponent of COTS only after the DOS deal with IBM. Before that they did lots of embedded languages for computer manufacturers. IIRC, I have used only Microsoft versions of BASIC in my early career.

They always had a strong stance against piracy, something that's understandable even when you consider they had limited exposure to it in those early days because of their OEM deals with computer makers.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#97

Post by avar »

reader5000 wrote: post #29
avar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I manage to extract money from you, governments and institutions with rough play it's all OK at the end of the day if I give some percentage of it to charity? Giving to charity by way of the residue of the profits of a monopoly like Microsoft is a very inefficient process.

Maybe you know something I don't but reading over wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft I don't see any misbehavior that most every other big company in the world has not engaged in or is actively engaging in. I mean, can you quantify roughly how much money Microsoft has "extracted" from you or other governments/institutions? My point is just, most leaders of industry are going to have skele…

I don't think Microsoft is worse than any other big company in their position, in fact I think they're probably much better given the charity Bill Gates is now engaging in.

Most big companies of Microsoft's size engage in unethical or illegal practices, and most of them don't have CEO's that become philanthropists. Gates is doing good, relatively speaking.

But I also think that praising Bill Gates as a "Hero" for his philanthropy without looking at how his wealth was generated, or how inefficient that process is misses the big picture.

Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have flowed through Microsoft over the years didn't go to Gates, and a lot of it was spent on unethical behavior which has held the industry hostage for years. For instance we've only relatively recently begun to see large transitions away from Windows, IE and Office, which might have happened much sooner in a more open market.

So who are my heroes?

My heroes people working in government trying to rain in monopolies and fostering healthy competition. My heroes are people that write software supporting open protocols that make it easy for everyone in the market to compete on equal ground.

My heroes are people in Africa and elsewhere using these technologies to bootstrap their local economies, so in the long term they can buy their own vaccines instead of getting them from Bill Gates.

None of these people will become billionaires, and you'll never know their names. But combined they'll do more economic good for humanity than Bill Gates ever could.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#98

Post by rbanffy »

agentultra wrote: post #94
rbanffy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their keyboards and mice are excellent. My Z-80 SoftCard II probably still works.

I cannot stand their keyboards. Gushy non-mechanical switches and awkward non-standard layouts. Pshh!

The natural ones allowed me to cut my pain medication ;-)

Not that I wrote that, I also noticed I no longer use any Microsoft software. That can also explain the pain medication...

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#99

Post by mattmaroon »

rbanffy wrote: post #73
mattmaroon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, my friend (who was a very early MSFT employee) tells a different story. There were a bunch of different competing technologies. Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over, so nobody did this. The market was small and fragmented, and nobody really believed you could get huge as a software company. Bill's parents wanted him to finish his schooling instead of dropping out to start Mic…

> Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over Not quite correct. Companies ported programs, even assembly-language programs, to different processors all the time. Visicalc ran on z-80s, 6502s (on Apples, Ataris and Commodores) and 8086s. the hard part is to write it the first time. Porting then is more or less straightforward. OSs were so minimalistic at that time they didn't create any significa…

Certainly porting happened, but the market was very fragmented. That was why Office was born in the first place.

My bet for what would have happened: one of two things.

1. Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did and you'd be complaining about them instead. Except maybe you wouldn't be complaining because nobody would have written this article because whoever benefited from it would have hoarded their money as most billionaires do rather than becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time.

2. Hacker News wouldn't exist for you to comment on, because computers would still be something you maybe used at work and that's about it.

I don't think any other result is possible (and I don't think the 2nd is practical). Users simply aren't savvy enough to deal with fragmentation. You wouldn't have the web we know today without cheap home PCs anymore than you'd have man without the apes.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#100

Post by theprodigy »

edw519 wrote: post #13

Why do you think Silicon Valley has never quite come around on this guy? Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake. Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman. Sure he wa…

larry ellison is a true silicon valley hero and success story.
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