181–190 of 239 posts
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…
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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…
There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.
I am talking about STAC, Gary Kildall's family, etc.
Also perhaps an effort at MSFT to reverse the culture of lying and deceit that even now permeates their marketing.
I see no evidence of Gates doing that. Self-reflection would be required for that to happen.
In some respects I see Zuckerberg following the same path.
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…
Oh please! Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same. Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses. Would…
No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter?
And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would have won by an insignificant 0.01 seconds less. By the same vein, it is inevitable that someone else would have stepped up had Microsoft not existed.
So why is it a problem to worship these people that have had all these advantages?
The biggest excuse why these people are against taxation is because they feel their wealth was earned 99% by hard work rather than circumstance. Conversely, many of them feel people on welfare don't deserve it, and it is 99% due to their personality.
It is a classic case of the fundamental attribution error.
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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. Interesting. In the 1970s, ITT's CEO Hal Geneen gave $700,000 to Jorge Alessandri to help him beat Salvadore Allende in the Chilean Presidential Election, correctly believing that ITT's financial interests were best served by defeating Al…
Well, there's a line for sure. If Microsoft has done anything like funding coups it's not in the standard litany of complaints. It's more like "they saw Netscape and ran it out of business by building their own browser" or "they ate all of Apple's market share". That's not evil, it's exercising fiduciary duty. Same with vendor lock-in. Unless I'm just not understanding the argument ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crit…
It's quite strange that the Criticism of Microsoft page doesn't even mention BeOS.
There's also the incident of designing Windows to crash if run on DR-DOS (they didn't simply not support it, they went out of their way to crash on purpose).
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Regarding the complaints about capitalism and "ruined lives," I think it might be helpful to decide whether one wants to maximize, minimize, or ignore the worst case, average case, and best case quality of life. It seems that pro-capitalist arguments support the average and best cases (i.e. middle class and wealthy), while disregarding the worst cases (the ruined lives). Anti-capitalist arguments, on the other hand, appear to focus on the worst-case outcomes.
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It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream. Really? I think that's discounting the booming home PC market that existed before Microsoft got involved and giving a lot of credit to someone for an achievement that wasn't fully there. All Gates did was ensure that his company's software was on every computer.
You're discounting the network effect of compatibility. I don't even mean "network" as in networking, but in the ability to save a Word document or whatever on a floppy on virtually any PC and load it back on another. This was long, long before every device could render a web page (and you could take for granted that it would have a TCP/IP connection!) There was huge real value in creating "the standard", not least b…
If MS didn't exist, someone else could have easily replaced them. It was also mainly due to Intel, who created such a cheap processor, that we have cheap computers today. Not Microsoft.
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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…
... any of which you can buy for $5,000.00.
It seems that anti-Microsoft arguments always ignore the benefits of network effects and economies of scale brought about by DOS and Windows. They are usually posted by Linux nerds running sub-$1000 3 GHz PCs that they couldn't possibly have afforded in a world where Apple, Commodore, Atari, and ten more companies like them kept building mutually- incompatible proprietary hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh please! Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same. Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses. Would…
Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter? And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would h…
To use your example, recent figures have shown that there are 4M adults in the UK who have never worked and spent their entire lives on the dole. Paying them to do nothing while there is stuff in the public good that needs doing, is simply not a good use of taxpayer's money.
How come no one talks about the loss of innovation Microsoft have incurred on the world? What if Windows were NeXT or Unix? What if Bill Gates had tried really hard to create the best tools possible, rather than the most profitable software? What if the world had run on Unix in the two decades since Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine to create the web? Might we have had a 1% increase in annual productivity (mainly f…
Ted Nelson said the world of computing would be different if AT&T hadn't charged $50,000 for a Unix license (yes, that's per machine!).