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Bill Gates, Hero

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Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#211

Post by rbanffy »

CamperBob wrote: post #194
rbanffy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was why Office was born in the first place. Office was never "born". Not even designed as a suite. It was cobbled together. Word and Excel were independent products developed originally for the Mac. PowerPoint was acquired and Access developed internally. > Either someone would have done much of the same things Microsoft did Striking a deal with IBM, retaining the rights to the OS and cooperating with OEMs so…

Bill Gates had nothing to do with the popularization of the home computer. Anyone heard of Microsoft BASIC? How about Applesoft? Bueller...?

There were many competing implementations of BASIC interpreters at the time. If it weren't for Applesoft, Wozniak would have finished his floating-point BASIC (he did the Integer BASIC that came with the II). IIRC, Atari computers didn't use Microsoft BASIC, nor did the BBC family in the UK.

And, BTW, Paul Allen deserves more credit for MS BASIC than is usually given.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#212

Post by stan_rogers »

rbanffy wrote: post #96
kenjackson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

That anti-piracy stance goes back to Micro Soft BASIC for the Altair in 1976: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#213

Post by rbanffy »

gaius wrote: post #136
generalk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was able to save a wordstar document on any CP/M (including CP/M 86) machine and transfer it to any other, including my Apple II running CP/M through a coprocessor. Most other word processors of the time could exchange files in one format or another. I never had any problems with it.

And you shouldn't be using a SPARC 5 on 1994 anyway.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#214

Post by [deleted] »

rbanffy wrote: post #149
storm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a young(ish) hacker, and I'm proud not to engage in religious nonsense like this at all. Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares? Get on with the coding already.

A real craftsman cares for the tools he uses. And it's not a religious issue - it's just that the thing is taking up space on an NTFS partition. I can store better stuff in that space.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#215

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

lefstathiou wrote: post #125

I am rather grateful for Gates' contribution to the software industry. Standardizing the development environment was monumental toward facilitating innovation in software development. Imagine if Steve Jobs controlled the industry with as much power that Gates did, how much different would the world be? While I dont like to deal in "IF's," if we judge people/organizations by their actions, Microsoft has always been a…

On the other hand OS X on the Mac is a relatively robust and usable platform and Windows on the PC still sucks for many users (I'm two days into a Windows rebuild at the moment).

It's swings and roundabouts. Gates and MS made good calls and they made bad calls, Jobs is the same.

For me I think Bill did OK, while I can imagine some using that sort of power in a more altruistic way, I can also see many doing far far worse things with it.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#216

Post by sutro »

rbanffy wrote: post #209
sutro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what's easy is to sit here from our current vantage point and call what he did easy. So what if he had an upper-middle-class family willing to put him through college. He walked away from that when he dropped out of Harvard and lit out for the middle of nowhere with no significant funds or support system to bootstrap a "software company" before such a thing even existed. He wasn't given his fortune, he built it h…

> And because he didn't always play nice with competitors you and the other holier-and-smarter-than-thou HN commenters want to call his incredible accomplishments "easy." Now that's a straw man. I never said it was easy to build Microsoft from its humble beginnings in Albuquerque into whatever it is now. I said it's easy to decide you'll try to start a company (Microsoft was his second attempt) when you know that you…

Saying it's easy to give when you have Gates' deep pockets negates the effort that it took to fill those pockets. Of all the crimes in the world to call Bill Gates a criminal is to have completely lost the plot. I don't particularly like Microsoft technology either, so I've spent my career (which has been far from boring) working on other technology stacks, and have always had plenty of opportunity to do so. Yet despite that choice, I acknowledge that I owe Gates a great debt for pioneering the business of software, a business which, divorced from hardware, didn't exist prior to 1975, and a business of which I, and I suspect you, have been a major beneficiary.

How does your track record measure up to Gates'? Which companies have you bootstrapped? Which charities have you founded? Or are you just a bitter salaryman complaining from the cheap seats on the sidelines?

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#217

Post by loewenskind »

mattmaroon wrote: post #95
edw519 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

Oh irony of ironies. You call someone a zealot and then go on to show how much vastly more of a zealot you are (but it's not clear to me that the OP even is a zealot).

If you're going to go preaching on the free market and such you should bloody well learn what it is. Go read a book on market theory (if Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Palin or any of those people are on the book, put it down and keep looking). I'm serious. This "passionate ignorance" movement is doing more damage to the US than anything else I can think of. Do you even know who Adam Smith is? He would have been very anti-Microsoft [1].

I apologize to everyone else on HN for this post, but this kind of ignorance needs a major slap down every time it's encountered so hopefully these people will either educate themselves or at least stfu and stop framing every debate around insanity and ignorance.

[1] http://www.pcdf.org/corprule/betrayal.htm

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#218

Post by loewenskind »

statictype wrote: post #195
code_duck wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to have turned out pretty well. She's famous for no other reason.

What good has she done for society? Isn't that the metric we're using here? Not whether she has done well for herself.

No one is calling her a hero.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#219

Post by mfukar »

rbanffy wrote: post #109
mattmaroon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft Look how loved the company is today. Was what he did really the best he could have done for Microsoft? Wouldn't a kinder, gentler Microsoft, one that helped a healthy market thrive, be better? Would the smaller slice of a larger pie be larger than Microsoft's current pie? > they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society I…

Really? What's the most popular OS, again?

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#220

Post by loewenskind »

2arrs2ells wrote: post #193
Bricejm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital gains/dividend tax breaks basically benefit the rich. Cap gains/dividend taxes should be on a marginal basis just like ordinary income.

The idea behind lower cap gains/dividend taxes is to incentivize investment (over consumption or savings). I'm no expert with the economics literature here, but I would worry about making changes that make it harder for businesses to access capital.

You don't have to throw the dice and hope, you can go look at most of the other 1st world countries that don't have this and how they're doing. Hint: just fine.
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