How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

http://www.alearningaday.com/2011/11/how-can-anyone-still-hate-bill-gates.html

by rrohan189 • 15 years ago

315 255 15 years ago

bediger• 15 years ago

Two famous saying come to mind:

"Trust, but verify."

and as Ben Franklin once said, "Keep your eyes on it, and feel for your hatchet." I'd add to keep the other hand on your wallet.

shriphani3• 15 years ago

Mr. Gates has become what Mr. Jobs wanted to become. After seeing Gates' UWash talk I am sure that the brand of philanthropy he is practicing is extremely mathematical, very involved and most certainly not the type that one eases into.

And what a resume Mr. Gates has - Personal Computing, conquering the enterprise and now polio + malaria. Man's in God Mode.

pinwale• 15 years ago

If you read Steve Jobs biography, you'd know that Steve Jobs never wanted to be like Bill Gates. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs even had a discussion about how it was funny how different their philosophies were but were still successful.

kwanbis• 15 years ago

Well, if Hitler was alive today, and he started doing charity, people would still hate him. Obviously BG is not Adolf, but is a on purpose exaggerated example. He did so much damage on the beginning.

artursapek2• 15 years ago

What net damage did you see him do?

sliverstorm7• 15 years ago

The difference is Hitler would have to start one hell of a charity to make up for the roughly 50 million soldiers who lost their lives in Europe during World War II, not to mention the 6 million Jewish executed.

suivix2• 15 years ago

But Bill Gates forces people to use IE6, which wastes a lot of time that equates to thousands of lives.

TomOfTTB• 15 years ago

Here's a reason: He poisoned the world.

When Microsoft had control of the world's technology they had a choice. They could backtrack and use their enormous money reserves and 90% or more profit margins to make their products stable and reliable or they could stay the course. They chose to stay the course.

As a result people were forced to use systems that really didn't work. Yes Windows 7 crashes less than Windows 3.11 but if Microsoft had adequately tested Windows 3.11 it wouldn't have crashed so much and Windows 7 wouldn't crash at all. Think about it. How much more stable would Windows be if Microsoft had made a still respectable 20% profit rather than 90%?

People cite Apple's hardware/software coupling as a reason for its stability but let me ask you this: How many malware/virus outbreaks were brought on by Hardware flaws in the PC?

Now you have 2 generations that have grown accustomed to crap. People who shrug off their DVR locking up or their phone crashing because they're used to it. Technology has come to mean unreliable. Much of Apple's popularity has been based around the idea that Apple products "Just Work". Because in our modern world working correctly has become a rarity.

And that's Microsoft's fault. They set the tone.

And how much has that tone cost us? How much good technology could be implemented if people trusted it more? How much further could we have gone if we could have focused more of humanity's intelligence on Curing Cancer and less on Curing the newest malware that exploits one of the endless bugs in Windows?

As far as his charitable contributions I'd point to the enormous amount of money spent fixing problems with Microsoft's crappy software and ask this: How much of that IT money would people have donated to charity if they hadn't lost it maintaining shoddy solutions? I don't know the answer but between viruses, malware, and Windows bugs you have 300 billion a year in the U.S. alone. It wouldn't take a large percentage of that to match the roughly $60 billion in Gates' personal fortune.

So don't tell me Gates is Superman because he's not.

va_coder• 15 years ago

At the risk of losing karma, I have to say you Apple fanboys are absolutely fascinating to me. I don't understand you at all.

craigmc• 15 years ago

I am a complete apple fanboy, but I still think Bill Gates is a legend. Microsoft made mistakes, but they made the PC the device that it is today, and they forced others to redefine themselves to compete, which raised the bar. However, Bill Gates will only be part remembered for Microsoft - what he has done in terms of his industrial-scale philanthropy is, frankly, incredible.

freemarketteddy• 15 years ago

Me too...I have even read his book....The idea that we have to choose one between them is a logical fallacy called False Dilemma!

nekojima2• 15 years ago

I don't understand Applefanboys at all either. Normally, even knowing a few, you expect them to be intelligent enough to see through the hype and marketing. But they still take the Apple cool-aid by IV and lineup hours before the shops open for a "new" product that's barely different from the recently purchased product they already have.

mindstab• 15 years ago

People often cite Apple's amazing stability as a reason for it being better than Windows but I don't see it. I've seen all kinds of insane MacOSX crashes just like Windows. My biggest problem is that once things go wrong, it is hardest to fix it in MacOSX, it is difficult but often doable in Windows, and easiest but by no means trivial in Linux.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

I think it's because most people who switched to a mac did it because they believed it would be more stable (largely thanks to clever marketing). Since they already expect the mac to be better than Windows, that's what they notice, even though it's just different.

Also, the sort of people who use macs now either don't use Windows at all or only use it at work which means they're either comparing mac os to an old version of Windows or to an annoyingly locked down work version.

shriphani3• 15 years ago

The alternatives aren't perfect.

Obviously some DVR manufacturer's incompetence is Bill Gates' fault. Someone here already made a Hitler comparison so this must be regarded as praise.

0. Now that the world is such a better place because the disruptive tech guys are using macs, how much of society's brain-power has gone into eradicating polio and malaria ? 0.

It is a very easy to trivialize the problem of wiping a disease off the face of the earth, attacking resource allocation in Africa and then taking aim at another disease.

My family couldn't afford a $1k+ mac in the 90s - that was an upper-middle class monthly income in India. Thank god for windows.

EDIT : formatting

cooldeal6• 15 years ago

>My family couldn't afford a $1k+ mac in the 90s - that was an upper-middle class monthly income in India. Thank god for windows.

If your family made the equivalent of Rs. 50,000 monthly in the 90s in India, they were definitely upper class, not upper middle class.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Do you seriously believe that the stability of Windows was such a direct and obvious decision? Do you seriously seriously believe that?

Sure Microsoft have done things that today look bad, but holy crap look at what we have today. Just look at it. Microsoft (alongside other companies) are part of what we have today, they pioneered a lot and changed the future. Discounting that all for some buggy software? jeez.

jakeonthemove2• 15 years ago

I respect Bill Gates a lot, he's a great businessman and he actually cares about the world - I'm honestly not sure if I would want to run a charity myself (I'd likely reinvest the money into new businesses).

On the topic of Windows: I've never had Windows crash since like 2004. ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 - all stable and reliable. I DID have a lot of third party apps that make the hodge podge soup on my hard drive crash, and that can't be avoided since not everyone works for Microsoft.

P.S. Windows 98 crashed sometimes, though and I needed to restore the registry once a year - don't know what that was about, but switching to ME got rid of the issues.

hdctambien• 15 years ago

Upvoting because this is the only nice thing I've ever heard anyone say about Windows ME.

Also, I haven't had windows crash on me since Vista.

jiggy20112• 15 years ago

"switching to ME got rid of the issues."

That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that.

recoiledsnake3• 15 years ago

http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/bill-gates-...

Quote:

Since leaving Microsoft, Gates and his wife Melinda have made their foundation into one of the world's premier charities. Since 1994, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation amassed an endowment of more than $31 billion in funds to fight the world's most difficult issues. But it hasn't merely accumulated funds, the foundation has already given away more than $25 billion, as Wessel notes in his HBR essay.

I don't know what Jobs did with his money. He may well have been a substantial donor to many a good cause. But at the end of his life, he was focused on business, while Gates is focused on broader and ultimately more significant concerns.

In a note to the members of the Harvard community, Gates wrote, "I hope you will reflect on what you've done with your talent and energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you work to address the world's deepest inequities, on how well you treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity."

raganwald5• 15 years ago

I don’t know what Jobs did with his money and I don’t care, it has zero to do with what Bill does with his money. I can decide whether to admire Bill on the basis of his actions rather than trying to compare him to others.

Am I to think more of him if he gave away more money than Steve Jobs? What a ridiculous notion. If you buy that argument, I ask you to think less of him because he spent fewer of the limited number of hours of his lifetime on philanthropy than some of the people who inherited a fortune and spend their lives on charitable causes. Or less of him because he didn’t minister to the sick and needy in Calcutta’s slums.

Each person can be judged on their own merits. I have nothing against admiring Mr. Gates, and I don’t think we need to drag Mr. Jobs or anybody else into the discussion.

varunsrin3• 15 years ago

Jobs is relevant to this discussion, because the article is based around the following quote:

"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology"

I've always considered charity to be a personal thing, and if Jobs didn't want to give it away, well that was his money, and his decision. However, attacking Gates for helping eradicate polio / malaria is simply unnecessary, and comes off as a childish retort.

recoiledsnake3• 15 years ago

Sure, but Jobs himself says this and invites comparisons in the very article that this HN post points to:

>“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology

That does seem like a cheap dig to me against someone that is doing very important work in the third world. I guess Bill Gates gets a bigger thrill saving a hundred thousand of the poorest 10% of the world from suffering with AIDS or dying from malaria or starvation rather than sell an extra ten million phones or tablets to the richest 10% of the world.

http://www.newser.com/story/130728/bill-gates-aids-program-s...

>Am I to think more of him if he gave away more money than Steve Jobs? What a ridiculous notion. If you buy that argument, I ask you to think less of him because he spent fewer of the limited number of hours of his lifetime on philanthropy than some of the people who inherited a fortune and spend their lives on charitable causes. Or less of him because he didn’t minister to the sick and needy in Calcutta’s slums.

I think that when it comes to a human quality like selflessness and empathy there's nothing wrong with thinking more of people like Mother Teresa, and next billionaires who contribute a lot of their money or time to charitable contributions. You don't need to think of less of anyone to respect good qualities in others.

Even Jobs took the help of philanthropic causes like the Hare Rama Hare Krishna temple's free meals to the poor.

From his Standford commencement address:

>It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. -- >Stanford Commencement Address, 12 Jun 2005

Anyway my personal theory is that Bill Gates had enough being on top of the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s that me moved on to bigger things, eradicating preventable diseases like malaria/AIDS and helping the poorest of the poor and felt it was a better use of his time and money for a higher ideal in life.

Jobs had to prove himself after coming back to Apple and Apple is just now taking off under his stewardship and he's still too involved in Apple's day to day operations. I definitely believe he would have had the time and inclination to do better for the third world in his later years after leading success to Apple if he had survived his totally unfortunate cancer that cut his life short. He simply didn't have enough time.

Lennie• 15 years ago

I don't know why people think the foundation is a good thing.

They deploy the same nasty tactics that the company does.

That is not a charity.

tobylane• 15 years ago

Bill Gates definitely agrees with Occupy Wall Street. He hates the 1% and helps the 99%. But he didn't get the full message, so he thinks its the top 1% in the world, which is roughly the group with good access to a good computer. So he gave a crappy OS to the top 1% in the world, and a lot of well needed help (medical/etc) to the 99%.

Just to point out, joking. Timeline doesn't work, and Windows isn't so bad.

rsanchez1• 15 years ago

Too bad the 99% will just see the billions and scream bloody murder.

cooldeal6• 15 years ago

The answer is easy. As someone who has most experience with such types of people said:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

mladenkovacevic• 15 years ago

I hope this has been posted at the top of HN before... if it hasn't it really should.

artursapek2• 15 years ago

The point on the humility is pretty spot-on. At a talk he gave at University of Washington recently he said that being a billionaire is overrated. He said comically that it's really not much different from merely being a millionaire, because "Dick's doesn't raise their prices." (Dick's is a famous Seattle burger chain) [1]

Doesn't shock me that he's donating his money by the billions.

[1] http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-gates-b...

powerfulninja• 15 years ago

Who hates Bill Gates? I can understand some people not approving of Microsoft in general (and for me specifically Internet Explorer) but Bill Gates as a person has done amazing things-- both for technology and humanity.

sliverstorm7• 15 years ago

When Microsoft was at its peak, I gather most everyone equated the business to the man, as if it was an extension of himself.

cooldeal6• 15 years ago

>Who hates Bill Gates?

Umm, just read some of the comments on this article? Or any Microsoft related posts on Slashdot?

stonemetal• 15 years ago

Why do people love Jobs? For better or worse he is\was the face of the company. Its actions reflect on him, especially since he was the man in charge of the company and set policy.

dubya• 15 years ago

I don't hate Bill Gates though I'm no fan of MS of the 1990s, and I thought that the PC industry was a lot more interesting before Windows took off. I am though really uncomfortable with the fact that his massive funds are totally warping the debate on education reform, not because there's any evidence that his ideas are worthwhile but because he's willing to pay to implement them. There's really not a lack of education research indicating what could be useful, but Gates and everyone else is fixated on his own little theories of what should work.

zdw2• 15 years ago

We've had this trope before - Andrew Carnegie, for example. Gates is just copying the idea...

Honestly, the company he built makes some good stuff, and also makes a lot of trouble for everyone else. The Embrace/Extend/Extinguish methodology which was created under Gates is something that anyone working in infrastructure is going to be fighting for the next 30 years, and it's holding innovation back. Does anyone out there love IE6, or Active Directory? Both are primary examples of this.

I don't hate Gates. I just think that he did a great job of making money at the expense of others, and in ways that still hurt the industry today.

Paying penance after the fact doesn't excuse the original actions.

3am2• 15 years ago

I didn't see it mentioned, but I give a ton of credit to Bill Gates for convincing Warren Buffett (who he plays bridge with) to give his money to charity in his lifetime.

AD isn't as bad as IE6, either. And I no longer blame MSFT for IE6 now... it's kept alive by bad, outdated corporate policies.

zdw2• 15 years ago

AD is much worse than IE6, but unless you're doing ops work that has to deal with it you probably wouldn't realize this.

MS broke or eliminated other authentication modes from Windows, so companies were forced to use AD (with the associated DNS and other infrastructure).

12 years after introduction, there are no stable/viable alternatives. Competition really was exterminated in this case.

rrohan1896• 15 years ago

agree. that's huge value!

And a whole bunch of other billionaires as well

phzbOx• 15 years ago

People bash over ie6 just because it was revolutionary at that time and some people are still using it. Yeah, it's a pain to deal with as it's a pain to deal with any old technologies. Try to support Netscape 2.0 for fun.

wanorris• 15 years ago

I don't know that I'd call IE6 "revolutionary", but it was indeed an excellent browser for its time. As terrible as its standards support was compared to later browsers, it was exemplary for its time.

But it's impossible to ignore the way Microsoft reacted to winning the browser wars by shuttering the IE team and leaving web standards effectively adrift until Firefox came along and starting taking market share. Whether you call it reprehensible or want to call it a "good business decision" that just happened to be bad for consumers and the web, that will always be the legacy people remember about IE6.

zerostar074• 15 years ago

I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosive mass adoption. Even with internet explorer, it introduced the internet to thousands of people. Computers (windows computers) have increased productivity dramatically since the 80s, so much that the cost of having to modify HTML for IE6 is relatively negligible.

mekoka• 15 years ago

It's not rational either to only necessarily netting his contribution in the positive.

Just ask yourself these two questions and you'll see what I mean.

Did Microsoft contribute in advancing certain areas of computing and speed up the adoption of Internet technologies?

Did Microsoft contribute in impeding certain areas of computing and slow down the adoption of Internet technologies?

vidarh7• 15 years ago

Did he help make computers affordable internationally?

I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism.

EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.

hype72• 15 years ago

Are you kidding me?

He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable?

He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.

pg• 15 years ago

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

kabdib2• 15 years ago

The Unix model of innovation didn't work. We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task. There are few companies left from this era; one exception of note is Oracle.

It seems that to survive in a "fair" proprietary ecosystem -- please recall that Unix /was/ proprietary in the 80s and 90s -- that you need to be rapacious. Microsoft used E/E/E, predatory dealing with manufacturers and gave out candy to developers, while Oracle followed IBM's old pattern of FUD backed by armies of consultants.

Apple barely made it; they were circling the drain when The Chief Jerk returned and started kicking the antheap and killing his predecessors projects. It was a near thing.

[Jack Tramiel failed in his attempt to bring Atari back to life in the mid 80s because he mistook 'being aggressively cheap' with being ruthless.]

I like the Chief Jerk theory. I've seen a lot of orgs get complacent and consensus-driven and /go under/ because they lose their edge. You need to stay hungry and driven, and one way to get this is to have someone who is not very likeable -- but that you still respect -- at the helm.

quanticle• 15 years ago

I disagree that Gates made computers affordable. Computers were made affordable by Moore's Law. The increasing density of transistors in an integrated circuit made it feasible to simplify circuit boards without sacrificing performance.

Indeed, I can argue that Bill Gates made computing significantly less affordable to the international world. Today, the cost of a Windows license can be as much as the cost of the hardware. How many people are being shut out of computing because of the forced subsidies OEMs have to give Windows?

angelbob4• 15 years ago

Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.

This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.

I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.

You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.

EdiX2• 15 years ago

> Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.

IE6 is still standard because of customer lock-in, it was so littered with quirks and outright bad ideas that it still is very hard to replace and no-one, not even microsoft, is willing to replicate its behaviours.

A prime example of why one should still hate Bill Gates.

darrenkopp• 15 years ago

i loved ie6 back in the day, it's just lasted too long. Does anyone like AJAX?

And active directory is actually quite good.

6ren2• 15 years ago

I think both Gates and Carnegie should by evaluated by how they made their fortune, not how they spent it.

They were both ruthlessly aggressive, yet also made their product affordable to more people. By the very act of creating a monopoly, Gates created a huge marketplace for applications that attracted investment - better in that sense that a fragmented market place. He didn't abuse it by charging monopoly rates (quite the opposite).

Is a beneficial end through nasty means a net positive? Probably... overall..., but I hesitate - and the fact that both felt compelled to give the money away suggests that they weren't entirely comfortable with how they made it. And it seems most people weren't either.

BTW: video of Gate's response http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYQxLhlUtr0&t=6m50s (6:50)

dereg• 15 years ago

Lets take your evaluation one step further. If you evaluate evaluate Gates and Carnegie through that lens, then governments are invariably more nasty than the sum of the world's past "monopolies". Do you agree with this?

On another note, Gates' effect on the tech industry is merely your opinion; the effect of his philanthropic efforts is fact.

ramblerman• 15 years ago

The conclusion that them "giving their money away, at the end of their life" is correlated to them "not being comfortable with how they made it" is idiotic.

Gates still leaves his family more than enough to live a comfortable happy life. Whatever his motivation, is purely speculative.

andymoe• 15 years ago

I'll give you the jab at IE6 but I take strong exception to your Active Directory comment. It is one of the cooler pieces of tech out of redmond and far and away better than the vanilla LDAP servers from Novel or just about anything else in the open source world. And don't get me started on OD in Apple Server... The multi-master replication features, plus distributed file system stuff, plus profiles, plus multisite policy deployments and on and on all made possible becuase of the core AD system. So sure, bag on IE6 but know there are people out there that can do amazing things with Microsoft software and AD is at the core of much of that.

ww520• 15 years ago

Active Directory is actually very good. Make admins life much easier in managing IT infrastructure.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

"Paying penance after the fact doesn't excuse the original actions."

Wouldn't paying penance involve actually doing good in the world? So far as I can tell he's basically an overgrown man-child whose using his billions to basically enslave low-income minorities via school 'reforms'.

Plus he's made a lot of investments into technologies to help third world countries, which have mostly been a bust.

VMG3• 15 years ago

Even if the malaria vaccine is the only thing that pans out, it would have been worth it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/10/18/glaxosm...

blntechie3• 15 years ago

It's hypothetical to say Gates held back innovation. Period. There is no way to arrive on what the world would be now if for e.g Bill didn't create Microsoft. I respect Jobs but admire Gates. The fact is, he contributed in making PCs affordable. Yes, the world could have had better technologies if not for Microsoft but you don't know that would have happened. It's always easy to imagine better things but reality is way different.

Edit: And I'm surprised by the amount of hate against Bill Gates in HN. We all need to think a minute on what each one of us personally did to make the world better and then opine on Bill Gates. It's easy to hold grudge and hate someone for some hypothetical reasons.

rrohan1896• 15 years ago

agree

fauldsh• 15 years ago

I have no issue with people hating Gates, but I hate how people mindlessly hate Gates whilst worshipping Jobs. I think there's in an argument that Apple holding back manufacturers through no-competes has a larger negative effect than anything Microsoft did, albeit in different markets.

levesque• 15 years ago

On the love of Jobs vs hate of Gates (or Microsoft), I am currently reading Steve Jobs biography, and I found a passage that highlights Apple as hypocrites quite more efficiently than anything I might say :

" The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with pride. As he once said, “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” "

wtallis2• 15 years ago

It sounds like you've never payed much attention to the antitrust actions against Microsoft.

Of course it's impossible to say what the world would be like if there had been no Microsoft. It's impossible to make any long-term projections, whether or not they're for an alternate reality. But that doesn't matter, because it works the other way: You can't say that the good done by Microsoft was worth it in the long run, because you don't know what long-term successes they prevented.

All we really have to go on are the short-term what-ifs, such as the dozens of times that Microsoft illegally screwed over their competitors and restricted consumer choice. Those aren't hypothetical events, but they did result in at least short-term harm.

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

> he contributed in making PCs affordable

Microsoft did nothing like that. Quite the contrary - and since the start of the PC market, by forcing PC makers to license MS-DOS for every unit shipped (not every unit shipped with MS-DOS), they effectively prevented the introduction of a competing operating system. While making prices one OEM license higher.

Had IBM never allowed MS-DOS to exist (by signing an exclusive deal), PC clones would probably not exist and, if they did, they would run CP/M 86. 32-bit computers would have arrived sooner, as would 64-bit and RISC. Intel would be happy making non-x86 processors (I can't imagine they really like making their current monstrosities). The personal computer landscape would be much more diverse hardware-wise, (think Amiga, Archimedes, Transputers) but, probably, due to pressures from software market, there would be a cross-platform software standard, most probably around POSIX.

Microsoft would be making compilers. I wouldn't be a better world from all aspects because Microsoft wouldn't be making the Natural keyboard.

edit: other things would be different - the Free Software movement would have a lot less momentum, as there would be no enemy (Microsoft's monopoly) to fight. MSX (once popular outside the US) would have never existed (manufacturers would never gang up to build a standard that would have them competing in price alone in order to enrich a single software company in return)

niels_olson• 15 years ago

s/if for e.g Bill/if, e.g., Bill/

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g.

marcamillion• 15 years ago

You know...this is something quite often misunderstood...as much as I hate IE6....believe me, I do....as a direct result of IE being included in the operating system, many more people got exposed to the notion of a browser.

The fact is, there is no telling what 'true' Internet adoption would be today if it weren't for Bill Gates including IE in Windows. I am not saying that it wouldn't be the same, but you can't jump to the conclusion that it would be.

We all use and love the internet because mainstream has adopted it. Bill Gates is a fundamental reason that the mainstream has adopted it.

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

> Gates is just copying the idea...

That's Bill's tragedy. To be remembered as the guy who never had a really original idea...

(burn, karma, burn)

zerostar074• 15 years ago

There's no point in making comparisons like these. On the other hand it's interesting to compare some of the IT-made billionaires to the traditional billionaires. Bill Gates was not born into money* but ended up drowning in them. He probably sees both the diminishing marginal utility of exorbitant wealth and the tendency of profits to accumulate exponentially. As a nerd, he's probably unable to give into a lavish lifestyle anyway, so he does the best thing of giving back. He can hope to be remembered in history for that, because, after all, how many rich people made history just for being rich?

[*] he wasn't poor, probably more than middle class; in any case, there's no doubt he's self-made

shareme• 15 years ago

ahem, Bill Gates parents probably did not pay for Harvard with fake money

sliverstorm7• 15 years ago

I'm not certain of this, but I don't think Harvard has always cost an arm, a leg, and twelve kidneys.

perokreco• 15 years ago

Ivy league schools are effectively free for people who are not rich through financial aid. Not sure that was true in 60s/70s.

Anechoic• 15 years ago

>there's no doubt he's self-made

Sure, but a large part of the reason he was "self-made" was his mother's relationship to an IBM executive. I'm not so sure Bill Gates becomes the world's richest man if his mother was a teacher and his father was a plumber.

Zarathust• 15 years ago

At the time of Windows 98/ME, I really hated Bill Gates. We had no viable alternative for an OS and the current state of things wasn't likely to change for a long time. Now over a decade later, Windows is much better, up to a point that I no longer feel ashamed to use it.

kamechan2• 15 years ago

windows NT? or linux if one was willing to struggle with the hardware a bit. i actually had a dual boot windows NT/slack machine at the time, which i'd named "bgates".

napierzaza• 15 years ago

Jobs is right. Gates gave up and lost interest. He lifted his head up and realized he needn't work ever again and didn't get any satisfaction from working. So why not give away the money you made since you couldn't possibly give enough away in your lifetime. Gates couldn't even make a dent in his lifestyle at the rate he's going.

As for Steve Jobs. He kept his head down and kept working. And when you talk about CEOs you're talking about 24 hours a day working. No time to start funds and foundations.

But where did Job's money go? He apparently lived very simply. Is his family just really filthy rich? It seems odd. Maybe it was a strange thing where he ignored that he had money and didn't want to think about? Maybe he was stockpiling it because he was poor or sick.

Just a bunch of speculation.

varunsrin3• 15 years ago

Gates didn't lift his head up and decide to give to charity. Read some of his earlier interviews from the 90's - when asked what he would do with his wealth, he often stated that he would spend his 50's & 60's giving a large portion of it away. I was skeptical when I heard this back then - but the man has more than stayed true to his word.

rayhano• 15 years ago

Here here

keeptrying• 15 years ago

I dont hate Gates. I hate windows because its so annoying.

jfb• 15 years ago

Hating Bill Gates was never a particularly intelligent stance. He was a great businessman and technician, pushing a really lousy technology. That doesn't say anything about his value as a person, and his subsequent work (while I differ to some degree with the means) has been of tremendous worth to the world.

That his company produced a whole raft of wretched technologies is germane, but hardly dispositive.

vidarh7• 15 years ago

I never could care less that his company produced wretched technologies. I cared about how he was responsible for a company that used reprehensible business methods to dramatically damage the competition - some of them in ways that have been found blatantly illegal. It had direct negative effects on a lot of us in reducing our choice.

He might be a nice guy on a personal level, and he is redeeming himself in many ways now in general, but there was a time when it was certainly justified to, if not hating him, then at least detesting what he stood for as a business person.

That said, overall my image of him today is vastly more positive than it was, and as much as his net impact on my life still has been negative, his net impact on the world has almost certainly been strongly positive - after all, the number of deaths he's prevented through is charitable work most certainly matters more than having deprived privileged people like me a few technology choices.

vph• 15 years ago

Despite the hatred for Windows and other Microsoft products, I don't think it is that bad. There has been no OS that has been able to accomplish what Windows has accomplished. OS aside, the Office Suite is a pretty good product. Windows and Office have been very successful not just because Gates is a good businessman.

joezydeco• 15 years ago

One question has still bugged me since the passing of Steve Jobs:

"What if Apple had decided not to port iTunes to Windows back in 2003?"

Let's pretend that the iPod stayed Firewire 400 - Macintosh users only. Would we have seen the explosion in iPod sales later in the decade? Would there have been enough money and courage to press ahead with the development of the iPhone?

bgarbiak2• 15 years ago

Without iTunes for Windows Zune would succeed.

nerfhammer• 15 years ago

Without iTunes for Windows would Zune even exist?

Carlfish• 15 years ago

To paraphrase the argument: "If you steal more money than you can possibly spend, giving the rest away makes everything OK."

jarofgreen• 15 years ago

+1. I don't particularly care enough to get into a fight about Bill Gates' personal reputation (I'll happily accept he has done many good things alongside the bad), but the original Forbes article is offensive bullshit. So being a nasty capitalist convicted multiple times of abusing monopolies is OK if you throw a trinket to charity? This argument isn't just about his reputation, its about more than that - it's about what type of capitalism we do have and what type we should have.

Jach• 15 years ago

I can't say I hate him, but I don't think the past decade of his various efforts has "redeemed him", as it were. I don't think he's "unredeemable", and he certainly deserves a lot of positive credit for a lot of things.

To me it seems like many people laud his charity efforts, but for them it's frequently an unexamined praise because "charity" is an effective applause light. It's hard to imagine that much cash attached to a charity not doing something good. (For some older criticisms, see http://blog.givewell.org/category/gates-foundation/ There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati... )

Anyway, it's worth remembering why people didn't like him in the first place. Most of those reasons have to do with long-term effects of our world, not petty things like he ate toe fungus or yelled at someone. It's not like Bill Gates stole some candy which is easy to redeem for, it's like he (excuse the very loose analogy) killed people, which is much harder to make up for and has longer (in that case, permanent for the dead person) consequences. I think Erik Naggum captured part of the problem of Gates as opposed to Microsoft pretty well in one of his rants: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum....

"the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses and homes everywhere, so now everybody is _afraid_ of losing some battle which isn't happening, instead of getting about their own lives. like, if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of the IDE, you'll be left behind. aaaugh!"

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

I wonder what Larry Ellison will end up doing.

heyrhett• 15 years ago

This email Bill sent out, pleading for anyone at Microsoft to care about usability, made me like him a little better: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...

protomyth• 15 years ago

I never hated Bill Gates since I never met the man and he never did horrific things. I am still mad after all this time that some of the money I spent buying a machine to run OPENSTEP was paid to Microsoft. I despise them for that and they should of had to pay all of it back in the settlement.

mixmastamyk5• 15 years ago

Bullshit. Computing advanced despite Gates, not because of him. I was there thru the nineties and win9x was a heaping pile of shit. Os/2 and BeOs were both five times better. Nt finally matured (now retarding) but the whole industry was set back at least ten years. Fuck you Bill; yeah i'm glad to hear you're giving to charity, thanks.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

This is a "head in the cloud" analysis that ignores practicality.

Let's look at your specific examples. BeOS was a beautiful and elegant OS, but from what I've heard it was a nightmare to develop for. Even today there are holdouts who continue to run FreeBSD and even AmigaOS and OS/2 but that doesn't seem to be the case with BeOS. Somehow, despite its excellence along one particular axis it missed out on enough other necessities to stunt its popularity. I don't think you can rest that failure entirely on MS's shoulders.

As far as Win 9x vs. OS/2 and NT, that's another case where things are not so simple. Windows 95 was a grand compromise. It was a bit of the next generation OS core along the lines of NT with a few carefully crafted modifications designed to provide a better balance of the characteristics and features that were the most important for the average user.

When you run a 16-bit application in NT or OS/2 you have a 2 to 4mb overhead per application due to the VM. This is all fine and dandy if you have enough ram, but back in 1995 4mb of ram was a several hundred dollar investment. In 1995 the next consumer version of Windows was faced with that crisis. How do you bring up the level of the OS to a modern foundation (from DOS/Win 3.x) in a world where the vast majority of users are still running quite a lot of 16-bit applications without forcing a crazily impractical and expensive minimum system requirement in terms of RAM on customers? The answer that Windows 95 came up with was a combination of a shared VM for all 16-bit apps along with some serious assembly level manual performance optimization to a lot of components. This allowed the Windows 95 minimum system requirements to be a mere 4mb total, which was well within what a lot of consumers had on their existing systems.

The result was one of the most successful software products of all time. It's easy to look back on Windows 95 and see its flaws but in its time it was a very solid offering at a consumer level.

bgarbiak2• 15 years ago

Completely agree. People hate Gates and Microsoft for some really silly reasons. Windows 95? It was a brave and revolutionary OS. Would world switch to Linux, Mac or BeOS if there was no Win95? No way it would, it would wait for Windows 4. Internet Explorer 6? Great, great browser by the time it was released. Really, whoever calls that 'crap, uninnovative software' wasn't there in 2001. Office? By far the best office software suite out there. Windows XP? People use it to this day and are so happy about it they don't want to change if for newer and better systems.

Of course there were things that MS did wrong (especially on the business side of things) but the whole hatred thing is, in my opinion, more like a kind of pop-culture than something based on facts. Just look at Xbox360 - it only took to not advertise it as a Microsoft creation and kids who ridicule Windows on a day-to-day basis are now "Halo fanboys".

As for the Jobs quotes - if these were taken as some kind of a gospel or a road sign we all should hate Android by now. Actually, it amazes me that Jobs is so glorified here, while Gates always gets the flack - after all the word "hacker" suits the latter a lot more.

mixmastamyk5• 15 years ago

I worked in IT during the 90's and Win9x crashed several times a day from drivers, lack of resources, and "rundll not responding...". Maybe you've forgotten, but I haven't. I had to diagnose hundreds of machines with those symptoms, ...it was shit. It's true 95 installed on 4MB ram, but it was slower than molasses, constantly swapping.

The fact that no other OS was perfect is irrelevant. They never had a chance, no matter if the were good or great, from lowly DOS clones all the way up to modern OSs because MS didn't allow it via a bag of dirty tricks.

prof_hobart• 15 years ago

OS/2 was originally developed by a combination of MS and IBM. It was a much better/more stable OS (I developed on it for a couple of years in the early 90s and used to pity those people in our team left on DOS or the toy Windows OS), but it had one major flaw - it was targetted only at IBM hardware, at least in the first few years. With most of the world heading towards cheap clones, that pretty much killed it as a real commercial option.

flomo• 15 years ago

OS/2 was still a severely compromised design. It was 'better' but it still crashed a lot and would have required a transition to a modern OS.

The IBM requirement was even more onerous because IBM had linked OS/2 with PS/2 Microchannel hardware. IBM had this locked up with patents and could have used it to to control the entire PC industry had it caught on. So everyone else in the 'open' PC world had an interest in seeing OS/2-PS/2 fail.

(IBM was the last major vendor to offer PC-based server hardware because they were trying to protect their midrange machines. I think if OS/2 had taken over, they would have prevented the entire x86 server market from getting off the ground until much later than it did.)

lispm• 15 years ago

Gates and his company were responsible for several releases of a very depressing operating system and a lot of shitty business software. I use Microsoft Word and it is amazingly bad. It is full of bugs, has a complex user interface but simple things don't work correctly and Microsoft hasn't been able to fix it for a decade. Currently I work for a company which uses Microsoft Sharepoint. It fulfills all expectations I have about Microsoft software and their services. Still, Microsoft does deliver from time to times some good stuff, but their core software (the operating systems and their software for business) is a huge ripoff.

vacri• 15 years ago

A good thing that there are so many quality alternatives for Microsoft's shitty business software!