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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 no

by edw519 16y ago

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 was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us. And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts? He fucked anyone who got in his way, always to the benefit of Microsoft, and usually to the detriment of the industry. When others wrote better code, he called his lawyers. When other developers wanted to collaborate, he stole their intellectual property. When customers or vendors balked, he crushed them. And when the citizens saw how unfair it all was and took action, he called his lobbyists. So now maybe he wants to be like Andrew Carnegie in his next act, conveniently forgetting all the lives destroyed in the hope of "giving it all back". If so, good. I really try to keep upbeat and optimistic in my posts here at hn, but I also understand how much we have forgotten, and sometimes I just can't resist. Every time I read about Bill Gates worship, I can vomit. Sometimes I really wonder how much better things would be for all of us hackers is he had just gone to law school and left our industry to develop as it could have. </rant> Oooh, that feels better. Now back to work.

ariels 16y ago
The same thing can be said of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and most of the tech titans. Sounds like you just have something against powerful people.
- zzzmarcus 16y ago
  Bill Gates did bad things. Jobs, Ellison, most tech titans do/did bad things. edw519 does not like Bill Gates worship. Therefore, edw519 has something against powerful people.
- naner 16y ago
  There's nothing wrong with criticizing how powerful people choose to wield and maintain their power. You are right that many of the same things can be said about Jobs and Ellison. I don't think anyone here would argue that they are saints.
reader5000 16y ago
Many fledgling industries have "evil titans". Look at oil, trains, telephone, social media. I'm not intimately acquainted enough with the actual events that earn Gates/Microsoft's popular ire, but if they hadn't earned the evil titan role somebody else would have. The work Gates is doing now I think makes up for any rough play he may have engaged in in the past.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- avar 16y ago
  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.
  - reader5000 16y ago
    Maybe you know something I don't but reading over wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft 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 skeletons in their closets. Most industry leaders don't then commit 98% of their wealth to charity.
    - avar 16y ago
      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.
stackthat 16y ago
As you said Bill Gates coming from a rich background which makes it even more amazing that how much he spends on charity (as a person who has never been poor)
kmfrk 16y ago
As I understand, he also met Warren Buffet at a young age through his parents and formed a relationship with him. (I think he was a friend of his parents and met Bill at a party.) Not the worst person to have in your rolodex.
melvinram 16y ago
Yes, he had a few things going for him but to trivalize what he/Microsoft accomplished over the years with "no smarter and worked no harder" is quiet ludicrous as mega successes usually have an unusually perfect set of circumstances that allow the successes to happen, whether you're talking about Ted Turner, Oracle or Google. The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has. -- Written on a MacBook Pro
lionhearted 16y ago
> 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 the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I think his point is that Gates was given some very generous gifts and, with them, "he fucked anyone who got in his way", "usually to the detriment of the industry".
  - mattmaroon 16y ago
    Another way to look at it is that Gates used his very generous gifts to give 100s of thousands of people jobs, make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people, then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history. Meanwhile the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs, who has broken plenty of laws himself (backdating is fraud), done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them (and only didn't do the rest because he didn't have the necessary market share) and by all accounts hoards his money along with black mock turtlenecks. It's rather hypocritical to type about how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro. You see what you want to see I suppose.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > give 100s of thousands of people jobs Would have jobs with or without Gates > make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W). > then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history. > the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs False dichotomy alert! Not the case here. Jobs is flawed too. > done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them Until now Apple is not guilty of monopoly abuse. Nothing even close to what Comes vs. Microsoft shows. > how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro I use a Dell running Linux. At home I use an Acer. Running Linux too.
jakarta 16y ago
"And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts?" He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away. It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that. That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.
- Gibbon 16y ago
  Most of the wealthy I know are not against charity or giving away their wealth.. they are against an inefficient government deciding on how that should be accomplished.
  - muhfuhkuh 16y ago
    Show me a company that is willing to feed and take care of _every single_ poor, elderly, and infirm person without the need for tax-exempt status, without the need for spiritual conversion or religious dogma, and without the "overhead" of paying executives millions of dollars for "administrative" purposes, and I'll urge Congress to redirect ALL of my tax dollars toward that company. Oh, and btw, this company also has to defend our shores, find cures for disease (or at least fund them) and manage distribution to those affected, assess and remediate damage on massive scales when emergencies strike, set standards and regulations of measurement and safety so that industries can interoperate and first-responders can (for example) plug their water hoses into a hydrant and it actually fit, etc. It's not just a couple rich charitable dudes that can handle all that. Sorry if I don't worship them as much as anti-tax crusaders do.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    Surely you're not talking to the same wealthy that I've been. What do you think will be the repsonse to, say, a 50% tax rate on the wealthy that they are able to distribute as they see fit (with strict controls such that it doesn't end up back in their own hands, or their family's)? Yeah, good luck with that. I see the "but government is inefficient" argument a lot - it would have some merit, if there's even the slightest hint of evidence that the rich would pay the tax even if the government were the most well-greased machine in the world. As it is it sounds like a lame scapegoat for wanting to keep all of your wealth.
gaius 16y ago
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 the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman. Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?
- generalk 16y ago
  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.
  - gaius 16y ago
    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 because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor. In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...
mattmaroon 16y ago
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 destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself. It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates. I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.
- edw519 16y ago
  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 bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick. Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying. Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did. I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices. If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years. We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.
pchristensen 16y ago
"forgetting all the lives destroyed" Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty. Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?
- kenjackson 16y ago
  And we should be really clear. Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. There are scant few developers in the world who can really argue that Gates hurt them, much less destroyed their lives. And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market. In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > 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 purchase.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      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 of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.
garrettgillas 16y ago
Is it better to be a bully in business and do great things with the wealth or to be graceful in business and squander a fortune? I really don't know but my initial reaction says the former.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  False dichotomy alert! You can be a graceful businessman and still make a profit, further a healthy market and win on it through a superior product instead of doing so through shady backroom deals that border the criminal.
  - garrettgillas 16y ago
    I wasn't implying there there exists a dichotomy and that all businesses are one or the other. You did that on your own. I'm just saying that no business is perfect and having to choose between the two...
  - mfukar 16y ago
    An example would be most helpful (to me, at least).
ch0wn 16y ago
I'm feeling better now too, knowing I'm not alone. This worshipping makes me crazy.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Agreed. Most robber barons of their time seem to follow this same pattern - scorched earth rise to power, then spend their waning years in philanthropy. And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then: http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
m0th87 16y ago
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.
theprodigy 16y ago
larry ellison is a true silicon valley hero and success story.
- theprodigy 16y ago
  damn i didn't know people hated larry ellison so much. He did have a rough upbringing and didn't have the advatages Bill Gates had and founded one of the most successful technology companies in the world. How can anyone deny that he is a Silicon Valley hero and success story. He is going to save Sun.
sutro 16y ago
I can't believe this is getting upvotes. Destroyed lives? Please. Get some perspective. And check your history. The guy bootstrapped Microsoft using nothing but sweat equity -- no investment, no inheritance -- working for years in very meager circumstances in New Mexico before getting some traction and moving to Washington. In short he lived the dream that many of us aspire to, and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. The article was spot-on. It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real heroes: the people who work, create and strive to win in the market by creating superior solutions for the problems people have, not by striking deals with OEMs that restrict what kind of product end-users will be able to buy. Also, don't forget that Gates didn't really risk everything (like so many entrepreneurs do). He had his family to back him up. I bet he would have a cozy job waiting for him if Microsoft failed.
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    I think we should do away with calling Gates's actions altruistic. What (significant) does he have to lose, or merely risk, by doing what he does? It's a good thing, but I don't think it's deserving of altruism. But being less than altruistic can still be very laudable.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      I am not against Gates giving nearly all of his money away to charity. I am only against considering this very atypical episode represents what Gates is.
Revisor 16y ago
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 was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us. With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter. No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck. He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it. But he made good use of it. Shame on you and all your upvoters.
qasar 16y ago
In the words of Linus Torvalds "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems." the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought. if you really hate microsoft, go build something better. the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.
srw 16y ago
I don't agree, even if we think Bill Gates is the evil, that doesn't mean that without him the industry would be what is it now. I think he contributed to move the industry, may be without the intent, but may be better than others. Obviously we would never know about the parallel realities.
billmcneale 16y ago
You probably meant Steve Jobs for this diatribe.

by edw519 16y ago

ariels 16y ago

The same thing can be said of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and most of the tech titans. Sounds like you just have something against powerful people.

zzzmarcus 16y ago
Bill Gates did bad things. Jobs, Ellison, most tech titans do/did bad things. edw519 does not like Bill Gates worship. Therefore, edw519 has something against powerful people.
naner 16y ago
There's nothing wrong with criticizing how powerful people choose to wield and maintain their power. You are right that many of the same things can be said about Jobs and Ellison. I don't think anyone here would argue that they are saints.

reader5000 16y ago

Many fledgling industries have "evil titans". Look at oil, trains, telephone, social media. I'm not intimately acquainted enough with the actual events that earn Gates/Microsoft's popular ire, but if they hadn't earned the evil titan role somebody else would have. The work Gates is doing now I think makes up for any rough play he may have engaged in in the past.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
avar 16y ago
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.
- reader5000 16y ago
  Maybe you know something I don't but reading over wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft 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 skeletons in their closets. Most industry leaders don't then commit 98% of their wealth to charity.
  - avar 16y ago
    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.

stackthat 16y ago

As you said Bill Gates coming from a rich background which makes it even more amazing that how much he spends on charity (as a person who has never been poor)

kmfrk 16y ago

As I understand, he also met Warren Buffet at a young age through his parents and formed a relationship with him. (I think he was a friend of his parents and met Bill at a party.) Not the worst person to have in your rolodex.

melvinram 16y ago

Yes, he had a few things going for him but to trivalize what he/Microsoft accomplished over the years with "no smarter and worked no harder" is quiet ludicrous as mega successes usually have an unusually perfect set of circumstances that allow the successes to happen, whether you're talking about Ted Turner, Oracle or Google. The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has. -- Written on a MacBook Pro

lionhearted 16y ago

> 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 the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.

rbanffy 16y ago
I think his point is that Gates was given some very generous gifts and, with them, "he fucked anyone who got in his way", "usually to the detriment of the industry".
- mattmaroon 16y ago
  Another way to look at it is that Gates used his very generous gifts to give 100s of thousands of people jobs, make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people, then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history. Meanwhile the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs, who has broken plenty of laws himself (backdating is fraud), done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them (and only didn't do the rest because he didn't have the necessary market share) and by all accounts hoards his money along with black mock turtlenecks. It's rather hypocritical to type about how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro. You see what you want to see I suppose.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > give 100s of thousands of people jobs Would have jobs with or without Gates > make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W). > then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history. > the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs False dichotomy alert! Not the case here. Jobs is flawed too. > done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them Until now Apple is not guilty of monopoly abuse. Nothing even close to what Comes vs. Microsoft shows. > how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro I use a Dell running Linux. At home I use an Acer. Running Linux too.

jakarta 16y ago

"And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts?" He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away. It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that. That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.

Gibbon 16y ago
Most of the wealthy I know are not against charity or giving away their wealth.. they are against an inefficient government deciding on how that should be accomplished.
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago
  Show me a company that is willing to feed and take care of _every single_ poor, elderly, and infirm person without the need for tax-exempt status, without the need for spiritual conversion or religious dogma, and without the "overhead" of paying executives millions of dollars for "administrative" purposes, and I'll urge Congress to redirect ALL of my tax dollars toward that company. Oh, and btw, this company also has to defend our shores, find cures for disease (or at least fund them) and manage distribution to those affected, assess and remediate damage on massive scales when emergencies strike, set standards and regulations of measurement and safety so that industries can interoperate and first-responders can (for example) plug their water hoses into a hydrant and it actually fit, etc. It's not just a couple rich charitable dudes that can handle all that. Sorry if I don't worship them as much as anti-tax crusaders do.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Surely you're not talking to the same wealthy that I've been. What do you think will be the repsonse to, say, a 50% tax rate on the wealthy that they are able to distribute as they see fit (with strict controls such that it doesn't end up back in their own hands, or their family's)? Yeah, good luck with that. I see the "but government is inefficient" argument a lot - it would have some merit, if there's even the slightest hint of evidence that the rich would pay the tax even if the government were the most well-greased machine in the world. As it is it sounds like a lame scapegoat for wanting to keep all of your wealth.

gaius 16y ago

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 the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.

rbanffy 16y ago
> Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman. Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?
generalk 16y ago
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.
- gaius 16y ago
  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 because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor. In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...

mattmaroon 16y ago

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 destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself. It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates. I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.

edw519 16y ago
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 bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick. Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying. Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did. I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices. If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years. We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.

pchristensen 16y ago

"forgetting all the lives destroyed" Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty. Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?

kenjackson 16y ago
And we should be really clear. Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. There are scant few developers in the world who can really argue that Gates hurt them, much less destroyed their lives. And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market. In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > 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 purchase.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    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 of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.

garrettgillas 16y ago

Is it better to be a bully in business and do great things with the wealth or to be graceful in business and squander a fortune? I really don't know but my initial reaction says the former.

rbanffy 16y ago
False dichotomy alert! You can be a graceful businessman and still make a profit, further a healthy market and win on it through a superior product instead of doing so through shady backroom deals that border the criminal.
- garrettgillas 16y ago
  I wasn't implying there there exists a dichotomy and that all businesses are one or the other. You did that on your own. I'm just saying that no business is perfect and having to choose between the two...
- mfukar 16y ago
  An example would be most helpful (to me, at least).

ch0wn 16y ago

I'm feeling better now too, knowing I'm not alone. This worshipping makes me crazy.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

Agreed. Most robber barons of their time seem to follow this same pattern - scorched earth rise to power, then spend their waning years in philanthropy. And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then: http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

m0th87 16y ago

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.

theprodigy 16y ago

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

theprodigy 16y ago
damn i didn't know people hated larry ellison so much. He did have a rough upbringing and didn't have the advatages Bill Gates had and founded one of the most successful technology companies in the world. How can anyone deny that he is a Silicon Valley hero and success story. He is going to save Sun.

sutro 16y ago

I can't believe this is getting upvotes. Destroyed lives? Please. Get some perspective. And check your history. The guy bootstrapped Microsoft using nothing but sweat equity -- no investment, no inheritance -- working for years in very meager circumstances in New Mexico before getting some traction and moving to Washington. In short he lived the dream that many of us aspire to, and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. The article was spot-on. It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.

rbanffy 16y ago
> and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real heroes: the people who work, create and strive to win in the market by creating superior solutions for the problems people have, not by striking deals with OEMs that restrict what kind of product end-users will be able to buy. Also, don't forget that Gates didn't really risk everything (like so many entrepreneurs do). He had his family to back him up. I bet he would have a cozy job waiting for him if Microsoft failed.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  I think we should do away with calling Gates's actions altruistic. What (significant) does he have to lose, or merely risk, by doing what he does? It's a good thing, but I don't think it's deserving of altruism. But being less than altruistic can still be very laudable.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    I am not against Gates giving nearly all of his money away to charity. I am only against considering this very atypical episode represents what Gates is.

Revisor 16y ago

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 was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us. With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter. No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck. He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it. But he made good use of it. Shame on you and all your upvoters.

qasar 16y ago

In the words of Linus Torvalds "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems." the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought. if you really hate microsoft, go build something better. the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.

srw 16y ago

I don't agree, even if we think Bill Gates is the evil, that doesn't mean that without him the industry would be what is it now. I think he contributed to move the industry, may be without the intent, but may be better than others. Obviously we would never know about the parallel realities.

billmcneale 16y ago

You probably meant Steve Jobs for this diatribe.