14 ms·

How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

315 points by rrohan189 15y ago

bediger 15y 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.
shriphani 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.
- artursapek 15y ago
  What net damage did you see him do?
- sliverstorm 15y 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.
  - suivix 15y ago
    But Bill Gates forces people to use IE6, which wastes a lot of time that equates to thousands of lives.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      You're really going to try to compare a little time wasted with IE6 to a brutal death on a freezing battlefield thousands of miles from home? Really?
      - suivix 15y ago
        I was being sarcastic.
TomOfTTB 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Related article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/bill-gates-not-steve-jobs-the-real-hero-177864 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."
- raganwald 15y 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.
  - varunsrin 15y 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.
tobylane 15y 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 15y ago
  Too bad the 99% will just see the billions and scream bloody murder.
cooldeal 15y 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_a_Disease http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mladenkovacevic 15y ago
  I hope this has been posted at the top of HN before... if it hasn't it really should.
artursapek 15y 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-being-a-billionaire-is-overrated/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-gates-b...
powerfulninja 15y 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.
- sliverstorm 15y 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.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  >Who hates Bill Gates? Umm, just read some of the comments on this article? Or any Microsoft related posts on Slashdot?
- stonemetal 15y 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 15y 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.
zdw 15y 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.
- 3am 15y 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.
  - zdw 15y 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.
    - 3am 15y ago
      Sorry, I don't want to defend what they did with breaking compatibility with any product other than their own (IE, AD, Office, IIS killed Corel, Netscape... and so many other companies). I just don't see AD as a terrible standalone product. But you're right, I don't have a deep understanding of its shortcomings vs, say, OpenLDAP (though I'd love to learn something!).
    - walkon 15y ago
zerostar07 15y 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 15y ago
  ahem, Bill Gates parents probably did not pay for Harvard with fake money
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I'm not certain of this, but I don't think Harvard has always cost an arm, a leg, and twelve kidneys.
  - perokreco 15y 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 15y 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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
Zarathust 15y 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.
- kamechan 15y 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 15y 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.
- varunsrin 15y 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 15y ago
Here here
keeptrying 15y ago
I dont hate Gates. I hate windows because its so annoying.
jfb 15y 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.
- vidarh 15y 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 15y 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.
ypcxz 15y ago
how can anyone hate him? Are you F*cking kidding? that man DESTROYED the desktop experience and OS evolution progress by using ILLEGAL business tactics to create an OS monopoly. Tactics like threatening computer vendors to ditch Linux otherwise they won't get "discounts" for MS Windows and won't be able to compete. You can only guess to what other practices he'd resorted behind the scenes. than man tried to KILL alternatives including Linux (via proxy companies like SCO), in which he succeeded to certain extent - for example Linux still doesn't have open source graphics drivers of the same quality as Windows/OSX, which hinders its adoption on the desktop. Furthermore, Gates invested lots of money into a corn ethanol production, an industry known to raise food prices and put people in poverty and misery. Next, Gates works hard to reduce Earth's population by providing birth-control vaccines to 3rd world countries, and you can only guess how else. F U.
joezydeco 15y 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?
- bgarbiak 15y ago
  Without iTunes for Windows Zune would succeed.
  - nerfhammer 15y ago
    Without iTunes for Windows would Zune even exist?
Carlfish 15y ago
To paraphrase the argument: "If you steal more money than you can possibly spend, giving the rest away makes everything OK."
- jarofgreen 15y 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 15y 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/ http://blog.givewell.org/category/gates-foundation/ There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism 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.no.html 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 15y ago
I wonder what Larry Ellison will end up doing.
heyrhett 15y 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/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...
protomyth 15y 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.
mixmastamyk 15y 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.
- InclinedPlane 15y 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.
  - bgarbiak 15y ago
Causification 15y ago
Bill Gates? Bah, how can this be relevant when we've seen tribute pages from only two of the three children Steve Jobs bought lemonade from last summer?
lispm 15y 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 15y ago
  A good thing that there are so many quality alternatives for Microsoft's shitty business software!
uris 15y ago
Reads something fabricated by Newsmax.
chunkyslink 15y ago
>> How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates? For being a part of Internet Explorer. I just cant let it go!
meow 15y ago
Steal the money - doesn't it bother anyone that if we equate earning money in business (in what ever way) with stealing, we have to equate what most of the oil companies, most of the investment banks, most of the media companies, most of pharma companies do as nothing but stealing.. The only difference is that there is no apparent 'master mind' to attack. Is anyone naive enough to believe that if bill gates didn't end up crushing the competition as he did during Microsoft's rise, some one else would not have done so ? Sure, we may/may not have Microsoft as powerful, but there would have been some other draconian-soft to fill the void. And though we should probably not pull Jobs in to this, if we are to imagine Jobs at the head of Microsoft when it is in a position to crush competition, I can't imagine Jobs (and many other business leaders) deciding otherwise (going by the current set of apple law suits). It's just like the lord of the rings - doesn't matter who wears the ring. The heady power of the monopoly is just like the ring (the governmental laws for fair competition should be such a way that they never form). If monopolies do form, there is no point blaming individuals for that.
giardini 15y ago
Easy. One sees the destruction he left in his wake.
coup 15y ago
Well, whether the market competitors were innocent victims of Gates' savvy schemes or whether he was just better at executing the same tricks and basics in that business is up for debate. For me, he's just another, rather due to his economical than technical knowledge, financially successful person in our brutally unfair world. What he does with his money is comparatively pretty noble but on an absolute scale neither very effective nor intelligent.
omlette 15y ago
im skeptical that any amount of damage bill gates might have done to technology is outweighed by millions of vaccines and thousands of schools in developing countries.
neebz 15y ago
I am an okish software engineer from Pakistan who has been in touch with the tech industry for quite sometime. I have followed what Google has done all these years for the web. And what Apple has done in the mobile computing. It's all awesome. But when I look around as a human and see what Bill's foundation has done to simply eradicate malaria and polio from my nearby villages which were the hub of these diseases only a couple of years ago. It's amazing. It's far too easy (even as an engineer) to ignore his previous short-comings.
Limes102 15y ago
I love Mac OS, but I definitely do not hate Bill Gates. He made computers affordable and accessible, while making a lot of money. A lot of that money has gone to charities which is great.
singingfish 15y ago
Hmm, Gates' approach is responsible for some monumental inefficiency in the PC landscape. The fact that microsoft's technology is more or less irelevant to anybody who works outside of the internal corporate ecosystem these days is a nice, and fitting testament to Gates' failures. Kudos to him to leaving the industry to do something more useful with his cash at the right time. Jobs appaears to have died at a fitting time, considering he never had to re-position himself the way that gates' has had to. <disclaimer>I have relatives who benefit from the B&MG foundation</disclaimer>
dendory 15y ago
I heard a story the other day where a new computer magazine was starting up in Brazil in the late 1990s. Microsoft went to them and offered to take full page ads. But when the price came into question, Microsoft PR said they would not pay, and that the magazine should just run Microsoft ads for free, because "nobody trusts a computer magazine if Microsoft isn't advertising in it." This is classic Microsoft practice, and this is why so many people hate the company. I don't hate Bill, and I'm sure most people don't hate him personally either, but he was CEO of this company that has made many, many bad things happen.
- thomasz 15y ago
  The only reason you won't find this story on snopes is because it's too lame.
- Niten 15y ago
  This is such a silly complaint. If the story is true, then Microsoft is simply making an offer. Either it's worth enough to the magazine to place a Microsoft ad without being paid for it, and they accept the offer; or it isn't, and they reject it. It's not like Microsoft was trying to get them to drop competitors' ads or something. There's just no evil there. Maybe it would be nice of them pour cash they don't have to let go of into a startup magazine, but Microsoft isn't a charity. If their PR department can sell someone on the idea of running ads for them for free, that's not evil, it's just good salesmanship. I might as well complain that I'm not getting a check from Apple when I go places with my laptop and its glowing logo. Never mind that on the whole, buying this computer was a beneficial transaction for me – just look at all this free advertising I'm giving them!
  - dendory 15y ago
    I disagree, Microsoft would be a great advertiser to get, and the only reason they can get away with the practice is because they are a monopoly. Would be illegal in the US, but they do it to other countries.
- TheFuture 15y ago
  So MS is supposed to just give the magazine money? If MS really needs to advertise in that magazine, they'll pay to do it. It's a simple value equation. You do realize how MS being an advertiser (non paid) can immensely help that magazine get paid ads? Who is getting hurt here?
vegai 15y ago
He capitalized on the idea that the consumer is not allowed to choose the operating system of the computer they buy. That idea hasn't yet faded. That's why I hate Microsoft.
- nekojima 15y ago
  I like playing new & recently released computer games on my computer. Which is why I have never bought a Mac. Btw, what other operating systems are available on the Macbook? Other than now MS because people want to play new computer games on their Macbooks and they can't with Apple's OS.
  - vegai 15y ago
    Macs have the same problem. You can't get a mac without OS X.
MarkMc 15y ago
"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas." Am I the only one who read that and thought, 'Wow, Steve Jobs could be a bit of an asshole'...?
BuddhaSource 15y ago
Yes Apple has shipped some amazing products but they were limited with only few products. Now that does't mean somebody else has to compete in the same respect, Microsoft had different focus & vision. They wanted to go the IBM way, consumer & businesses. I feel they have done a good job. Beside they are not thief, its business. Apple products are far more expensive than Microsoft, the difference between 16GB & 32GB iPhones are not justified. People have a notion that Mac OS is far more refined than Windows. Well I feel they are wrong, windows 7 is far more customizable & stable on many devices etc than Mac OS. Apple is a good hardware company, they build brillant product that you can look & feel but they are not good at softwares. Mac OS is an extension of unix under a limited environment where as Ms Windows which was build in house can virtually run on any machine. I am not a Microsoft Fan but using Ms products for quite some time, I always liked Apple's products, I would say Steve just knows how to sell. A good example is the way he packaged & sold the 1st iMac in a translucent box which looked amazing, with the same hardware inside. Now when I started exploring the world of Apple I realized its little too over hyped that what its actually worthy of. If you think about it now, Steve Jobs had more failures than Bill. Both had ups & downs but I feel Bill was more consistent when he was at Microsoft.
- rrohan189 15y ago
  Cannot agree more. Jobs made great products.. but Bill felt like a more consistent person.
xborns 15y ago
I always wonder when people say Microsoft is holding back innovation why they don't say the same at Apple. I think Apple does some great marketing and design for their products but from a developer perspective I can see the noose closing more on Apple's platform versus Windows/Android these days. The App Store removed a dictionary app (don't remember the name) that had foul language in it, really? I like that the App Store ensures quality from an operational perspective, BUT I hate that they can filter out content of the apps that they personally don't agree (illegal items excluding). Where does the line get drawn? Now with this sandboxing for the MacOs App Store apps it seems that they are creating a gate keeper like iPhone apps. Apple tries to block competing apps on its iTunes store while if Microsoft did the same people would scream bloody murder. I hate the word fanboi but I see quite a few Apple ones that after he passed like he was some saint, he was a business man don't forget. Holy shit. Yeah Bill Gates did questionable things to get where he was but I respect him more for not being and arrogant dick about the products he releases, and now he is GIVING most of his wealth away. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying philanthropy would be distracting, and understandably stopped the charity program when the company was on the urge of bankruptcy but never reinstated it when it was flying high. I respect Apple more now that Tim Cook is in charge for re-instating the charity program. Did I like Steve Jobs? No he was arrogant and kind of an asshole, traits I don't admire. But I respected him for taking quality products to market and marketing it to people making them think they absolutely needed it. I say he made technology fashionable, and fashion changes every season. That was good for business.
hrktb 15y ago
I have to thank Bill Gates for changing my life. I was in contact with computers quite early, as at 7 or 8, playing games on green and black monitors, doing some report printing on OS 7 Macintosh, programming some small stuff at school for belts and robotic arms on TO-8 dinosaurs reading K7 tapes. But I never really cared, it was just some tool sitting on the desk. You used it, got done and just forget it. I preferred to play outside. It was relentless nights trying to create full reports on win 95 in Word and Excel(what a wonderful name) that taught me that a modern computer was not just a tool that did what it had to, and you could forget about it afterwards. Even doing mundane things like formatting properly white space in a report, removing programs that annoys you, installing the right drivers for you modem and just have it work, having the OS stay up more than 8 hours straight needed quite a lot knowledge, dedication, and problem solving skills. I thought for the first time that all this was not something that just works by itself, but needs a lot of talent, and the world must have been really short of that talent for a long time. I just thought, you could actually dedicate a life making computers actually do what you want them to do. And I became a programmer. Thanks Bill.
chernevik 15y ago
Philanthropy demonstrates good will as well as indulgences demonstrated sanctity. There's nothing more materialist than associating virtue with the scale of one's donations.
tnicola 15y ago
This kind of makes me angry as well. Partly because I was about to write almost identical blog whilst deciding whether to buy a MacBook Air or a Lenovo IdeaPad. MacBook won, but only because Apple insists on me owning Apple in order to publish to their bookstore. A move I deem despicable and rude. Until recently, Apple was also the biggest polluter in their sector and their philanthropic side is non-existent. That and, does nobody remember that Jobs ripped off Xerox? "Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap. Everything since abacus, just a bunch of crap. From Mackintosh to Microsoft to Lin, Line, Lin, Line-ux. Every computer crashes, cause every OS sucks!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFZgD9mwxA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFZgD9mwxA
quinndupont 15y ago
Ever read Zizek? tl;dr: so-called charity is just the entrenchment of capitalism, which requires considerable income disparity to function. So, far from eradicating poverty, he's deepening it. Another commenter mentioned Carnegie (could add Rockefeller or any of the other robber barons), it's a good parallel (look into the history, e.g., these men where so awful they would even sell known-to-be-faulty guns to the army during the civil war, so soldiers would end up blowing off their limbs while in battle)
T_S_ 15y ago
Gates did an amazing job of taking advantage of my many bosses ignorance in the early 90's. We all still pay for that, though less and less it seems. Thank goodness he left Balmer in charge. As for the the whole redemption through philanthropy thing, it's fun to watch the wealthy compete in the legacy game. Go Bill!
toddh 15y ago
Habit?
mkramlich 15y ago
If a man has $1000 dollars and gives half away I'd think he's foolish but since he did something that hurts him he deserves respect. If a man has a billion dollars and gives half away he's smart, he makes himself look good (buying it) and yet experiences no pain or personal downside in exchange. In effect it cost him nothing. While I'm glad he did it, I'm also not impressed. Also it seems to be rare that someone becomes a billionaire without being an asshole and screwing over other people along the way, whether employees, partners or competitors. So this makes me even less impressed. Also I know several people who have much less wealth, who didn't come from Gates silver spoon background, yet perform charity and never engaged in the shady pratices, or shoddy craftsmanship, that Microsoft and Gates have done. So again, color me not impressed, and everything needs to be evaluated in the context of the larger ecosystem, and what everybody else out there is doing.
- pbsurf 15y ago
  Luke 21:1-4
  - mkramlich 15y ago
    Yoda, Ep. V
- naner 15y ago
  I'm sure he was an asshole and also that he is genuinely trying (and succeeding) to help people. Mel Gibson has issues with antisemitism, racism, sexism, violence and is also one hell of an actor and a pretty good philanthropist as well. Life isn't a comic book. People don't neatly fit into the category of hero or villain.
VikingCoder 15y ago
If I was Tim Paterson, I'd be pretty pissed at Bill Gates.
nks 15y ago
I've always been a little confused as to why whenever Jobs and Gates come under discussion, there is an instant contrast drawn with either one placed on completely different extremes. One was good other was bad, one was creative other was not, one was spiritual and zen-like and the other was stuffy and corporate. It's almost like they cannot be reconciled in any way possible. I feel like people often conflate people with their creations and forget that they both are human beings who change, evolve and behave differently under different contexts. I mean, they both are/were great visionaries and their greatness was manifested in different ways just like their weaknesses in personalities. They both created lasting companies which changed the world at an age where most of us are still figuring out what to do with our lives. You don't have to hate BillG in order to like Steve Jobs or vice versa. I personally find inspiring traits in both of them.
Tycho 15y ago
I hate how in HN discussions like this, philanthropy is always exalted as some untouchable trump card. I admire Gates more for the products/achievements of Microsoft (I don't remember too many people ever saying to me 'oh i wish i had a Mac, Windows is like a hellish prison I cannot escape from' - it was more like 'you use a Mac? lulz') than the achievements of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. Personally. And much of the moaning about Microsoft's so-called monopolies just sounds like sour grapes.

315 points by rrohan189 15y 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.

shriphani 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

artursapek 15y ago
What net damage did you see him do?
sliverstorm 15y 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.
- suivix 15y ago
  But Bill Gates forces people to use IE6, which wastes a lot of time that equates to thousands of lives.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    You're really going to try to compare a little time wasted with IE6 to a brutal death on a freezing battlefield thousands of miles from home? Really?
    - suivix 15y ago
      I was being sarcastic.

TomOfTTB 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

recoiledsnake 15y ago

Related article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/bill-gates-not-steve-jobs-the-real-hero-177864 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."

raganwald 15y 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.
- varunsrin 15y 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.

tobylane 15y 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 15y ago
Too bad the 99% will just see the billions and scream bloody murder.

cooldeal 15y 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_a_Disease http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
I hope this has been posted at the top of HN before... if it hasn't it really should.

artursapek 15y 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-being-a-billionaire-is-overrated/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-gates-b...

powerfulninja 15y 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.

sliverstorm 15y 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.
cooldeal 15y ago
>Who hates Bill Gates? Umm, just read some of the comments on this article? Or any Microsoft related posts on Slashdot?
stonemetal 15y 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 15y 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.

zdw 15y 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.

3am 15y 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.
- zdw 15y 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.
  - 3am 15y ago
    Sorry, I don't want to defend what they did with breaking compatibility with any product other than their own (IE, AD, Office, IIS killed Corel, Netscape... and so many other companies). I just don't see AD as a terrible standalone product. But you're right, I don't have a deep understanding of its shortcomings vs, say, OpenLDAP (though I'd love to learn something!).
  - walkon 15y ago

zerostar07 15y 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 15y ago
ahem, Bill Gates parents probably did not pay for Harvard with fake money
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I'm not certain of this, but I don't think Harvard has always cost an arm, a leg, and twelve kidneys.
- perokreco 15y 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 15y 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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

Zarathust 15y 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.

kamechan 15y 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 15y 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.

varunsrin 15y 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 15y ago

Here here

keeptrying 15y ago

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

jfb 15y 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.

vidarh 15y 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 15y 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.

ypcxz 15y ago

how can anyone hate him? Are you F*cking kidding? that man DESTROYED the desktop experience and OS evolution progress by using ILLEGAL business tactics to create an OS monopoly. Tactics like threatening computer vendors to ditch Linux otherwise they won't get "discounts" for MS Windows and won't be able to compete. You can only guess to what other practices he'd resorted behind the scenes. than man tried to KILL alternatives including Linux (via proxy companies like SCO), in which he succeeded to certain extent - for example Linux still doesn't have open source graphics drivers of the same quality as Windows/OSX, which hinders its adoption on the desktop. Furthermore, Gates invested lots of money into a corn ethanol production, an industry known to raise food prices and put people in poverty and misery. Next, Gates works hard to reduce Earth's population by providing birth-control vaccines to 3rd world countries, and you can only guess how else. F U.

joezydeco 15y 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?

bgarbiak 15y ago
Without iTunes for Windows Zune would succeed.
- nerfhammer 15y ago
  Without iTunes for Windows would Zune even exist?

Carlfish 15y ago

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

jarofgreen 15y 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 15y 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/ http://blog.givewell.org/category/gates-foundation/ There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism 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.no.html 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 15y ago

I wonder what Larry Ellison will end up doing.

heyrhett 15y 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/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...

protomyth 15y 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.

mixmastamyk 15y 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.

InclinedPlane 15y 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.
- bgarbiak 15y ago

Causification 15y ago

Bill Gates? Bah, how can this be relevant when we've seen tribute pages from only two of the three children Steve Jobs bought lemonade from last summer?

lispm 15y 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 15y ago
A good thing that there are so many quality alternatives for Microsoft's shitty business software!

uris 15y ago

Reads something fabricated by Newsmax.

chunkyslink 15y ago

>> How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates? For being a part of Internet Explorer. I just cant let it go!

meow 15y ago

Steal the money - doesn't it bother anyone that if we equate earning money in business (in what ever way) with stealing, we have to equate what most of the oil companies, most of the investment banks, most of the media companies, most of pharma companies do as nothing but stealing.. The only difference is that there is no apparent 'master mind' to attack. Is anyone naive enough to believe that if bill gates didn't end up crushing the competition as he did during Microsoft's rise, some one else would not have done so ? Sure, we may/may not have Microsoft as powerful, but there would have been some other draconian-soft to fill the void. And though we should probably not pull Jobs in to this, if we are to imagine Jobs at the head of Microsoft when it is in a position to crush competition, I can't imagine Jobs (and many other business leaders) deciding otherwise (going by the current set of apple law suits). It's just like the lord of the rings - doesn't matter who wears the ring. The heady power of the monopoly is just like the ring (the governmental laws for fair competition should be such a way that they never form). If monopolies do form, there is no point blaming individuals for that.

giardini 15y ago

Easy. One sees the destruction he left in his wake.

coup 15y ago

Well, whether the market competitors were innocent victims of Gates' savvy schemes or whether he was just better at executing the same tricks and basics in that business is up for debate. For me, he's just another, rather due to his economical than technical knowledge, financially successful person in our brutally unfair world. What he does with his money is comparatively pretty noble but on an absolute scale neither very effective nor intelligent.

omlette 15y ago

im skeptical that any amount of damage bill gates might have done to technology is outweighed by millions of vaccines and thousands of schools in developing countries.

neebz 15y ago

I am an okish software engineer from Pakistan who has been in touch with the tech industry for quite sometime. I have followed what Google has done all these years for the web. And what Apple has done in the mobile computing. It's all awesome. But when I look around as a human and see what Bill's foundation has done to simply eradicate malaria and polio from my nearby villages which were the hub of these diseases only a couple of years ago. It's amazing. It's far too easy (even as an engineer) to ignore his previous short-comings.

Limes102 15y ago

I love Mac OS, but I definitely do not hate Bill Gates. He made computers affordable and accessible, while making a lot of money. A lot of that money has gone to charities which is great.

singingfish 15y ago

Hmm, Gates' approach is responsible for some monumental inefficiency in the PC landscape. The fact that microsoft's technology is more or less irelevant to anybody who works outside of the internal corporate ecosystem these days is a nice, and fitting testament to Gates' failures. Kudos to him to leaving the industry to do something more useful with his cash at the right time. Jobs appaears to have died at a fitting time, considering he never had to re-position himself the way that gates' has had to. <disclaimer>I have relatives who benefit from the B&MG foundation</disclaimer>

dendory 15y ago

I heard a story the other day where a new computer magazine was starting up in Brazil in the late 1990s. Microsoft went to them and offered to take full page ads. But when the price came into question, Microsoft PR said they would not pay, and that the magazine should just run Microsoft ads for free, because "nobody trusts a computer magazine if Microsoft isn't advertising in it." This is classic Microsoft practice, and this is why so many people hate the company. I don't hate Bill, and I'm sure most people don't hate him personally either, but he was CEO of this company that has made many, many bad things happen.

thomasz 15y ago
The only reason you won't find this story on snopes is because it's too lame.
Niten 15y ago
This is such a silly complaint. If the story is true, then Microsoft is simply making an offer. Either it's worth enough to the magazine to place a Microsoft ad without being paid for it, and they accept the offer; or it isn't, and they reject it. It's not like Microsoft was trying to get them to drop competitors' ads or something. There's just no evil there. Maybe it would be nice of them pour cash they don't have to let go of into a startup magazine, but Microsoft isn't a charity. If their PR department can sell someone on the idea of running ads for them for free, that's not evil, it's just good salesmanship. I might as well complain that I'm not getting a check from Apple when I go places with my laptop and its glowing logo. Never mind that on the whole, buying this computer was a beneficial transaction for me – just look at all this free advertising I'm giving them!
- dendory 15y ago
  I disagree, Microsoft would be a great advertiser to get, and the only reason they can get away with the practice is because they are a monopoly. Would be illegal in the US, but they do it to other countries.
TheFuture 15y ago
So MS is supposed to just give the magazine money? If MS really needs to advertise in that magazine, they'll pay to do it. It's a simple value equation. You do realize how MS being an advertiser (non paid) can immensely help that magazine get paid ads? Who is getting hurt here?

vegai 15y ago

He capitalized on the idea that the consumer is not allowed to choose the operating system of the computer they buy. That idea hasn't yet faded. That's why I hate Microsoft.

nekojima 15y ago
I like playing new & recently released computer games on my computer. Which is why I have never bought a Mac. Btw, what other operating systems are available on the Macbook? Other than now MS because people want to play new computer games on their Macbooks and they can't with Apple's OS.
- vegai 15y ago
  Macs have the same problem. You can't get a mac without OS X.

MarkMc 15y ago

"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas." Am I the only one who read that and thought, 'Wow, Steve Jobs could be a bit of an asshole'...?

BuddhaSource 15y ago

Yes Apple has shipped some amazing products but they were limited with only few products. Now that does't mean somebody else has to compete in the same respect, Microsoft had different focus & vision. They wanted to go the IBM way, consumer & businesses. I feel they have done a good job. Beside they are not thief, its business. Apple products are far more expensive than Microsoft, the difference between 16GB & 32GB iPhones are not justified. People have a notion that Mac OS is far more refined than Windows. Well I feel they are wrong, windows 7 is far more customizable & stable on many devices etc than Mac OS. Apple is a good hardware company, they build brillant product that you can look & feel but they are not good at softwares. Mac OS is an extension of unix under a limited environment where as Ms Windows which was build in house can virtually run on any machine. I am not a Microsoft Fan but using Ms products for quite some time, I always liked Apple's products, I would say Steve just knows how to sell. A good example is the way he packaged & sold the 1st iMac in a translucent box which looked amazing, with the same hardware inside. Now when I started exploring the world of Apple I realized its little too over hyped that what its actually worthy of. If you think about it now, Steve Jobs had more failures than Bill. Both had ups & downs but I feel Bill was more consistent when he was at Microsoft.

rrohan189 15y ago
Cannot agree more. Jobs made great products.. but Bill felt like a more consistent person.

xborns 15y ago

I always wonder when people say Microsoft is holding back innovation why they don't say the same at Apple. I think Apple does some great marketing and design for their products but from a developer perspective I can see the noose closing more on Apple's platform versus Windows/Android these days. The App Store removed a dictionary app (don't remember the name) that had foul language in it, really? I like that the App Store ensures quality from an operational perspective, BUT I hate that they can filter out content of the apps that they personally don't agree (illegal items excluding). Where does the line get drawn? Now with this sandboxing for the MacOs App Store apps it seems that they are creating a gate keeper like iPhone apps. Apple tries to block competing apps on its iTunes store while if Microsoft did the same people would scream bloody murder. I hate the word fanboi but I see quite a few Apple ones that after he passed like he was some saint, he was a business man don't forget. Holy shit. Yeah Bill Gates did questionable things to get where he was but I respect him more for not being and arrogant dick about the products he releases, and now he is GIVING most of his wealth away. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying philanthropy would be distracting, and understandably stopped the charity program when the company was on the urge of bankruptcy but never reinstated it when it was flying high. I respect Apple more now that Tim Cook is in charge for re-instating the charity program. Did I like Steve Jobs? No he was arrogant and kind of an asshole, traits I don't admire. But I respected him for taking quality products to market and marketing it to people making them think they absolutely needed it. I say he made technology fashionable, and fashion changes every season. That was good for business.

hrktb 15y ago

I have to thank Bill Gates for changing my life. I was in contact with computers quite early, as at 7 or 8, playing games on green and black monitors, doing some report printing on OS 7 Macintosh, programming some small stuff at school for belts and robotic arms on TO-8 dinosaurs reading K7 tapes. But I never really cared, it was just some tool sitting on the desk. You used it, got done and just forget it. I preferred to play outside. It was relentless nights trying to create full reports on win 95 in Word and Excel(what a wonderful name) that taught me that a modern computer was not just a tool that did what it had to, and you could forget about it afterwards. Even doing mundane things like formatting properly white space in a report, removing programs that annoys you, installing the right drivers for you modem and just have it work, having the OS stay up more than 8 hours straight needed quite a lot knowledge, dedication, and problem solving skills. I thought for the first time that all this was not something that just works by itself, but needs a lot of talent, and the world must have been really short of that talent for a long time. I just thought, you could actually dedicate a life making computers actually do what you want them to do. And I became a programmer. Thanks Bill.

chernevik 15y ago

Philanthropy demonstrates good will as well as indulgences demonstrated sanctity. There's nothing more materialist than associating virtue with the scale of one's donations.

tnicola 15y ago

This kind of makes me angry as well. Partly because I was about to write almost identical blog whilst deciding whether to buy a MacBook Air or a Lenovo IdeaPad. MacBook won, but only because Apple insists on me owning Apple in order to publish to their bookstore. A move I deem despicable and rude. Until recently, Apple was also the biggest polluter in their sector and their philanthropic side is non-existent. That and, does nobody remember that Jobs ripped off Xerox? "Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap. Everything since abacus, just a bunch of crap. From Mackintosh to Microsoft to Lin, Line, Lin, Line-ux. Every computer crashes, cause every OS sucks!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFZgD9mwxA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFZgD9mwxA

quinndupont 15y ago

Ever read Zizek? tl;dr: so-called charity is just the entrenchment of capitalism, which requires considerable income disparity to function. So, far from eradicating poverty, he's deepening it. Another commenter mentioned Carnegie (could add Rockefeller or any of the other robber barons), it's a good parallel (look into the history, e.g., these men where so awful they would even sell known-to-be-faulty guns to the army during the civil war, so soldiers would end up blowing off their limbs while in battle)

T_S_ 15y ago

Gates did an amazing job of taking advantage of my many bosses ignorance in the early 90's. We all still pay for that, though less and less it seems. Thank goodness he left Balmer in charge. As for the the whole redemption through philanthropy thing, it's fun to watch the wealthy compete in the legacy game. Go Bill!

toddh 15y ago

Habit?

mkramlich 15y ago

If a man has $1000 dollars and gives half away I'd think he's foolish but since he did something that hurts him he deserves respect. If a man has a billion dollars and gives half away he's smart, he makes himself look good (buying it) and yet experiences no pain or personal downside in exchange. In effect it cost him nothing. While I'm glad he did it, I'm also not impressed. Also it seems to be rare that someone becomes a billionaire without being an asshole and screwing over other people along the way, whether employees, partners or competitors. So this makes me even less impressed. Also I know several people who have much less wealth, who didn't come from Gates silver spoon background, yet perform charity and never engaged in the shady pratices, or shoddy craftsmanship, that Microsoft and Gates have done. So again, color me not impressed, and everything needs to be evaluated in the context of the larger ecosystem, and what everybody else out there is doing.

pbsurf 15y ago
Luke 21:1-4
- mkramlich 15y ago
  Yoda, Ep. V
naner 15y ago
I'm sure he was an asshole and also that he is genuinely trying (and succeeding) to help people. Mel Gibson has issues with antisemitism, racism, sexism, violence and is also one hell of an actor and a pretty good philanthropist as well. Life isn't a comic book. People don't neatly fit into the category of hero or villain.

VikingCoder 15y ago

If I was Tim Paterson, I'd be pretty pissed at Bill Gates.

nks 15y ago

I've always been a little confused as to why whenever Jobs and Gates come under discussion, there is an instant contrast drawn with either one placed on completely different extremes. One was good other was bad, one was creative other was not, one was spiritual and zen-like and the other was stuffy and corporate. It's almost like they cannot be reconciled in any way possible. I feel like people often conflate people with their creations and forget that they both are human beings who change, evolve and behave differently under different contexts. I mean, they both are/were great visionaries and their greatness was manifested in different ways just like their weaknesses in personalities. They both created lasting companies which changed the world at an age where most of us are still figuring out what to do with our lives. You don't have to hate BillG in order to like Steve Jobs or vice versa. I personally find inspiring traits in both of them.

Tycho 15y ago

I hate how in HN discussions like this, philanthropy is always exalted as some untouchable trump card. I admire Gates more for the products/achievements of Microsoft (I don't remember too many people ever saying to me 'oh i wish i had a Mac, Windows is like a hellish prison I cannot escape from' - it was more like 'you use a Mac? lulz') than the achievements of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. Personally. And much of the moaning about Microsoft's so-called monopolies just sounds like sour grapes.