4 ms·

Why did he not earn his money? All you managed to say was that bill gates is wealthy and smart. Did he steal the money?

colordrops 4y ago
The underlying assumption is that if Bill didn't do what he did, whatever products and value werw delivered that earned him the money would not have been created. Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field. Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund. It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.) Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something. So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    I suffered through all that! You just reminded me about how IE was designed to prevent the internet from growing. What a wart of a company. Held back the software world for 20 years.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Hundreds of millions did! MS apologists always astonish me. Even extreme IE bugginess was to try to defend their installed-app business.
- clircle 4y ago
  Maybe that's how you think, but I'm not interested in counterfactuals. In *Reality* Microsoft made a lot of useful products and they were compensated for that (probably too much)
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Microsoft's sociopathic behaviors are not how I think, they are objective facts.
aeturnum 4y ago
If the question is "did he break laws to make his money" then of course the answer is yes. If you think Gates generated more than $1.5 million in value every hour he worked, well, I can't stop you. All I can do is point out that the rates that most people get are not as generous and, while high performers should be extremely well compensated, the structural elements that make careers like Gates' possible are bad for the rest of us. When Bill Gates stopped active work at Microsoft in 2008, if he had redistributed his shares equally to all 91,000 employees, every one of them would be a millionaire today. I encourage you to think about what 'earning' something means and why you defending this particular system for distributing rewards for productive work.
- mech987 4y ago
  As a pure test case- Let's say there was an individual who founded a company, owned 100% of the equity, and designed a brand new product. The product solved an unmet need for consumers, sold at high profit margins, and was massively successful. Our inventor was well ahead of his time, and the next-fastest similar invention would've been invented 30 years later, during which time $500 billion of consumer value had been created. Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion? To what degree is Bill Gates' wealth similar to this test case versus network-effect-capture, first-mover-advantage wealth? How do you quantify the value of Microsoft's software quality earning it's substantial market share, versus Microsoft getting there first and squatting on the network effect?
  - aeturnum 4y ago
    It's interesting to me that you bring up the profit that Microsoft made because I have not. There are things to talk about vis-a-vie Microsoft-the-company and why they were so profitable, but I was only talking about a particular Microsoft employee. > Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion? Oh, would I admit it - huh? I do want to say that your account of this company is at odds with the history of Microsoft, which was famously profitable for ruthless business practices more than innovation. This founder sounds like they have done well. Certainly, they should be the highest paid person at the company. However, consider how disconnected their actions are from their financial reward. Someone could run a nonprofit just as well, generate $500bn in benefit, and get just their salary. The fact that this person can capture as much value as they can has very little to do with the merit of their work. What I am saying is that Gates did very well at his job, but the reason he was rewarded so highly for that high performance has more to do with choice and imbalanced value-capture than merit. Every Microsoft employee, down to the janitors, has an equal (if proportional) claim on the basis of "this company is successful so they should get value." If Gates deserves his money because the company was doing well and he contributed x% to the company, the same is true for everyone. I am not arguing here that Microsoft should have had less total compensation to award to employees, I am arguing that Gates has captured too much of its total compensation. I think we, as members of the tech industry, have very immediate incentives (as well as well-founded philosophical ones) to point out this inefficient distribution and advocate for a better one.

The underlying assumption is that if Bill didn't do what he did, whatever products and value werw delivered that earned him the money would not have been created. Obviously that isn't true as someone else would have built out a commercially successful operating system and various other products instead, and arguably better. Bill was just more aggressive and conniving in his land grabbing abilities. He ran more of a racket than a software company. Various extortion and coercion techniques were employed, such as forcing vendors to only offer Windows, surreptitiously encouraging piracy to gain adoption then turning the thumbscrews, and working with SCO in an attempt to destroy Linux.

ncmncm 4y ago
Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field. Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund. It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.) Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something. So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.
- colordrops 4y ago
  I suffered through all that! You just reminded me about how IE was designed to prevent the internet from growing. What a wart of a company. Held back the software world for 20 years.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Hundreds of millions did! MS apologists always astonish me. Even extreme IE bugginess was to try to defend their installed-app business.
clircle 4y ago
Maybe that's how you think, but I'm not interested in counterfactuals. In *Reality* Microsoft made a lot of useful products and they were compensated for that (probably too much)
- colordrops 4y ago
  Microsoft's sociopathic behaviors are not how I think, they are objective facts.

aeturnum 4y ago

If the question is "did he break laws to make his money" then of course the answer is yes. If you think Gates generated more than $1.5 million in value every hour he worked, well, I can't stop you. All I can do is point out that the rates that most people get are not as generous and, while high performers should be extremely well compensated, the structural elements that make careers like Gates' possible are bad for the rest of us. When Bill Gates stopped active work at Microsoft in 2008, if he had redistributed his shares equally to all 91,000 employees, every one of them would be a millionaire today. I encourage you to think about what 'earning' something means and why you defending this particular system for distributing rewards for productive work.

mech987 4y ago
As a pure test case- Let's say there was an individual who founded a company, owned 100% of the equity, and designed a brand new product. The product solved an unmet need for consumers, sold at high profit margins, and was massively successful. Our inventor was well ahead of his time, and the next-fastest similar invention would've been invented 30 years later, during which time $500 billion of consumer value had been created. Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion? To what degree is Bill Gates' wealth similar to this test case versus network-effect-capture, first-mover-advantage wealth? How do you quantify the value of Microsoft's software quality earning it's substantial market share, versus Microsoft getting there first and squatting on the network effect?
- aeturnum 4y ago
  It's interesting to me that you bring up the profit that Microsoft made because I have not. There are things to talk about vis-a-vie Microsoft-the-company and why they were so profitable, but I was only talking about a particular Microsoft employee. > Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion? Oh, would I admit it - huh? I do want to say that your account of this company is at odds with the history of Microsoft, which was famously profitable for ruthless business practices more than innovation. This founder sounds like they have done well. Certainly, they should be the highest paid person at the company. However, consider how disconnected their actions are from their financial reward. Someone could run a nonprofit just as well, generate $500bn in benefit, and get just their salary. The fact that this person can capture as much value as they can has very little to do with the merit of their work. What I am saying is that Gates did very well at his job, but the reason he was rewarded so highly for that high performance has more to do with choice and imbalanced value-capture than merit. Every Microsoft employee, down to the janitors, has an equal (if proportional) claim on the basis of "this company is successful so they should get value." If Gates deserves his money because the company was doing well and he contributed x% to the company, the same is true for everyone. I am not arguing here that Microsoft should have had less total compensation to award to employees, I am arguing that Gates has captured too much of its total compensation. I think we, as members of the tech industry, have very immediate incentives (as well as well-founded philosophical ones) to point out this inefficient distribution and advocate for a better one.