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Blimey. Fascinating. Sounds like a rather frightening and ruthless individual. Am curious. What would your nominations be for the Rockefeller of the tech (soft

Blimey. Fascinating. Sounds like a rather frightening and ruthless individual. Am curious. What would your nominations be for the Rockefeller of the tech (software/hardware) world? Ever thought about that?

philwelch 12y ago
In the 1990's, undoubtedly Gates.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Yeah, that was my thought too. > John offered three choices to rival refiners, cash, Standard Oil stock, or to get crushed ... is also a pretty good description of how Microsoft approached anyone they considered competition in the '80s and '90s: you either licensed your software to them ("cash"), sold your company to them ("stock"), or got destroyed by them. Gates' charitable efforts have earned him a warmer and fuzzier reputation these days (another parallel to Rockefeller?), but back then he was an absolute barracuda.
  - veb 12y ago
    Hmm, does his charitable efforts these days make up for the pain and suffering he caused back when he was a barracuda? (nice term, btw). I like to say yes. I think. I mean, he may have destroyed hundreds of people's livelihoods/jobs/companies, but his efforts these days are literally saving peoples lives. Does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm a firm believer people can change and while this might not be Bill Gates changing, it might simply be him "atoning for his sins" so to speak, not that I'm religious, nor that he is either I think.
    - gnaritas 12y ago
      > Hmm, does his charitable efforts these days make up for the pain and suffering he caused back when he was a barracuda? No. Changing doesn't remove your past sins and helping one person doesn't balance your hurting another. To believe so would mean saving a life makes up for taking another life, obviously it doesn't.
      - veb 12y ago
        Great point, didn't think of it like that.
      - derekp7 12y ago
        Reminds me of a parable in I think an old Hardy Boys book. First, pound a bunch of nails in a board. Now remove the nails. Now remove the holes.
      - dusklight 12y ago
        Does that mean he should stop and go back to being a barracuda? It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another. A better comparison would be saving many (millions?) of poor, non-white lives in exchange for stealing money from privileged white men (majority of people in the software industry during his era).
        scholia 12y ago
        Gates helped make a lot of your "privileged white men" rich by providing a market for compatible software and hardware. He also helped a lot of Asians become rich as well. In the 1980s, Apple went round Hong Kong, Taiwan and China suing companies for making knockoffs of the Apple II (ie better, faster, more reliable and much cheaper versions of the Apple II). Then along came the PC industry, which welcomed them -- and their innovations -- with open arms. How do you balance a handful of self-righteous American programmers against the wealth and the millions of jobs generated by Acer, Asus, MSI, Hon Hai, Wistron, Pegatron, Quanta, Compal, Inventec, etc?
        gnaritas 12y ago
        > Does that mean he should stop and go back to being a barracuda? Of course not. > It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another. It's exactly the right example because it makes the moral choice clear and that same choice applies to the lesser scenario. > A better comparison would be We don't need a better comparison, it's already been made clear that you can't make up for sins against one by helping another.
    - baddox 12y ago
      What pain and suffering did he cause, other than running his business better and offering a better product to customers than his competitors? He cut the price of kerosene by 90%, which must have vastly improved the quality of life for a lot of people.
      - dredmorbius 12y ago
        Blowing up competitors comes to mind.
        baddox 12y ago
        I can find one reference to a claim from a Vacuum Oil Company mechanic that he was bribed to sabotage a still which caused a sabotage a still. The website appears to be an online edition of a book, and it looks less than reputable. Is this what you're referring to? http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/so/consolid.htm http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/so/consolid.htm
        dredmorbius 12y ago
        There are references in Daniel Yergin's _The Prize_ IIRC, and the anecdotal references to "Wreckafeller". I'd have to dig for specifics.
    - jholman 12y ago
      I assume from "these days" that you mean Gates, not Rockefeller. Microsoft wrote some software that was, I would argue, overall an improvement on the software against which it competed. So Microsoft did some good. However, in the process of extracting value, they actively - and, in my opinion, often unethically - suppressed the efforts of those with whom they competed. I don't pretend to be very knowledgeable on the exact value of these positive and negative effects, but I think it's pretty clear that all of the above effects more or less amounted making a bunch of computer nerds like us a little richer, or a little poorer. Not necessarily in money, but in power... like the power to track business expenses cheaply (which Microsoft enhanced, with Excel), or the power to collaborate on making productive software for ourselves and share it freely with the world (which Microsoft harmed, see the Halloween Documents, or other conspiracy evidence of your choice). For the most part, this only affects a few dozen million humans, and even interpreted broadly it affects perhaps 10% of humanity. And the effects are small; for almost all of the affected, life gets less than 1% better or 1% worse, due to Microsoft existing. I mean, that's bigger than most companies, but. I'm less able to give clear magnitudes of the impact of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. My understanding, though, is that they're playing a significant role in the attempts to eradicate polio. Frankly, you can inflict Windows95 on me for the next 50 years, if that's what it takes to save one person from polio. Suppose that it turns out that polio is eradicated, and the B&MGF is due 1% of the credit for that; wouldn't this be more valuable than all the harm ever done by MS, past and future? And then there's their malaria-eradication efforts, their money spent on education, their money spent on sanitation, etc etc. Bill Gates seems to have stolen a very manageable amount of our first-world wealth, burned a good fraction of in an engine of inefficiency (for example, Ballmer got some money too), and given most of the rest of it where it could do the most good (modulo a small fraction kept for himself, to indulge in fabulous luxury). As far as I can tell, although it astounds and confounds me, Bill Gates is Robin Hood. wtf.
      - philwelch 12y ago
        I really like this theory. I guess it turns out that once you put into perspective what part of the world Microsoft affected, it really is fundamentally outweighed by the good the Gates Foundation is doing.
    - graycat 12y ago
      > Does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm a firm believer people can change and while this might not be Bill Gates changing, it might simply be him "atoning for his sins" so to speak, not that I'm religious, nor that he is either I think. My candidate explanation, Melinda.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      That's absolutely impossible to measure. What parts of Microsofts business can be accurately ascribed to him? What patent trolls are completely Microsoft-owned? What damage do they do? They did an absolutely unprecedented assault on the Internet on the developer, policy, and user front when they found out they could not compete there, until they turned that policy around. We only see vague results of this today, on that all development of the web itself was put on an 8 year hiatus, and in some of the crazy proprietary formats that still plague us. But how do you put it in economic terms? How much is the break-ins at RSA, Cisco Google, Valve, and inbetweens unknown worth to the global economy, because bad business practice forced peoples email clients to have the ability to run code?
    - teddyh 12y ago
      http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_4.html http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_4.html
  - tlb 12y ago
    It's worth reading Ron Chernow's biography of the Rockefellers. Rockefeller had a strong Christian Soldier belief system, in which he was righteous and most other oilmen were sinners. (The 19th century oil business attracted a lot of hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing types.) He did good works with his money, while many of his competitors would have spent it on vice. Therefore, he was furthering God's plan for the righteous to inherit the earth by beating them in business. It's a worldview difficult for moderns to relate to, but I think it was authentic for him.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    > The right choice was to have taken stock, which would have made you fabulously wealthy. If you were any good at the oil business at all, he would also offer you a job, which again would have eventually made you very very rich. He had an insatiable hunger for quality staff. It was never a good idea to bet against Rockefeller. That was eerily reminiscent for me, too.
vinceguidry 12y ago
Rockefeller was a human hurricane, a truly unique individual. He practically invented the modern corporation. He was also a product of his time. I don't think a comparison to any of today's tech giants could be anything more than laughably superficial. There are plenty of ruthless people in business even today. But Rockefeller was driven by the belief that cooperation in business, rather than competition, was the way forward for society. The business he built reflected that. Eventually the world learned from his model and now business isn't quite so cutthroat. But it took Rockefeller to create this new order. Someone so genius at business that there was no stopping him from doing anything he wanted to do. Not even the full might of the federal government could bring him low. Maybe they could have eventually, but the government's position on monopoly softened after it realized what the economies of scale it generated meant for our wartime industrial efficiency. There were other titans in that time period. Rockefeller stands above them all.
- samstave 12y ago
  I would equate only Musk to him with respect to creating lasting change.
  - psychometry 12y ago
    What lasting change has Musk effected? The potential is certainly there, but the average person's life isn't much different than it would be had Musk never existed.
    - samstave 12y ago
      Uh, the private space industry? Really, you don't see what is happening here? Who else mounted a private space company able to dock with that of the global governmental effort that is the ISS?
      - Karellen 12y ago
        SpaceX is conceptually awesome, and it's incredible how far they've come already, and I find myself being unbelievably excited for the future of space travel and exploration whenever they put another Falcon 9 up there. (I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation of tonights/tomorrow morning's AsiaSat launch.) But. They're not there yet. At the moment, they're currently providing a launch facility that is equivalent to services offered by a number of other vendors, albeit at a slightly lower (currently) price. And the service they're providing really does not directly impact on 99.9% of the lives going on around you. Yes, their reusable launch system program is way ahead of anything else anyone is doing, but it's still experimental, and isn't yet providing benefits to even their direct customers, let alone anyone else. Musk hasn't made lasting change yet with SpaceX. I really, really hope he does. Becoming a multiplanetry species would be the biggest thing for Humanity since, well, fire, standing upright, or speech, and Musk seems to be the person best placed to make that happen in the next 20-40-odd years. But he's not done it yet.
theodoree 12y ago
>Fascinating. If you have low self-esteem maybe. Rockefeller was a piece of shit.
baddox 12y ago
Perhaps less frightening when you consider that he manage to cut the end-user price of kerosene by 90%.
- bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  Cut prices on a finite and polluting resource. No, not really less frighting. Also a reminder that the term "visionary" is very relative to your horizon.
  - saryant 12y ago
    Rockefeller built an enterprise that continues on to this day. An empire that has seen nineteen American presidents come and go, watched superpowers rise and fall and is (IMO) the most important company in history. Exxon still breathes Rockefeller, his imprint can be seen all over that company. To call him a visionary is absolutely appropriate.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I don't oppose all improvements in human quality of life that have a potential negative environmental impact.
gadders 12y ago
To be clear, though, I believe he was ruthless in business, as, say, Michael Jordan or Floyd Mayweather is ruthless in sports. AFAIK he wasn't off kicking puppies and punching beggars in his spare time. You can be a ruthless businessman and perfectly good human being.
awa 12y ago
Bill Gates with Microsoft. At its peak Windows was running on 90% of computers and the biggest rival Apple (Steve Jobs) was taking money from Microsoft (Bill G) to survive. Bill was able to leverage almost all other software companies to create software for Windows to create a lock in fro the customers.
- scholia 12y ago
  Windows is still running on more than 90% of the world's PCs. It provided an openly-licensed standard that enabled hundreds of thousands of companies to enter the hardware and software business -- and some of them became rich. It also delivered huge benefits to the companies that freely adopted Windows to benefit from the massive ecosystem it produced. It's hard to see how many people suffered who didn't fail thanks mainly to their own mistakes. I'd put DR, IBM (Lotus), Novell and Netscape in that group.
- RebSmith 12y ago
  Correct! And if I say that Amazon is doing the same then I think we will have to agree to that! Don't we!?
- philwelch 12y ago
  Microsoft's $150MM investment in Apple wasn't necessary for Apple to survive. The commitment it signaled (plus the promise to keep making Office for Mac) might have been, but the money wasn't. > The day before the announcement Apple had a market cap of $2.46 billion,[58] and had ended its previous quarter with quarterly revenues of US$1.7 billion and cash reserves of US$1.2 billion,[59] making the US$150 million amount of the investment largely symbolic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1996:_Return_of_Steve_Jobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1996:_Ret...

philwelch 12y ago

In the 1990's, undoubtedly Gates.

smacktoward 12y ago
Yeah, that was my thought too. > John offered three choices to rival refiners, cash, Standard Oil stock, or to get crushed ... is also a pretty good description of how Microsoft approached anyone they considered competition in the '80s and '90s: you either licensed your software to them ("cash"), sold your company to them ("stock"), or got destroyed by them. Gates' charitable efforts have earned him a warmer and fuzzier reputation these days (another parallel to Rockefeller?), but back then he was an absolute barracuda.
- veb 12y ago
  Hmm, does his charitable efforts these days make up for the pain and suffering he caused back when he was a barracuda? (nice term, btw). I like to say yes. I think. I mean, he may have destroyed hundreds of people's livelihoods/jobs/companies, but his efforts these days are literally saving peoples lives. Does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm a firm believer people can change and while this might not be Bill Gates changing, it might simply be him "atoning for his sins" so to speak, not that I'm religious, nor that he is either I think.
  - gnaritas 12y ago
    > Hmm, does his charitable efforts these days make up for the pain and suffering he caused back when he was a barracuda? No. Changing doesn't remove your past sins and helping one person doesn't balance your hurting another. To believe so would mean saving a life makes up for taking another life, obviously it doesn't.
    - veb 12y ago
      Great point, didn't think of it like that.
    - derekp7 12y ago
      Reminds me of a parable in I think an old Hardy Boys book. First, pound a bunch of nails in a board. Now remove the nails. Now remove the holes.
    - dusklight 12y ago
      Does that mean he should stop and go back to being a barracuda? It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another. A better comparison would be saving many (millions?) of poor, non-white lives in exchange for stealing money from privileged white men (majority of people in the software industry during his era).
      - scholia 12y ago
        Gates helped make a lot of your "privileged white men" rich by providing a market for compatible software and hardware. He also helped a lot of Asians become rich as well. In the 1980s, Apple went round Hong Kong, Taiwan and China suing companies for making knockoffs of the Apple II (ie better, faster, more reliable and much cheaper versions of the Apple II). Then along came the PC industry, which welcomed them -- and their innovations -- with open arms. How do you balance a handful of self-righteous American programmers against the wealth and the millions of jobs generated by Acer, Asus, MSI, Hon Hai, Wistron, Pegatron, Quanta, Compal, Inventec, etc?
      - gnaritas 12y ago
        > Does that mean he should stop and go back to being a barracuda? Of course not. > It's certainly not fair to make the comparison of saving one life in exchange for taking another. It's exactly the right example because it makes the moral choice clear and that same choice applies to the lesser scenario. > A better comparison would be We don't need a better comparison, it's already been made clear that you can't make up for sins against one by helping another.
  - baddox 12y ago
    What pain and suffering did he cause, other than running his business better and offering a better product to customers than his competitors? He cut the price of kerosene by 90%, which must have vastly improved the quality of life for a lot of people.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      Blowing up competitors comes to mind.
      - baddox 12y ago
        I can find one reference to a claim from a Vacuum Oil Company mechanic that he was bribed to sabotage a still which caused a sabotage a still. The website appears to be an online edition of a book, and it looks less than reputable. Is this what you're referring to? http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/so/consolid.htm http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/so/consolid.htm
        dredmorbius 12y ago
        There are references in Daniel Yergin's _The Prize_ IIRC, and the anecdotal references to "Wreckafeller". I'd have to dig for specifics.
  - jholman 12y ago
    I assume from "these days" that you mean Gates, not Rockefeller. Microsoft wrote some software that was, I would argue, overall an improvement on the software against which it competed. So Microsoft did some good. However, in the process of extracting value, they actively - and, in my opinion, often unethically - suppressed the efforts of those with whom they competed. I don't pretend to be very knowledgeable on the exact value of these positive and negative effects, but I think it's pretty clear that all of the above effects more or less amounted making a bunch of computer nerds like us a little richer, or a little poorer. Not necessarily in money, but in power... like the power to track business expenses cheaply (which Microsoft enhanced, with Excel), or the power to collaborate on making productive software for ourselves and share it freely with the world (which Microsoft harmed, see the Halloween Documents, or other conspiracy evidence of your choice). For the most part, this only affects a few dozen million humans, and even interpreted broadly it affects perhaps 10% of humanity. And the effects are small; for almost all of the affected, life gets less than 1% better or 1% worse, due to Microsoft existing. I mean, that's bigger than most companies, but. I'm less able to give clear magnitudes of the impact of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. My understanding, though, is that they're playing a significant role in the attempts to eradicate polio. Frankly, you can inflict Windows95 on me for the next 50 years, if that's what it takes to save one person from polio. Suppose that it turns out that polio is eradicated, and the B&MGF is due 1% of the credit for that; wouldn't this be more valuable than all the harm ever done by MS, past and future? And then there's their malaria-eradication efforts, their money spent on education, their money spent on sanitation, etc etc. Bill Gates seems to have stolen a very manageable amount of our first-world wealth, burned a good fraction of in an engine of inefficiency (for example, Ballmer got some money too), and given most of the rest of it where it could do the most good (modulo a small fraction kept for himself, to indulge in fabulous luxury). As far as I can tell, although it astounds and confounds me, Bill Gates is Robin Hood. wtf.
    - philwelch 12y ago
      I really like this theory. I guess it turns out that once you put into perspective what part of the world Microsoft affected, it really is fundamentally outweighed by the good the Gates Foundation is doing.
  - graycat 12y ago
    > Does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm a firm believer people can change and while this might not be Bill Gates changing, it might simply be him "atoning for his sins" so to speak, not that I'm religious, nor that he is either I think. My candidate explanation, Melinda.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    That's absolutely impossible to measure. What parts of Microsofts business can be accurately ascribed to him? What patent trolls are completely Microsoft-owned? What damage do they do? They did an absolutely unprecedented assault on the Internet on the developer, policy, and user front when they found out they could not compete there, until they turned that policy around. We only see vague results of this today, on that all development of the web itself was put on an 8 year hiatus, and in some of the crazy proprietary formats that still plague us. But how do you put it in economic terms? How much is the break-ins at RSA, Cisco Google, Valve, and inbetweens unknown worth to the global economy, because bad business practice forced peoples email clients to have the ability to run code?
  - teddyh 12y ago
    http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_4.html http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_4.html
- tlb 12y ago
  It's worth reading Ron Chernow's biography of the Rockefellers. Rockefeller had a strong Christian Soldier belief system, in which he was righteous and most other oilmen were sinners. (The 19th century oil business attracted a lot of hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing types.) He did good works with his money, while many of his competitors would have spent it on vice. Therefore, he was furthering God's plan for the righteous to inherit the earth by beating them in business. It's a worldview difficult for moderns to relate to, but I think it was authentic for him.
- philwelch 12y ago
  > The right choice was to have taken stock, which would have made you fabulously wealthy. If you were any good at the oil business at all, he would also offer you a job, which again would have eventually made you very very rich. He had an insatiable hunger for quality staff. It was never a good idea to bet against Rockefeller. That was eerily reminiscent for me, too.

vinceguidry 12y ago

Rockefeller was a human hurricane, a truly unique individual. He practically invented the modern corporation. He was also a product of his time. I don't think a comparison to any of today's tech giants could be anything more than laughably superficial. There are plenty of ruthless people in business even today. But Rockefeller was driven by the belief that cooperation in business, rather than competition, was the way forward for society. The business he built reflected that. Eventually the world learned from his model and now business isn't quite so cutthroat. But it took Rockefeller to create this new order. Someone so genius at business that there was no stopping him from doing anything he wanted to do. Not even the full might of the federal government could bring him low. Maybe they could have eventually, but the government's position on monopoly softened after it realized what the economies of scale it generated meant for our wartime industrial efficiency. There were other titans in that time period. Rockefeller stands above them all.

samstave 12y ago
I would equate only Musk to him with respect to creating lasting change.
- psychometry 12y ago
  What lasting change has Musk effected? The potential is certainly there, but the average person's life isn't much different than it would be had Musk never existed.
  - samstave 12y ago
    Uh, the private space industry? Really, you don't see what is happening here? Who else mounted a private space company able to dock with that of the global governmental effort that is the ISS?
    - Karellen 12y ago
      SpaceX is conceptually awesome, and it's incredible how far they've come already, and I find myself being unbelievably excited for the future of space travel and exploration whenever they put another Falcon 9 up there. (I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation of tonights/tomorrow morning's AsiaSat launch.) But. They're not there yet. At the moment, they're currently providing a launch facility that is equivalent to services offered by a number of other vendors, albeit at a slightly lower (currently) price. And the service they're providing really does not directly impact on 99.9% of the lives going on around you. Yes, their reusable launch system program is way ahead of anything else anyone is doing, but it's still experimental, and isn't yet providing benefits to even their direct customers, let alone anyone else. Musk hasn't made lasting change yet with SpaceX. I really, really hope he does. Becoming a multiplanetry species would be the biggest thing for Humanity since, well, fire, standing upright, or speech, and Musk seems to be the person best placed to make that happen in the next 20-40-odd years. But he's not done it yet.

theodoree 12y ago

>Fascinating. If you have low self-esteem maybe. Rockefeller was a piece of shit.

baddox 12y ago

Perhaps less frightening when you consider that he manage to cut the end-user price of kerosene by 90%.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Cut prices on a finite and polluting resource. No, not really less frighting. Also a reminder that the term "visionary" is very relative to your horizon.
- saryant 12y ago
  Rockefeller built an enterprise that continues on to this day. An empire that has seen nineteen American presidents come and go, watched superpowers rise and fall and is (IMO) the most important company in history. Exxon still breathes Rockefeller, his imprint can be seen all over that company. To call him a visionary is absolutely appropriate.
- baddox 12y ago
  I don't oppose all improvements in human quality of life that have a potential negative environmental impact.

gadders 12y ago

To be clear, though, I believe he was ruthless in business, as, say, Michael Jordan or Floyd Mayweather is ruthless in sports. AFAIK he wasn't off kicking puppies and punching beggars in his spare time. You can be a ruthless businessman and perfectly good human being.

awa 12y ago

Bill Gates with Microsoft. At its peak Windows was running on 90% of computers and the biggest rival Apple (Steve Jobs) was taking money from Microsoft (Bill G) to survive. Bill was able to leverage almost all other software companies to create software for Windows to create a lock in fro the customers.

scholia 12y ago
Windows is still running on more than 90% of the world's PCs. It provided an openly-licensed standard that enabled hundreds of thousands of companies to enter the hardware and software business -- and some of them became rich. It also delivered huge benefits to the companies that freely adopted Windows to benefit from the massive ecosystem it produced. It's hard to see how many people suffered who didn't fail thanks mainly to their own mistakes. I'd put DR, IBM (Lotus), Novell and Netscape in that group.
RebSmith 12y ago
Correct! And if I say that Amazon is doing the same then I think we will have to agree to that! Don't we!?
philwelch 12y ago
Microsoft's $150MM investment in Apple wasn't necessary for Apple to survive. The commitment it signaled (plus the promise to keep making Office for Mac) might have been, but the money wasn't. > The day before the announcement Apple had a market cap of $2.46 billion,[58] and had ended its previous quarter with quarterly revenues of US$1.7 billion and cash reserves of US$1.2 billion,[59] making the US$150 million amount of the investment largely symbolic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1996:_Return_of_Steve_Jobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1996:_Ret...