5 ms·

Who wants to be Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg anyway? Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but

Who wants to be Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg anyway? Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket. We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy. There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting: "The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor." http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/ http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-hal... If you want to be like Zuck, what is it about you that you are going to infect the world with?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
It's pretty telling that everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but very few want to be the next Niklaus Wirth, Alan Kay or Gary Kildall. Far fewer are interested in computing so much as a gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.
- walterbell 11y ago
  > gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies. Yet Gates' and Jobs' gold came from edge clients, not web media. Clients have never been more powerful, why is there no modern gold rush in client software? Is it merely that SaaS/hosted software does not suffer from piracy?
  - virmundi 11y ago
    I think is part of it. It's hard to pirate something you can't get a copy of. Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets. The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.
    - boomzilla 11y ago
      I think there are two other factors as why web apps are dominating client apps. The first is distribution cost. Even with AppStore and Android market, it's still very hard to get your app to the users. People browse to hundreds of different websites everyday, but very few try out tens of apps in their phone. The second factor is that the web is intrinsically a lot more connected. One web page/app can easily link to another with, doh, a link. The linking/back button semantics are well understood by all the users.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    "not suffer from piracy" really means "has more power to lock in and control people", and yes, that's a major factor.
- 11y ago
quadrangle 11y ago
Wonderfully said. Bill Gates remains net negative impact on the world at this point. "If you are giving back, it means you took too much." See http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a_company_a_school_a_life http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...
- antaviana 11y ago
  It depends on how you look at it. It turned out that Bill Gates is a kind of Robin Hood: in a sense, he robbed the rich (those who could buy a computer or who owned a software company) and gave it to the poor. Unless you believe that richer people should be richer because they deserve it and poorer people should be poorer because they deserve it, I think that he made a positive impact on the world at this point by redistributing wealth.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    the only way you could compare Gates to Robin Hood is if you've never heard of his letter to the Homebrew Computer Club[0]. But now you have, so you have no excuse anymore. Gates made a career stealing from not just the poor, but the charitable[1]. Then he pioneered new ways to destroy competing markets[2] He'll have to cure cancer to offset the damage he's done. 0. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_... 1. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-microsofts-dirty-tricks http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-... 2. http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    I don't know all the facts, but I know a lot about this particular case. I'm certain that Gates' impact on the world has been almost entirely transfer of wealth from less wealthy to more wealthy. Microsoft's legacy been technologically bad (as in buggy lousy software), actively hurting (explicitly fighting against) the free software movement which aims to empowers regular people, and bullying governments around the world (literally taking taxpayer money). The elites of Microsoft took home among the greatest amounts of wealth of any company, and employees spend absurdly lavishly on all their business trips etc. Microsoft is a good example of how richer people do NOT deserve their riches, so we're in agreement about the injustice of the system. Your idea that Bill Gates is on the right side of this is, well, almost completely backwards except that some of his philanthrophy is postive today. On the other hand, the Gates Foundation is a major pusher of Common Core testing in education, which is, by many accounts and perspectives, destructive and terrible policy. So, I'm not even sure that the Gates Foundation is all that positive, even there it's a mix.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

It's pretty telling that everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but very few want to be the next Niklaus Wirth, Alan Kay or Gary Kildall. Far fewer are interested in computing so much as a gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.

walterbell 11y ago
> gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies. Yet Gates' and Jobs' gold came from edge clients, not web media. Clients have never been more powerful, why is there no modern gold rush in client software? Is it merely that SaaS/hosted software does not suffer from piracy?
- virmundi 11y ago
  I think is part of it. It's hard to pirate something you can't get a copy of. Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets. The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.
  - boomzilla 11y ago
    I think there are two other factors as why web apps are dominating client apps. The first is distribution cost. Even with AppStore and Android market, it's still very hard to get your app to the users. People browse to hundreds of different websites everyday, but very few try out tens of apps in their phone. The second factor is that the web is intrinsically a lot more connected. One web page/app can easily link to another with, doh, a link. The linking/back button semantics are well understood by all the users.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  "not suffer from piracy" really means "has more power to lock in and control people", and yes, that's a major factor.
11y ago

quadrangle 11y ago

Wonderfully said. Bill Gates remains net negative impact on the world at this point. "If you are giving back, it means you took too much." See http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a_company_a_school_a_life http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...

antaviana 11y ago
It depends on how you look at it. It turned out that Bill Gates is a kind of Robin Hood: in a sense, he robbed the rich (those who could buy a computer or who owned a software company) and gave it to the poor. Unless you believe that richer people should be richer because they deserve it and poorer people should be poorer because they deserve it, I think that he made a positive impact on the world at this point by redistributing wealth.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  the only way you could compare Gates to Robin Hood is if you've never heard of his letter to the Homebrew Computer Club[0]. But now you have, so you have no excuse anymore. Gates made a career stealing from not just the poor, but the charitable[1]. Then he pioneered new ways to destroy competing markets[2] He'll have to cure cancer to offset the damage he's done. 0. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_... 1. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-microsofts-dirty-tricks http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-... 2. http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html
- quadrangle 11y ago
  I don't know all the facts, but I know a lot about this particular case. I'm certain that Gates' impact on the world has been almost entirely transfer of wealth from less wealthy to more wealthy. Microsoft's legacy been technologically bad (as in buggy lousy software), actively hurting (explicitly fighting against) the free software movement which aims to empowers regular people, and bullying governments around the world (literally taking taxpayer money). The elites of Microsoft took home among the greatest amounts of wealth of any company, and employees spend absurdly lavishly on all their business trips etc. Microsoft is a good example of how richer people do NOT deserve their riches, so we're in agreement about the injustice of the system. Your idea that Bill Gates is on the right side of this is, well, almost completely backwards except that some of his philanthrophy is postive today. On the other hand, the Gates Foundation is a major pusher of Common Core testing in education, which is, by many accounts and perspectives, destructive and terrible policy. So, I'm not even sure that the Gates Foundation is all that positive, even there it's a mix.