Why do you think Silicon Valley has never quite come around on this guy?
Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake.
Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts? He fucked anyone who got in his way, always to the benefit of Microsoft, and usually to the detriment of the industry.
When others wrote better code, he called his lawyers. When other developers wanted to collaborate, he stole their intellectual property. When customers or vendors balked, he crushed them. And when the citizens saw how unfair it all was and took action, he called his lobbyists.
So now maybe he wants to be like Andrew Carnegie in his next act, conveniently forgetting all the lives destroyed in the hope of "giving it all back". If so, good.
I really try to keep upbeat and optimistic in my posts here at hn, but I also understand how much we have forgotten, and sometimes I just can't resist. Every time I read about Bill Gates worship, I can vomit. Sometimes I really wonder how much better things would be for all of us hackers is he had just gone to law school and left our industry to develop as it could have.
Your argument is silly all the way through. He's got an IQ of 160, which means he actually is considerably smarter than most of the rest of us.
He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements.
It's ludicrous to say that he's destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself.
It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates.
I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.
> Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.
The rest of your post is very insightful, but this part above strikes me as petty - I was low born myself, was given almost nothing except birth in the USA in the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.
"And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts?"
He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away.
It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that.
That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.
Yes, he had a few things going for him but to trivalize what he/Microsoft accomplished over the years with "no smarter and worked no harder" is quiet ludicrous as mega successes usually have an unusually perfect set of circumstances that allow the successes to happen, whether you're talking about Ted Turner, Oracle or Google.
The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has.
Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same.
Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses.
Would the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.
Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty.
Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?
Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter.
No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck.
He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it.
I can't believe this is getting upvotes. Destroyed lives? Please. Get some perspective. And check your history. The guy bootstrapped Microsoft using nothing but sweat equity -- no investment, no inheritance -- working for years in very meager circumstances in New Mexico before getting some traction and moving to Washington. In short he lived the dream that many of us aspire to, and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. The article was spot-on.
It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.
In the words of Linus Torvalds "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems."
the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought.
if you really hate microsoft, go build something better.
the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.
Agreed. Most robber barons of their time seem to follow this same pattern - scorched earth rise to power, then spend their waning years in philanthropy.
And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then:
As I understand, he also met Warren Buffet at a young age through his parents and formed a relationship with him. (I think he was a friend of his parents and met Bill at a party.)
As you said Bill Gates coming from a rich background which makes it even more amazing that how much he spends on charity (as a person who has never been poor)
Many fledgling industries have "evil titans". Look at oil, trains, telephone, social media. I'm not intimately acquainted enough with the actual events that earn Gates/Microsoft's popular ire, but if they hadn't earned the evil titan role somebody else would have. The work Gates is doing now I think makes up for any rough play he may have engaged in in the past.
If you think the unethical business decisions he made in the yesteryear outweigh the billions he has poured into philanthropic work in recent years, we have very different views of ethics.
The man has started a movement among billionaires to use their wealth toward charitable purposes, and somehow you can pass it off based on his wealthy upbringing and a "Carnegie complex"?
Injustices in technology are much less important than the injustices Gates is trying to fix now.
Is it better to be a bully in business and do great things with the wealth or to be graceful in business and squander a fortune? I really don't know but my initial reaction says the former.
The interesting fact that is often left out of these Gates-as-philanthropist v. Jobs-as-salesman arguments is that Jobs has 1/10 the wealth that Bill Gates has, if that, even though Apple is now worth more than Microsoft. So if this is a simple comparison of allocation of wealth we find that Jobs simply hasn't taken the money (look at his paycheck v. Apple's cash holdings for crying out loud). And socially how effective is charity relative to giving it to the market? I'm not sure, but it's open to debate.
So does two decades of merciless greed followed by a decade of giving some of that money away constitute heroism? To an extent, yes. But I think we ought to give simply taking a lower cash holding a better look also.
Jobs' wealth is lower than Gates because Apple raised more money than Microsoft did early on, and because he sold all his stock when he left Apple and is now compensated in stock options rather than in founders' stock.
"And socially how effective is charity relative to giving it to the market? I'm not sure, but it's open to debate."
Generally speaking this is true, but if you look into the kind of charity work Bill Gates does, you'll find a lot of it is investing in setups that will be able to support themselves after a while and even pay back what was invested in them initially.
To me Bill Gates will always be a modern-day Rockefeller: he clawed and trampled his way to the top, then once he was there he gave away his money -- a lot of it, to be sure -- and will always be remembered for that, rather than the ugly methods he used to get it.
It's laudable when somebody gives so freely and I don't want to take away from that, but I find it hard to view him charitably because I know that even now, this is all about him, making him feel better about himself. Many others sacrificed much more for the good of others without having to tread so heavily.
I am rather grateful for Gates' contribution to the software industry. Standardizing the development environment was monumental toward facilitating innovation in software development. Imagine if Steve Jobs controlled the industry with as much power that Gates did, how much different would the world be? While I dont like to deal in "IF's," if we judge people/organizations by their actions, Microsoft has always been a relatively open environment whereas today Apple continues to tyranically control their platform. Seeing Apple rule would have sucked for everyone.
On the other hand OS X on the Mac is a relatively robust and usable platform and Windows on the PC still sucks for many users (I'm two days into a Windows rebuild at the moment).
It's swings and roundabouts. Gates and MS made good calls and they made bad calls, Jobs is the same.
For me I think Bill did OK, while I can imagine some using that sort of power in a more altruistic way, I can also see many doing far far worse things with it.
I think he's villanized because of his main product, Windows. It suffers from the same plight Bill himself suffers as mentioned in the article. Awkwardness.
As much as this seems like snark, it's a fair observation.
Bill Gates is often seen as a villain because of the late 1990s behavior of Microsoft and the quality of some of their flagship products (Windows and IE). It can be hard to separate perceptions of Bill Gates the man/philanthropist from Bill Gates the businessman. Perceptions of Bill Gates are colored by BSoD's, IE's non-compliance to standards, Frontpage creating pages that only rendered in IE, and awkward conventions and interfaces in several popular pieces of software.
(I personally think very highly of Bill and Melinda Gates for their charitable work.)
Sure, he's villainized because he aggressively forced his company's software on the world regardless of the poor quality and the negative effect it has had on essentially everyone. They bloodthirstily copied competing software to the pixel and bludgeoned innovators to death with it. I can't even calculate how much the simply poor ideas and execution of DOS/Windows has cost the computing world and everyone as a result.
If you go back to 1988, and compare a DOS machine to say, an Amiga - how could anyone say that Microsoft did the world good by ensuring that the primitive, clunky, non-user friendly junk that was DOS beat out the relatively amazing competition?
So, Gates shoved this awful crap on us to make himself rich, regardless of the consequences. I can't respect a software company that has never appeared to be concerned with or even understand software quality.
At the same time I think we need to remember the motto of Microsoft up until a couple years ago: "a computer in every home." Without Microsoft I'm not sure that would have been done so effectively or quickly and I'm positive that the tech world which we build in now is a direct result of that fact. The reason Microsoft changed their motto is because they actually succeeded, which is simply amazing.
The first thing you do in real life, not in fantasy blogger-land, once you are able to is go back and apologize to the guys you stomped on along the way.
I am talking about STAC, Gary Kildall's family, etc.
Also perhaps an effort at MSFT to reverse the culture of lying and deceit that even now permeates their marketing.
I see no evidence of Gates doing that. Self-reflection would be required for that to happen.
In some respects I see Zuckerberg following the same path.
First comment on HN after lurking for a year or so. It does irk me that people who obtain their wealth by means of sitting at the top of a monopoly can be praised by giving away the money that they did not have to work so hard for without others giving second thought to how the person arrived in that position in the first place. Sure it was hard to get to the monopoly position in the first place, but what happened after?
Now, to be fair, he is a huge philanthropist and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does some amazing work, but praise what you preach, Microsoft needs to start paying its dues.
The man is the greatest philanthropist of our time. He's doing more for the world than everyone commenting here combined, to some outrageous exponent. Decry the man's business practices, but at the end of the day it was a means to an end. He's taking his wealth and spending it wisely on charity. Further, he's convincing other billionaires to do the same. I say we leave his tenure at Microsoft in the past and focus on the stuff that will truly be his legacy: helping mankind. And for that, I say, good for you Mr. Gates.
For what it's worth, Gates has been getting a lot of crap in the political sphere for this statement he made a couple of months ago. Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze, has been ripping him for his stance seemingly favoring "death panels."
I lean on the side of the blog post, even if his company's quality (as has been noted in the comments) has been downright abhorrent.
Bill Gates is the ultimate example of what's explained in the book 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell. Success is usually a combination of hard work & luck.
I suppose Bill Gates was responsible for the death of Princess Di as well? Britney Spears 3rd album too. Not to mention Hanson and Take That. And all those Hugh Grant films. Sooo bad.
My point? No point really, just adding to the existing rubbish on this thread.
Glenn has it wrong. Without a doubt Bill's creations at Microsoft are far more important than what he's doing now. I prefer the capitalist Gates to the egalitarian one.
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Because of the trail of dead bodies and lost opportunities left in his wake.
Let's not forget, Bill Gates was handed a 0th birthday gift of $1 million from his grandfather, the keys to his private middle school computer (the same one Stanford had), and a free ticket to do business with IBM because his mother already knew its chairman.
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
And what did he do with these fabulous once-in-a-lifetime gifts? He fucked anyone who got in his way, always to the benefit of Microsoft, and usually to the detriment of the industry.
When others wrote better code, he called his lawyers. When other developers wanted to collaborate, he stole their intellectual property. When customers or vendors balked, he crushed them. And when the citizens saw how unfair it all was and took action, he called his lobbyists.
So now maybe he wants to be like Andrew Carnegie in his next act, conveniently forgetting all the lives destroyed in the hope of "giving it all back". If so, good.
I really try to keep upbeat and optimistic in my posts here at hn, but I also understand how much we have forgotten, and sometimes I just can't resist. Every time I read about Bill Gates worship, I can vomit. Sometimes I really wonder how much better things would be for all of us hackers is he had just gone to law school and left our industry to develop as it could have.
</rant>
Oooh, that feels better. Now back to work.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|15 years ago|reply
He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements.
It's ludicrous to say that he's destroyed lives. He's perhaps run competitors out of business, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the actual people involved didn't end up in a gutter as a result. Netscape is the most often cited victim of his allegedly brutal business acumen, and Marc Andreesen seems to be doing alright for himself.
It's totally impossible to say what was to the detriment (or benefit) of the industry. To do so, you'd have to compare this universe to another which was identical to this other than Bill Gates having not existed. All we can say for sure is that Bill was consequential enough that the alternate universe would look much different, certainly better in some ways, just as surely worse in others, but on the balance who knows? You could just as well predict what the weather will be 100 years from now as you could what the world would have been like without Bill Gates.
I don't think pointing out his philanthropic endeavors amounts to worship. And I suspect things would not be better for Hackers at all, but again, I cannot see into alternate universes. He's simply become a scapegoat for all of the frustrations of people who are more comfortable with computers than they are with the businesses that drive a society that can create such a thing.
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
The rest of your post is very insightful, but this part above strikes me as petty - I was low born myself, was given almost nothing except birth in the USA in the modern era, but I think good for people who are given things and achieve with them. The bad things stand on their own - you include the fact that he was given gifts as if it makes him worse - it doesn't - at least, not by my ethics. Other people can disagree. Let his bad deeds stand on their own, the rest of it comes across as sour grapes.
[+] [-] jakarta|15 years ago|reply
He used those gifts to amass wealth which he is now in the process of mostly giving away.
It goes back to Warren Buffett who claimed that he won the ovarian lottery, being born at the right time with the right circumstances which enabled him to become extremely wealthy. As a result, Buffett advocates giving away 99% of his fortune in recognition of that.
That's contrary to other groups of the ultra-wealthy who vigorously fight against increased taxation because it robs them of money that they earned through "hard work" without recognizing the benefits of the society that they were born into.
[+] [-] melvinram|15 years ago|reply
The circumstances may be favorable but it takes good decisions and massive action to turn the circumstances into a multi-billion dollar, world changing enterprise.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and it's products but it's undeniable that Bill has the opportunity to improve the quality of hundreds of millions of people in a way that no one ever has.
--
Written on a MacBook Pro
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same.
Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses.
Would the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.
[+] [-] pchristensen|15 years ago|reply
Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty.
Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?
[+] [-] Revisor|15 years ago|reply
Sure he was smart and he worked hard, but he was no smarter and worked no harder than many of the rest of us.
With all due respect, this is such a bitter, jealous and peasant-like rant that's not even worth your status as the best HN commenter.
No matter what Gates' starting position was, his success was nothing than a lot of hard work, several good decisions and some luck.
He got a million bucks and a computer? Well he could have spent it on whores and only played games. His mother knew the chairman of IBM? Instead of using this connection he could have absolutely squandered or missed it.
But he made good use of it.
Shame on you and all your upvoters.
[+] [-] sutro|15 years ago|reply
It's sad that myopic, hysterical, anti-Microsoft rants citing dead bodies and destroyed lives get upvotes on Hacker News.
[+] [-] ariels|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qasar|15 years ago|reply
the point of the article is that he has done a lot of great for people that markets have traditionally ignored, not if he deserved the success microsoft brought.
if you really hate microsoft, go build something better.
the only thing that counts is action and results. the market doesnt care if you if you're mom knew the IBM chairman - it only cares what you can do with what you have.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
And for a little trip down memory lane, for those who might not have been around then:
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
The original Finding of Fact from US vs. Microsoft is worth a read too if you haven't, corroborates most of the above:
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
Not the worst person to have in your rolodex.
[+] [-] stackthat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reader5000|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0th87|15 years ago|reply
The man has started a movement among billionaires to use their wealth toward charitable purposes, and somehow you can pass it off based on his wealthy upbringing and a "Carnegie complex"?
Injustices in technology are much less important than the injustices Gates is trying to fix now.
[+] [-] garrettgillas|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ch0wn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmcneale|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srw|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theprodigy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pstuart|15 years ago|reply
When she connected the plight of many of the world's children to that of their own he got it.
[+] [-] brudgers|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siglesias|15 years ago|reply
So does two decades of merciless greed followed by a decade of giving some of that money away constitute heroism? To an extent, yes. But I think we ought to give simply taking a lower cash holding a better look also.
[+] [-] qq66|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Encosia|15 years ago|reply
I'll take that actual wealth over valuation on paper any day.
[+] [-] mtts|15 years ago|reply
Generally speaking this is true, but if you look into the kind of charity work Bill Gates does, you'll find a lot of it is investing in setups that will be able to support themselves after a while and even pay back what was invested in them initially.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
When the Devil gets old, he joins the abbey.
[+] [-] seldo|15 years ago|reply
It's laudable when somebody gives so freely and I don't want to take away from that, but I find it hard to view him charitably because I know that even now, this is all about him, making him feel better about himself. Many others sacrificed much more for the good of others without having to tread so heavily.
[+] [-] lefstathiou|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tyrannosaurs|15 years ago|reply
It's swings and roundabouts. Gates and MS made good calls and they made bad calls, Jobs is the same.
For me I think Bill did OK, while I can imagine some using that sort of power in a more altruistic way, I can also see many doing far far worse things with it.
[+] [-] m3mb3r|15 years ago|reply
There are two separate aspects here, professional and personal.
Silicon Valley judges people based on their professional acumen and practices. And Gates did not please everybody in this department.
And the other aspect, yes, people in tech do admire his humanitarian efforts.
It's just that mixing two aspects of a personality and trying to come up with an overall score does not work.
[+] [-] edkennedy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotharbot|15 years ago|reply
Bill Gates is often seen as a villain because of the late 1990s behavior of Microsoft and the quality of some of their flagship products (Windows and IE). It can be hard to separate perceptions of Bill Gates the man/philanthropist from Bill Gates the businessman. Perceptions of Bill Gates are colored by BSoD's, IE's non-compliance to standards, Frontpage creating pages that only rendered in IE, and awkward conventions and interfaces in several popular pieces of software.
(I personally think very highly of Bill and Melinda Gates for their charitable work.)
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
If you go back to 1988, and compare a DOS machine to say, an Amiga - how could anyone say that Microsoft did the world good by ensuring that the primitive, clunky, non-user friendly junk that was DOS beat out the relatively amazing competition?
So, Gates shoved this awful crap on us to make himself rich, regardless of the consequences. I can't respect a software company that has never appeared to be concerned with or even understand software quality.
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickgzill|15 years ago|reply
I am talking about STAC, Gary Kildall's family, etc.
Also perhaps an effort at MSFT to reverse the culture of lying and deceit that even now permeates their marketing.
I see no evidence of Gates doing that. Self-reflection would be required for that to happen.
In some respects I see Zuckerberg following the same path.
[+] [-] bhoung|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitchen|15 years ago|reply
http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/09/microsofts-nevada-tax-d...
tax the wealthy, so long as it's not him.
Now, to be fair, he is a huge philanthropist and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does some amazing work, but praise what you preach, Microsoft needs to start paying its dues.
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply
If not, then why do you think businesses should do so?
[+] [-] Eruc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortformblog|15 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, Gates has been getting a lot of crap in the political sphere for this statement he made a couple of months ago. Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze, has been ripping him for his stance seemingly favoring "death panels."
I lean on the side of the blog post, even if his company's quality (as has been noted in the comments) has been downright abhorrent.
[+] [-] brudgers|15 years ago|reply
Microsoft's success in Redmond doesn't fit with the Silicon Valley narrative that ties creativity to geography.
In other words Microsoft's success challenges the value of Silicon Valley's terroir. It goes against the brand.
That's not to say that geography doesn't play a role - it's hard to imagine a Microsoft based out of Bentonville.
[+] [-] Bricejm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RuadhanMc|15 years ago|reply
My point? No point really, just adding to the existing rubbish on this thread.
[+] [-] kevin_morrill|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeisc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fady|15 years ago|reply