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.
It's hypothetical to say Gates held back innovation. Period. There is no way to arrive on what the world would be now if for e.g Bill didn't create Microsoft. I respect Jobs but admire Gates. The fact is, he contributed in making PCs affordable. Yes, the world could have had better technologies if not for Microsoft but you don't know that would have happened. It's always easy to imagine better things but reality is way different.
Edit: And I'm surprised by the amount of hate against Bill Gates in HN. We all need to think a minute on what each one of us personally did to make the world better and then opine on Bill Gates. It's easy to hold grudge and hate someone for some hypothetical reasons.
I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosive mass adoption. Even with internet explorer, it introduced the internet to thousands of people. Computers (windows computers) have increased productivity dramatically since the 80s, so much that the cost of having to modify HTML for IE6 is relatively negligible.
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 it's kept alive by bad, outdated corporate policies.
I think both Gates and Carnegie should by evaluated by how they made their fortune, not how they spent it.
They were both ruthlessly aggressive, yet also made their product affordable to more people. By the very act of creating a monopoly, Gates created a huge marketplace for applications that attracted investment - better in that sense that a fragmented market place. He didn't abuse it by charging monopoly rates (quite the opposite).
Is a beneficial end through nasty means a net positive? Probably... overall..., but I hesitate - and the fact that both felt compelled to give the money away suggests that they weren't entirely comfortable with how they made it. And it seems most people weren't either.
I'll give you the jab at IE6 but I take strong exception to your Active Directory comment. It is one of the cooler pieces of tech out of redmond and far and away better than the vanilla LDAP servers from Novel or just about anything else in the open source world. And don't get me started on OD in Apple Server... The multi-master replication features, plus distributed file system stuff, plus profiles, plus multisite policy deployments and on and on all made possible becuase of the core AD system. So sure, bag on IE6 but know there are people out there that can do amazing things with Microsoft software and AD is at the core of much of that.
Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.
This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.
I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.
You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.
People bash over ie6 just because it was revolutionary at that time and some people are still using it. Yeah, it's a pain to deal with as it's a pain to deal with any old technologies. Try to support Netscape 2.0 for fun.
You know...this is something quite often misunderstood...as much as I hate IE6....believe me, I do....as a direct result of IE being included in the operating system, many more people got exposed to the notion of a browser.
The fact is, there is no telling what 'true' Internet adoption would be today if it weren't for Bill Gates including IE in Windows. I am not saying that it wouldn't be the same, but you can't jump to the conclusion that it would be.
We all use and love the internet because mainstream has adopted it. Bill Gates is a fundamental reason that the mainstream has adopted it.
"Paying penance after the fact doesn't excuse the original actions."
Wouldn't paying penance involve actually doing good in the world? So far as I can tell he's basically an overgrown man-child whose using his billions to basically enslave low-income minorities via school 'reforms'.
Plus he's made a lot of investments into technologies to help third world countries, which have mostly been a bust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
"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!"
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?
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.
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.
OS/2 was originally developed by a combination of MS and IBM. It was a much better/more stable OS (I developed on it for a couple of years in the early 90s and used to pity those people in our team left on DOS or the toy Windows OS), but it had one major flaw - it was targetted only at IBM hardware, at least in the first few years. With most of the world heading towards cheap clones, that pretty much killed it as a real commercial option.
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. 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.
"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'...?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
Hating Bill Gates was never a particularly intelligent stance. He was a great businessman and technician, pushing a reallylousy 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] zdw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blntechie|14 years ago|reply
Edit: And I'm surprised by the amount of hate against Bill Gates in HN. We all need to think a minute on what each one of us personally did to make the world better and then opine on Bill Gates. It's easy to hold grudge and hate someone for some hypothetical reasons.
[+] [-] zerostar07|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3am|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
They were both ruthlessly aggressive, yet also made their product affordable to more people. By the very act of creating a monopoly, Gates created a huge marketplace for applications that attracted investment - better in that sense that a fragmented market place. He didn't abuse it by charging monopoly rates (quite the opposite).
Is a beneficial end through nasty means a net positive? Probably... overall..., but I hesitate - and the fact that both felt compelled to give the money away suggests that they weren't entirely comfortable with how they made it. And it seems most people weren't either.
BTW: video of Gate's response http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYQxLhlUtr0&t=6m50s (6:50)
[+] [-] andymoe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angelbob|14 years ago|reply
This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.
I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.
You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.
[+] [-] phzbOx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darrenkopp|14 years ago|reply
And active directory is actually quite good.
[+] [-] ww520|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcamillion|14 years ago|reply
The fact is, there is no telling what 'true' Internet adoption would be today if it weren't for Bill Gates including IE in Windows. I am not saying that it wouldn't be the same, but you can't jump to the conclusion that it would be.
We all use and love the internet because mainstream has adopted it. Bill Gates is a fundamental reason that the mainstream has adopted it.
[+] [-] rbanffy|14 years ago|reply
That's Bill's tragedy. To be remembered as the guy who never had a really original idea...
(burn, karma, burn)
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
Wouldn't paying penance involve actually doing good in the world? So far as I can tell he's basically an overgrown man-child whose using his billions to basically enslave low-income minorities via school 'reforms'.
Plus he's made a lot of investments into technologies to help third world countries, which have mostly been a bust.
[+] [-] neebz|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shriphani|14 years ago|reply
And what a resume Mr. Gates has - Personal Computing, conquering the enterprise and now polio + malaria. Man's in God Mode.
[+] [-] pinwale|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jach|14 years ago|reply
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/ There's also 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....
"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!"
[+] [-] joezydeco|14 years ago|reply
"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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prof_hobart|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artursapek|14 years ago|reply
Doesn't shock me that he's donating his money by the billions.
[1] http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-gates-b...
[+] [-] Carlfish|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarofgreen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMc|14 years ago|reply
Am I the only one who read that and thought, 'Wow, Steve Jobs could be a bit of an asshole'...?
[+] [-] zerostar07|14 years ago|reply
[*] he wasn't poor, probably more than middle class; in any case, there's no doubt he's self-made
[+] [-] Anechoic|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shareme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyrhett|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerfulninja|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dubya|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooldeal|14 years ago|reply
Umm, just read some of the comments on this article? Or any Microsoft related posts on Slashdot?
[+] [-] singingfish|14 years ago|reply
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>
[+] [-] BuddhaSource|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
Jobs made great products.. but Bill felt like a more consistent person.
[+] [-] meow|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xborns|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jfb|14 years ago|reply
That his company produced a whole raft of wretched technologies is germane, but hardly dispositive.
[+] [-] vidarh|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegai|14 years ago|reply
That's why I hate Microsoft.
[+] [-] nekojima|14 years ago|reply
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.