
How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates? - rrohan189
http://www.alearningaday.com/2011/11/how-can-anyone-still-hate-bill-gates.html
======
zdw
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.

~~~
zerostar07
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.

~~~
hype7
Are you kidding me?

He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist,
using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things
affordable?

He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best
people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done
that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-
gotten gains.

~~~
bad_user

         made, by and large, shitty products that
         at best people have tolerated because they
         felt they had no alternative
    

Microsoft Office was quite good from the get go. WordPerfect may have been
better, but Office was more affordable. It won on merits, and although later
they preserved this newly acquired monopoly through proprietary formats,
Office is a pretty good product.

Internet Explorer kicked Netscape's ass. It only stagnated after version 5,
when there was no competition remaining, but IExplorer was then the equivalent
of today's Chrome ... fast and innovative.

Also people only remember Windows 9x and cry about the failure of OS/2, but NT
4.0 was released in Jul 96 and it was a pretty good operating system. It
evolved later in Windows 2000 and XP. And it wasn't sold to consumers because
consumers didn't want it. Instead consumers wanted 100% backwards
compatibility - this was a hard constraint to workaround as hardware was not
powerful enough for emulation modes.

People also cry about how Microsoft killed Netscape and yet how many people
are willing to pay for their browser? Some people do, but not that many. And
the Internet is useless without a browser. The irony of the situation is that
many of the people blaming Microsoft for Netscape also love free stuff. And
you really should do some reading on what Netscape did, because the truth is
they killed themselves with whatever remained going on to live as the Mozilla
Foundation, which is doing fine.

The thing is operating systems are natural monopolies. And when owning such a
powerful monopoly, it is hard to not abuse it ... witness Apple, they don't
even have a monopoly yet and are acting like total jerks. Witness Google for
that matter and how they basically killed WebOS and MeeGo.

Is it fair? Probably not, but MeeGo is also dying because of Nokia's
incompetence and WebOS is also dying because of HP and Palm. You can't blame
only Android for that.

I got my first computer 16 years ago. It came with a licensed MS-DOS 6.22 and
Windows for Workgroups. It was built by a local computer shop. It was a lot
cheaper than what I could buy from any US company.

~~~
viraptor
> Office is a pretty good product.

Yeah... which was incompatible with previous version of itself, which happily
saved deleted information in the file, crashed like hell and (in my opinion)
taught people to just mark stuff and change it, instead of structuring
documents properly.

~~~
VMG
Most people don't really care about most of the things you mentioned. Office
was and is still stable, useful and easy enough for most people and
businesses.

------
neebz
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.

------
shriphani
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.

~~~
pinwale
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.

------
hrktb
I have to thank Bill Gates for changing my life.

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
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.

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism)
)

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....](http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum.no.html)

"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
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?

~~~
bgarbiak
Without iTunes for Windows Zune would succeed.

~~~
nerfhammer
Without iTunes for Windows would Zune even exist?

------
mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
bgarbiak
Completely agree. People hate Gates and Microsoft for some really silly
reasons. Windows 95? It was a brave and revolutionary OS. Would world switch
to Linux, Mac or BeOS if there was no Win95? No way it would, it would wait
for Windows 4. Internet Explorer 6? Great, great browser by the time it was
released. Really, whoever calls that 'crap, uninnovative software' wasn't
there in 2001. Office? By far the best office software suite out there.
Windows XP? People use it to this day and are so happy about it they don't
want to change if for newer and better systems.

Of course there were things that MS did wrong (especially on the business side
of things) but the whole hatred thing is, in my opinion, more like a kind of
pop-culture than something based on facts. Just look at Xbox360 - it only took
to not advertise it as a Microsoft creation and kids who ridicule Windows on a
day-to-day basis are now "Halo fanboys".

As for the Jobs quotes - if these were taken as some kind of a gospel or a
road sign we all should hate Android by now. Actually, it amazes me that Jobs
is so glorified here, while Gates always gets the flack - after all the word
"hacker" suits the latter a lot more.

~~~
InclinedPlane
A few points worthy of note:

MS has terrible taste (as Jobs famously pointed out), and a lot of people hate
companies with a bad sense of fashion and taste. That's a big reason why
people hate walmart, I expect.

MS _has_ been a bully and has used its size to gain an unfair advantage from
time to time. However, in general I'd say that MS is actually less guilty of
this sort of thing than the average run-of-the-mill company of a similar size.
Compare and contrast with, say, AEG, Bank of America, or Archer-Daniels-
Midland for example. On a properly calibrated evil-o-meter MS hardly
registers.

Finally, it's easy to develop a strong mental picture of a hypothetical
"better" world, even if that world is wholly impractical. There are
fundamental reasons why linux, to this day, is still not the best choice for
the average consumer desktop. Even down to a fundamental technological design
level there are good reasons why that's so (though there's also android, which
still has a delicious linux core). The truth is that "the man" hasn't been
holding back electric car technology, solar power, and linux on the desktop
merely to prop up big oil and Microsoft. Sometimes it takes time for competing
technologies to mature to a level to where they are actually competitive.
Linux has done awesomely in the server market, for example, even despite MS's
massive expenditures to make substantial inroads.

------
artursapek
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] [http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-
gates-b...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/10/27/bill-gates-being-
a-billionaire-is-overrated/)

------
Carlfish
To paraphrase the argument: "If you steal more money than you can possibly
spend, giving the rest away makes everything OK."

~~~
jarofgreen
+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.

------
MarkMc
"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'...?

------
zerostar07
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

~~~
shareme
ahem, Bill Gates parents probably did not pay for Harvard with fake money

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm not certain of this, but I don't think Harvard has always cost an arm, a
leg, and twelve kidneys.

------
heyrhett
This email Bill sent out, pleading for anyone at Microsoft to care about
usability, made me like him a little better:
[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf)

------
powerfulninja
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.

~~~
dubya
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.

------
singingfish
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>

------
BuddhaSource
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.

~~~
rrohan189
Cannot agree more.

Jobs made great products.. but Bill felt like a more consistent person.

------
meow
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.

------
xborns
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.

------
jfb
Hating Bill Gates was never a particularly intelligent stance. He was a great
businessman and technician, pushing a _really_ _lousy_ 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.

~~~
vidarh
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.

------
protomyth
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.

------
vegai
He capitalized on the idea that the consumer is not allowed to choose the
operating system of the computer they buy. That idea hasn't yet faded.

That's why I hate Microsoft.

~~~
nekojima
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.

~~~
vegai
Macs have the same problem. You can't get a mac without OS X.

------
Zarathust
At the time of Windows 98/ME, I really hated Bill Gates. We had no viable
alternative for an OS and the current state of things wasn't likely to change
for a long time. Now over a decade later, Windows is much better, up to a
point that I no longer feel ashamed to use it.

~~~
kamechan
windows NT? or linux if one was willing to struggle with the hardware a bit. i
actually had a dual boot windows NT/slack machine at the time, which i'd named
"bgates".

------
dendory
I heard a story the other day where a new computer magazine was starting up in
Brazil in the late 1990s. Microsoft went to them and offered to take full page
ads. But when the price came into question, Microsoft PR said they would not
pay, and that the magazine should just run Microsoft ads for free, because
"nobody trusts a computer magazine if Microsoft isn't advertising in it."

This is _classic_ Microsoft practice, and this is why so many people hate the
company. I don't hate Bill, and I'm sure most people don't hate him personally
either, but he was CEO of this company that has made many, many bad things
happen.

~~~
Niten
This is such a silly complaint.

If the story is true, then Microsoft is simply making an offer. Either it's
worth enough to the magazine to place a Microsoft ad without being paid for
it, and they accept the offer; or it isn't, and they reject it. It's not like
Microsoft was trying to get them to drop competitors' ads or something.

There's just no evil there. Maybe it would be nice of them pour cash they
don't have to let go of into a startup magazine, but Microsoft isn't a
charity. If their PR department can sell someone on the idea of running ads
for them for free, that's not evil, it's just good salesmanship.

I might as well complain that I'm not getting a check from Apple when I go
places with my laptop and its glowing logo. Never mind that on the whole,
buying this computer was a beneficial transaction for me – just look at all
this free advertising I'm giving them!

~~~
dendory
I disagree, Microsoft would be a great advertiser to get, and the only reason
they can get away with the practice is because they are a monopoly. Would be
illegal in the US, but they do it to other countries.

------
quinndupont
Ever read Zizek? tl;dr: so-called charity is just the entrenchment of
capitalism, which requires considerable income disparity to function. So, far
from eradicating poverty, he's deepening it. Another commenter mentioned
Carnegie (could add Rockefeller or any of the other robber barons), it's a
good parallel (look into the history, e.g., these men where so awful they
would even sell known-to-be-faulty guns to the army during the civil war, so
soldiers would end up blowing off their limbs while in battle)

------
giardini
Easy. One sees the destruction he left in his wake.

------
nks
I've always been a little confused as to why whenever Jobs and Gates come
under discussion, there is an instant contrast drawn with either one placed on
completely different extremes. One was good other was bad, one was creative
other was not, one was spiritual and zen-like and the other was stuffy and
corporate. It's almost like they cannot be reconciled in any way possible.

I feel like people often conflate people with their creations and forget that
they both are human beings who change, evolve and behave differently under
different contexts.

I mean, they both are/were great visionaries and their greatness was
manifested in different ways just like their weaknesses in personalities. They
both created lasting companies which changed the world at an age where most of
us are still figuring out what to do with our lives.

You don't have to hate BillG in order to like Steve Jobs or vice versa.

I personally find inspiring traits in both of them.

------
lispm
Gates and his company were responsible for several releases of a very
depressing operating system and a lot of shitty business software. I use
Microsoft Word and it is amazingly bad. It is full of bugs, has a complex user
interface but simple things don't work correctly and Microsoft hasn't been
able to fix it for a decade. Currently I work for a company which uses
Microsoft Sharepoint. It fulfills all expectations I have about Microsoft
software and their services. Still, Microsoft does deliver from time to times
some good stuff, but their core software (the operating systems and their
software for business) is a huge ripoff.

~~~
vacri
A good thing that there are so many quality alternatives for Microsoft's
shitty business software!

------
Limes102
I love Mac OS, but I definitely do not hate Bill Gates. He made computers
affordable and accessible, while making a lot of money. A lot of that money
has gone to charities which is great.

------
Tycho
I hate how in HN discussions like this, philanthropy is always exalted as some
untouchable trump card. I admire Gates more for the products/achievements of
Microsoft (I don't remember too many people ever saying to me 'oh i wish i had
a Mac, Windows is like a hellish prison I cannot escape from' - it was more
like 'you use a Mac? lulz') than the achievements of the Bill and Melissa
Gates Foundation. Personally.

And much of the moaning about Microsoft's so-called monopolies just sounds
like sour grapes.

------
coup
Well, whether the market competitors were innocent victims of Gates' savvy
schemes or whether he was just better at executing the same tricks and basics
in that business is up for debate. For me, he's just another, rather due to
his economical than technical knowledge, financially successful person in our
brutally unfair world. What he does with his money is comparatively pretty
noble but on an absolute scale neither very effective nor intelligent.

------
T_S_
Gates did an amazing job of taking advantage of my many bosses ignorance in
the early 90's. We all still pay for that, though less and less it seems.
Thank goodness he left Balmer in charge.

As for the the whole redemption through philanthropy thing, it's fun to watch
the wealthy compete in the legacy game. Go Bill!

------
tnicola
This kind of makes me angry as well. Partly because I was about to write
almost identical blog whilst deciding whether to buy a MacBook Air or a Lenovo
IdeaPad. MacBook won, but only because Apple insists on me owning Apple in
order to publish to their bookstore. A move I deem despicable and rude.

Until recently, Apple was also the biggest polluter in their sector and their
philanthropic side is non-existent.

That and, does nobody remember that Jobs ripped off Xerox?

"Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap. Everything since
abacus, just a bunch of crap. From Mackintosh to Microsoft to Lin, Line, Lin,
Line-ux. Every computer crashes, cause every OS sucks!"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFZgD9mwxA>

------
chernevik
Philanthropy demonstrates good will as well as indulgences demonstrated
sanctity.

There's nothing more materialist than associating virtue with the scale of
one's donations.

------
chunkyslink
>> How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

For being a part of Internet Explorer. I just cant let it go!

------
VikingCoder
If I was Tim Paterson, I'd be pretty pissed at Bill Gates.

------
Apocryphon
I wonder what Larry Ellison will end up doing.

------
bediger
Two famous saying come to mind:

"Trust, but verify."

and as Ben Franklin once said, "Keep your eyes on it, and feel for your
hatchet." I'd add to keep the other hand on your wallet.

------
uris
Reads something fabricated by Newsmax.

------
toddh
Habit?

------
cooldeal
The answer is easy. As someone who has most experience with such types of
people said:

[http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...](http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_a_Disease)

~~~
mladenkovacevic
I hope this has been posted at the top of HN before... if it hasn't it really
should.

------
recoiledsnake
Related article:

[http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/bill-
gates-...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/bill-gates-not-
steve-jobs-the-real-hero-177864)

Quote:

Since leaving Microsoft, Gates and his wife Melinda have made their foundation
into one of the world's premier charities. Since 1994, the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation amassed an endowment of more than $31 billion in funds to
fight the world's most difficult issues. But it hasn't merely accumulated
funds, the foundation has already given away more than $25 billion, as Wessel
notes in his HBR essay.

I don't know what Jobs did with his money. He may well have been a substantial
donor to many a good cause. But at the end of his life, he was focused on
business, while Gates is focused on broader and ultimately more significant
concerns.

In a note to the members of the Harvard community, Gates wrote, "I hope you
will reflect on what you've done with your talent and energy. I hope you will
judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on
how well you work to address the world's deepest inequities, on how well you
treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their
humanity."

~~~
raganwald
I don’t know what Jobs did with his money and I don’t care, it has zero to do
with what Bill does with his money. I can decide whether to admire Bill on the
basis of his actions rather than trying to compare him to others.

Am I to think more of him if he gave away more money than Steve Jobs? What a
ridiculous notion. If you buy that argument, I ask you to think less of him
because he spent fewer of the limited number of hours of his lifetime on
philanthropy than some of the people who inherited a fortune and spend their
lives on charitable causes. Or less of him because he didn’t minister to the
sick and needy in Calcutta’s slums.

Each person can be judged on their own merits. I have nothing against admiring
Mr. Gates, and I don’t think we need to drag Mr. Jobs or anybody else into the
discussion.

~~~
varunsrin
Jobs is relevant to this discussion, because the article is based around the
following quote:

"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why
I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology"

I've always considered charity to be a personal thing, and if Jobs didn't want
to give it away, well that was his money, and his decision. However, attacking
Gates for helping eradicate polio / malaria is simply unnecessary, and comes
off as a childish retort.

~~~
sliverstorm
_Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything_

If Bill never invented anything, I'm not sure Jobs did either. Sure, Jobs
dreamt up the iPod and the iPhone, but telling engineers what to do is not the
same as inventing.

~~~
manish_gill
Exactly. This is why I'm irritated every time I see a comment comparing Jobs
to Edison. He wasn't an Engineer. Even from the beginning.

~~~
rrohan189
agree. he really knew how to market products..

------
mkramlich
If a man has $1000 dollars and gives half away I'd think he's foolish but
since he did something that hurts him he deserves respect.

If a man has a billion dollars and gives half away he's smart, he makes
himself look good (buying it) and yet experiences no pain or personal downside
in exchange. In effect it cost him nothing. While I'm glad he did it, I'm also
not impressed. Also it seems to be rare that someone becomes a billionaire
without being an asshole and screwing over other people along the way, whether
employees, partners or competitors. So this makes me even less impressed. Also
I know several people who have much less wealth, who didn't come from Gates
silver spoon background, yet perform charity and never engaged in the shady
pratices, or shoddy craftsmanship, that Microsoft and Gates have done. So
again, color me not impressed, and everything needs to be evaluated in the
context of the larger ecosystem, and what everybody else out there is doing.

~~~
pbsurf
Luke 21:1-4

~~~
mkramlich
Yoda, Ep. V

------
omlette
im skeptical that any amount of damage bill gates might have done to
technology is outweighed by millions of vaccines and thousands of schools in
developing countries.

------
napierzaza
Jobs is right. Gates gave up and lost interest. He lifted his head up and
realized he needn't work ever again and didn't get any satisfaction from
working. So why not give away the money you made since you couldn't possibly
give enough away in your lifetime. Gates couldn't even make a dent in his
lifestyle at the rate he's going.

As for Steve Jobs. He kept his head down and kept working. And when you talk
about CEOs you're talking about 24 hours a day working. No time to start funds
and foundations.

But where did Job's money go? He apparently lived very simply. Is his family
just really filthy rich? It seems odd. Maybe it was a strange thing where he
ignored that he had money and didn't want to think about? Maybe he was
stockpiling it because he was poor or sick.

Just a bunch of speculation.

~~~
varunsrin
Gates didn't lift his head up and decide to give to charity. Read some of his
earlier interviews from the 90's - when asked what he would do with his
wealth, he often stated that he would spend his 50's & 60's giving a large
portion of it away. I was skeptical when I heard this back then - but the man
has more than stayed true to his word.

------
rayhano
Here here

------
keeptrying
I dont hate Gates. I hate windows because its so annoying.

------
tobylane
Bill Gates definitely agrees with Occupy Wall Street. He hates the 1% and
helps the 99%. But he didn't get the full message, so he thinks its the top 1%
in the world, which is roughly the group with good access to a good computer.
So he gave a crappy OS to the top 1% in the world, and a lot of well needed
help (medical/etc) to the 99%.

Just to point out, joking. Timeline doesn't work, and Windows isn't so bad.

~~~
rsanchez1
Too bad the 99% will just see the billions and scream bloody murder.

------
kwanbis
Well, if Hitler was alive today, and he started doing charity, people would
still hate him. Obviously BG is not Adolf, but is a on purpose exaggerated
example. He did so much damage on the beginning.

~~~
sliverstorm
The difference is Hitler would have to start one _hell_ of a charity to make
up for the roughly 50 million soldiers who lost their lives in Europe during
World War II, not to mention the 6 million Jewish executed.

~~~
suivix
But Bill Gates forces people to use IE6, which wastes a lot of time that
equates to thousands of lives.

~~~
sliverstorm
You're really going to try to compare a little time wasted with IE6 to a
brutal death on a freezing battlefield thousands of miles from home? Really?

~~~
suivix
I was being sarcastic.

------
TomOfTTB
Here's a reason: He poisoned the world.

When Microsoft had control of the world's technology they had a choice. They
could backtrack and use their enormous money reserves and 90% or more profit
margins to make their products stable and reliable or they could stay the
course. They chose to stay the course.

As a result people were forced to use systems that really didn't work. Yes
Windows 7 crashes less than Windows 3.11 but if Microsoft had adequately
tested Windows 3.11 it wouldn't have crashed so much and Windows 7 wouldn't
crash at all. Think about it. How much more stable would Windows be if
Microsoft had made a still respectable 20% profit rather than 90%?

People cite Apple's hardware/software coupling as a reason for its stability
but let me ask you this: How many malware/virus outbreaks were brought on by
Hardware flaws in the PC?

Now you have 2 generations that have grown accustomed to crap. People who
shrug off their DVR locking up or their phone crashing because they're used to
it. Technology has come to mean unreliable. Much of Apple's popularity has
been based around the idea that Apple products "Just Work". Because in our
modern world working correctly has become a rarity.

And that's Microsoft's fault. They set the tone.

And how much has that tone cost us? How much good technology could be
implemented if people trusted it more? How much further could we have gone if
we could have focused more of humanity's intelligence on Curing Cancer and
less on Curing the newest malware that exploits one of the endless bugs in
Windows?

As far as his charitable contributions I'd point to the enormous amount of
money spent fixing problems with Microsoft's crappy software and ask this: How
much of that IT money would people have donated to charity if they hadn't lost
it maintaining shoddy solutions? I don't know the answer but between viruses,
malware, and Windows bugs you have 300 billion a year in the U.S. alone. It
wouldn't take a large percentage of that to match the roughly $60 billion in
Gates' personal fortune.

So don't tell me Gates is Superman because he's not.

~~~
va_coder
At the risk of losing karma, I have to say you Apple fanboys are absolutely
fascinating to me. I don't understand you at all.

~~~
craigmc
I am a complete apple fanboy, but I still think Bill Gates is a legend.
Microsoft made mistakes, but they made the PC the device that it is today, and
they forced others to redefine themselves to compete, which raised the bar.
However, Bill Gates will only be part remembered for Microsoft - what he has
done in terms of his industrial-scale philanthropy is, frankly, incredible.

~~~
rrohan189
It really is, Craig!

