
Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter - sethbannon
http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/
======
sethbannon
Bill Gates always seemed like a more appropriate person to idol, if you must
do such things, than Steve Jobs. Not only did he build the worlds largest
technology company (in its time), but he's making a global philanthropic
impact.

~~~
neumann_alfred
_Not only did he build the worlds largest technology company_

With what tactics and strategies, though?

 _he's making a global philanthropic impact._

How would one measure the destruction Microsoft caused? The wasted time? The
wasted money, the wasted lifes? I mean, if HNers can scream bloody murder
about Shirley Hornstein "stealing jobs that would have gone to others" (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135436> ), surely that should enter into
this as well. If someone takes with one hand and gives with the other, you
can't just count the giving. Well you can, but I can't follow. Personally, I
judge people solely by how they react to a pie to the face, and Bill Gates
scored quite low on that.

~~~
ivany
__How would one measure the destruction Microsoft caused? The wasted time? The
wasted money, the wasted lifes? __

Wat. I'm sure lots of work that gets done at Microsoft is misguided or
redundant. Welcome to working at a big company. The pay is competitive and the
environment, from what I hear, is some of the best in the software industry.
It's not some sweatshop where you're forced to toil for pennies; I bet a lot
of people here would enjoy and benefit from the experience of "wasting their
lives" at MSFT for a few years.

~~~
adaml_623
I think he meant the time 'wasted' or perhaps just used working with Microsoft
Windows. Rebooting, configuring/reinstalling every few months, etc.

Every reboot required during the install or upgrade of a Microsoft product
multiplied by an install base of hundreds of millions of machines is a big
number.

(Not that this is really relevant to Bill Gates's work today)

------
adnrw
Kottke's Report on it is very interesting: <http://kottke.org/13/01/read-bill-
gates-annual-letter>

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pkeane
This five-part exchange between a public education advocate and a member of
the Gates Foundation team working on education was eye opening.

[http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-
dialogue/2012/07/...](http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-
dialogue/2012/07/dialogue_with_the_gates_founda.html)

The Gates Foundation work is and will likely continue to be disastrous for
public education in the U.S. It is simply an attempt to push education into
the private sector.

~~~
hexonexxon
He's pushing for same review system MS uses to be implemented into public
schools in order to increase their school rankings, which is apparently
riddled with corruption and ineffective according to ex employees like this
guy:
[http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_mic...](http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_microsoft.html)

"Microsoft's review system, in which a mid-level manager has significant
control over all the review scores within a 100+ person group (so it's in your
best interest to get on his/her good side), and conversely needs only a
fraction of that group's total support to succeed as a manager (so it's in
his/her best interest to cultivate a loyal fanclub to provide that support).
The cult gives the manager the appearance of broad support, and makes the few
people who speak out against him/her look like sour grapes unrepresentative of
a larger majority. After a string of successes, the manager is nearly
invincible."

------
zt
The letter led me to wonder about measurment and results in the world of
"doing good". I was wondering what this forum's thoughts on the matter are.
Should we only fund the things that get results? How should we quantify our
results? And probably most importantly: what do we choose to measure?
(Decrease in rainforest destruction vs companies that choose to use non
rainforest sources for wood or palm oil?)

I worry sometimes--and I co-founded an organization that brings data science
to civic and social organizations--that this will be similar to No Child Left
Behind (or World Bank like), where non profits do what is best for their
metric instead of what is best for the population they are trying to serve.

------
dr_
Gates' legacy will ultimately be his foundation, more so than Microsoft.

~~~
hkmurakami
Like Carnegie before him.

~~~
dmhdlr
The Gates Foundation's answer to the thousands of _public_ libraries Carnegie
built is . . . the Khan Academy?

~~~
akiselev
If I were a bettin' man I'd wager that more people have access to the internet
than to public libraries.

Also, no one ever snags that last book that you really need for class.
(Instead publishers charge you out the ass for a digital copy you dont even
own!)

------
adventured
Steve Jobs keeps coming up in this thread. People seem to be missing two very
important things regarding him.

Warren Buffett is giving his wealth away, but he isn't doing much actual
charitable giving of his own direction. If you read up on it, you'll find that
Buffett regards the best use of his time to be capital allocation, aka running
Berkshire to generate profit. And then giving that wealth generation to the
Gates Foundation to distribute. Why? In Buffett's own words, he thinks he
would suck at distribution, so he picked someone better to do it.

Buffett is regarded as an important philanthropist now. However, he had no
intention of being that during his lifetime. Susan was supposed to give his
wealth away, but she (unexpectedly) died before him, forcing Buffett to change
course. I assume I don't need to elaborate the point that things are not so
linear as so many here seem to think.

Has anybody considered that Jobs regarded his best gift as building products?
And that his wife would be far better at giving the wealth away.

Jobs died at a mere 56 years of age. He was sick for seven years with a form
of cancer that is particularly hard to cure. If we're talking about his
fortune, in all likelihood his best use of time was to drive Apple forward (he
held something like $2 billion worth of Apple stock), and complete the sale of
Pixar to Disney (2006) to secure his billions there as well.

Was Jobs going to suddenly become an amazing philanthropist, while dying from
a horrific cancer, while running Apple and Pixar? This is an absurd notion.
Bill Gates - by all accounts a highly productive person - had to leave his
work at Microsoft in order to become a good philanthropist and go full time at
the Gates Foundation.

Gates will spend the rest of his life on the philanthropy course. There was no
'rest of his life' for Jobs, his wife will fulfill that end. His wife will be
the great philanthropist. And I believe it's very likely that was exactly what
he had in mind. That thought is amplified by his lack of affection for wealth,
there's no reason to think Jobs was desperate to hold onto it so he could buy
mansions and leave his children billions. The logical conclusion is, he didn't
view himself as the one to do the giving. Laurene is a mere 48 years old, she
has a long life of giving ahead of her, bet on it.

~~~
camo
It would seem that steve jobs was more interested in suing other companies
than anything non-ego driven. He wouldn't even pay up for his super-expensive
titanium boat.

I'll keep betting on Bill and Warren to save the world, thanks.

------
tokenadult
I don't know how many of you who have followed the link where offered the
reader survey as you visited the link. I found that interesting, in that it
asked a few of the same questions before reading the page, with my consent,
and then again after I read it. I suppose the questions are designed to track
attitudinal change from reading the page. I had read some of the page content
earlier as the New York Times op-ed, which I think was also submitted here to
HN.

I will always rail at Microsoft products, although I still use them. (Two of
my four children have already switched to Linux for their PCs, but I'm still
an old Windoze fuddy-duddy.) I do like Bill Gates's approach to philanthropy a
lot. I particularly like the Gates Foundation research on effective teaching,
some of which I apply to my own work as a mathematics teacher in private
practice. Helping charities become more effective would indeed be a great
contribution to society.

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TheYComb
I am happy to be building the startup (BloomBoard) that Colorado is using to
assess the quality of their teachers =)

