

Bill Gates's Secret to Success: Cheating - jcarlson23
http://www.gototheboard.com/articles/Bill_Gates_Secret_to_Success:_Cheating
This will be controversial but there's a good point that Gates benefited tremendously from no one enforcing anti-trust laws.  No company should ever get to a 90% market share - that's not good for the public.
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goodkarma
Antitrust or not, most Gates biographies I've read touch on aspects of
cheating or questionable ethics. Microsoft has a history of using predatory
pricing through OEM distribution and/or giving products away to establish its
monopolies.

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corentin
Three businessmen are sitting in the hallway of a court, waiting for their
trial. After some time, one of them starts lamenting: "because my prices are
way higher than my competitors, those bastards want to convict me for
profiting from a monopoly!"

"Well, that's interesting" replies the second one, "because I'm also here for
an antitrust case: I charge way less than my competitors and they say that I'm
doing predatory pricing to kill the competition."

The third one starts laughing hysterically: "Believe it or not, guys, I'm here
for the same reason as well! But my prices are exactly the same as my
competitors, so they want to convict me of price collusion and profiting from
a cartel!"

~~~
Goladus
Funny, but the purpose of an investigation is to determine the truth. It
probably sucks to get dragged into an investigation when you've done nothing
wrong, unfortunately history is not on their side.

If they're looking for someone to blame, blame the monopolies, cartels, and
predators that abused public trust so badly that laws had to get made.

~~~
corentin
Well, as far as I'm concerned the real, evil bastards are the ones attacking
their competitors through the government using lawsuits instead of working to
improve their products and services.

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Goladus
I agree that sucks, but the laws wouldn't likely be there if people hadn't
pushed those boundaries to begin with. I'm sure people were quite happy in the
pre- Sarbanes-Oxley US but Enron went ahead and screwed that up for everyone.

~~~
corentin
Your logic is broken; it's a little bit like saying that the Third Reich or
the Apartheid wouldn't have existed if the jews and blacks behaved nicely.

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augustus
Reminds me of John D. Rockefeller's agreement with shippers.Gates must have
studied history.

Regardless, ultimately Microsoft lost the US antitrust lawsuit and is no
longer dominant in the era of the Internet.

Much of the money he earned would end up funding good causes so I feel there
is some justice in all of this.

~~~
henning
They still have two strong monopolies: Windows and Office. Neither are going
anywhere anytime soon.

~~~
yariv
Windows and Office are dominant but they are not monopolies. People have
alternatives. I haven't used a Windows machine (at least at home) for years.

~~~
anotherjesse
I've not either, but most non-apple machines I've bought has a XP/Vista
sticker on it.

~~~
kirubakaran
<http://www.paulgraham.com/designedforwindows.html>

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steveplace
This is one of those where I try and put myself in his shoes.

If your business had the opportunity to take the contracts he mentioned, would
you? Of course there are those silly things called _laws_ that might get in
the way of this business deal, but they may not have been clear at the time (I
don't know).

All I know is that Gates leveraged his product against an unknown market and
then created barriers of entry for other competitors. Machiavellian, perhaps,
but brilliant.

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Tichy
Opinions differ on the anti-trust thing... Personally, I don't understand it.
I don't think anybody was forced to sign the contract.

~~~
gaius
Well, quite. It's worth noting that the anti-monopoly laws are retrospective,
which means you can be found guilty of things _that were not illegal at the
time you did them_.

If the democratic will of the People is that the government regulates business
that's one thing, but retrospective laws are just insidious. A level playing
field up front is the only fair way.

~~~
corentin
Just because "The People" democratically wants something doesn't mean it's
right.

~~~
gaius
You're right, but that's not the point I was making.

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mattmaroon
This is simply redefining cheating such that Microsoft is guilty of it because
he doesn't like them. That sort of contract seems like a brilliant maneuver to
me. The fact that they were merely forced to stop it, rather than pay for
having done it shows the DoJ probably didn't feel it was illegal.

And if it ain't illegal, it ain't cheating in business.

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patrickg-zill
They are still illegally "tying" by their use of the WHQL certification
process.

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brentr
I read things everyday about what's better: Windows or something else. The
truth is each OS has its own plusses and minuses. Linux/Unix allows a
sophisticated user much more power than Windows. Windows has a whole network
of developers that create the mainstream games and other entertainment
software I enjoy. I use both a Unix and a Windows system, but I use both in a
very different manner.

Regardless of one's opinion on what OS is better, you cannot deny that Gates
is one of the most brilliant people of our time. His business practices are
what brought him wealth. He may or may not have done a few questionable
things, but what business hasn't? This is why we have a justice system. Laws
are not always written to be black and white. The justice systme is there to
help us define all the gray in between.

If I had the ability to create a monopoly because the laws don't explicitly
define a certain prohibition, you can bet your ass that I would. I'd deal with
antitrust issues as they came up and leverage what I have already done to move
into a new area of exploitation. Whether or not you want to believe it, that
is how capitalism is practiced.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't agree Billg as one of the most brilliant people of our time. He is
certainly a clever strategist, but not much more than that. He got incredibly
lucky a couple times: The non-exclusivity IBM deal, the PC clone market (that
could have not existed if the BIOS were harder to reverse engineer - say, like
a Mac). MS has also at least one failed attempts to create a PC-like
environment: MSX. They saw that a commodity computer running an OS they
controlled was a way to get big money.

I would also like to know if they somehow covertly helped the BIOS reverse
engineering process.

Everything they did up to Windows 3 derived from that - do whatever it takes
to secure a market for their OS. They did not leave OS/2 to IBM because the
codebase was bad. They needed control of the OS in order to keep it a
commodity and having a competitor developing the OS that runs on commodity PCs
was out of the question. Up to the launch of Windows 3, the public discourse
was that OS/2 was the future. It changed dramatically at that minute.

They played dirty tricks all the time. Threatening Apple not to renew the
Applesoft BASIC license was a way to secure Apple would endorse Microsoft
BASIC on the Mac and ditch a competing product. I don't know what else they
got from Apple while their cash cow had a piece of MS software within. It
certainly made Apple's contracts better the next time.

They got lucky a couple times and IBM got fooled twice. Their dominance is the
consequence of luck and borderline criminal tactics. I see no huge genius here
beyond one that was willing to bend the law (and morality) as much as he
could.

It's also unclear how much of this came from Ballmer.

As far as I know, the big genius among the Microsoft founders is Paul Allen.

~~~
furiouslol
I think you need to give credit where credit is due. Bill Gates is one of the
geniuses of our time.

You don't create a powerful company like Microsoft just by being lucky. This
is the guy who brought personal computing to the masses. This is the guy who
managed to grow his company into the behemoth that it is today. This is the
guy who responded to the Internet threat brilliantly (well initially that
is.).

Dirty tricks are PARTS AND PARCEL of the world, especially in businesses. The
techies are insulated from such behavior, which is why they are usually
shocked at such behavior. People on the business side are used to such
behavior. They deal with it. They counter back. Wall St revel in it. Govts use
them all the time. This is society at its normal equilibrium. Google, being a
techie wonderland, is trying to avoid this for as long as possible but trust
me, WallSt will push their hands sooner or later.

Paul Allen wouldn't have build Microsoft into the success that it is today. He
just isn't as sly as Bill is.

