> This is why Bill Gates is Bill Gates and you are and always will be a codemonkey
Bill had a rare opportunity (wealth, access to equipment, an opportunity to take advantage of IBM and Tim Paterson, etc) and a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth.
There's lots of differences between him and most people, and not all of them are unfavourable to 'most people'.
> a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth
Oh please, windows was taking over the world long before microsoft was abusing its position. Frankly, "Windows on every desktop" was set the day win95 released.
> Bill had a rare opportunity
A disproportionately large percentage of people in tech get opportunities that can lead to massive improvement of life (maybe not "richest man of the world" level, but "rich" nonetheless), most of us don't actually act on them or don't use them properly. Him getting one is par for the course, really.
So his point still stand.
I genuinely say this as a well meaning comment: if your view of Bill Gates is of "someone that got everything handed to him, and succedded only due to lucky timing and illegal methods" you need to open up your horizons, read a few books on the matter and inform yourself, because you've gone so far as to seeing a grey-white person as black (in terms of morality, of course).
> Oh please, windows was taking over the world long before microsoft was abusing its position.
No need for the faux exasperation.
Microsoft was abusing its position long before Windows was 'a thing'.
I appreciate your well-meaning comment, but I assure you that I've read sufficient books, lived through, and informed myself of, the history I'm talking about here.
I don't see this as a monochromatic morality scenario. Quite the contrary -- it's hugely nuanced. My initial comment was a response to the contextually-lacking hero worship that attempts to remove the darker hues from a clearly grey history.
> Microsoft was abusing its position long before Windows was 'a thing'.
Care to give some concrete exemple ? This is again a very genuine query.
As far as my knowledge goes, Microsoft sometimes went fast and aggressively in the DOS and Win3.1 days, but there was no abuse of position until the win98 days and forward where they started on the browsers, the jvm, ...
"In the 1990s, Microsoft adopted exclusionary licensing under which PC manufacturers were required to pay for an MS-DOS license even when the system shipped with an alternative operating system."
And then gets worse. It is not a short page.
When you say 'fast and aggressive', are you including FUD (ie. lying, libel, etc) and (arguably) inserting code to break competitors software?
Bill had a rare opportunity (wealth, access to equipment, an opportunity to take advantage of IBM and Tim Paterson, etc) and a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth.
There's lots of differences between him and most people, and not all of them are unfavourable to 'most people'.