Steve Jobs was a big role model of mine, yet Bill Gates never came close. I'm starting to realize that is due to the dramatic nature of Job's life, which is very different from what we know about Bill Gates.
Yet, when things like this comes out, and stories about Jobs emerge, I start to question whether my choice of a role model was really all that well placed. Do you admire the guy with the entrancing personality, or the one that is about to cure polio?
One guy made an easy to use computer, some cool movies, and then some expensive first-world gadgets while hanging on to his massive fortune and reputation as a jerk. The other made "PC" a household word, now runs the largest charity in history, and is working to eradicate malaria, among other things. Both were around the same age at the time of Jobs' death. I don't understand why people look up to Jobs so much when Gates seems to be the better human being by far.
Great people are not necessarily nice people. I understand that Leonardo Da Vinci was a jerk. Often doing something really difficult either requires you to be a jerk, or it could just be a jerk is more likely to have the insensitivity to do the job.
I'm old enough to remember Bill Gates was like while he was running Microsoft, and I know people whose businesses Microsoft seriously, and unethically IMO, damaged.
If Gates has mellowed, then cool. Once you've accomplished your goals and squashed your opponents, then you've got time to play the nice guy and work on your place in history. (Mr. Carnegie built a lot of libraries that did a lot of good; after a career in industry and development that makes anything Gates might have done pale in comparison.) Personally I think Gates got pissed when he realized he had lost the browser wars and he couldn't own that internet thingie.
Jobs's goals were a bit more ambitious than simply making "all the money." To describe Jobs's work as "an easy to use computer, some cool movies, and ... some expensive first-world gadgets." strikes me as glib and disingenuous. Anyone who seriously thinks that needs to spend some time with normal people and watch how they interact with technology.
And the movies are better than just cool...
Even had Jobs lived a normal life span it's unlikely that he would have accomplished all the universe denting he had in mind. If Jobs was a jerk, and having met him once I can say from personal observation that he was a bit of one, he was a jerk in a hurry.
To imply that Bill Gates' goals were "simply making 'all the money'" is at best intentionally misleading. Microsoft's unofficial mission statement from 1977 was "a computer on every desk and in every home". They aimed ridiculously high, succeeded past anyone's expectations, and fundamentally changed the world all on their own.
To dismiss the tens of billions of dollars that he is ploughing into his foundation (and the tens of billions of dollars he convinced Warren Buffet to also donate) as just "play[ing] the nice guy and work[ing] on [his] place in history" is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
This is a foundation working hard on some of the most fundamental problems of humanity: crippling poverty and devastating diseases. Sure, this gets them a few headlines, but what do you expect when their budget is as much as the International Red Cross and Oxfam International combined?
Bill Gates: Changed the world once. Will probably do it again.
Despite the actual verbiage used, Gate's goal wasn't a PC on every desk, it was a computer, which he didn't sell, running his OS and software, which he did sell, on every desk. Software that locked the user into an ecosystem that Microsoft controlled and profited by. He helped get the hardware in place, but never got the software lock in he wanted. Not from lack of trying though.
Ironic that Jobs's emphasis on maintaining quality and interfacing with human psychology is faring better towards that goal; as a side effect.
While I admire your attempt at parallelism, no where in my post do I denigrate Gate's philanthropy. Read it again. Ruthlessness and vanity have their social uses. I grew up using a Carnegie library and am a better person for it. They had a hell of a time tearing it down in the 1970s in order to put up a much inferior glass box. The wreaking ball kept just bouncing off... Literally.
We'll see how well Gates's legacy performs historically. Myself, I wish he had an interest in the space program or in energy production. But it's his loot to spend as he sees fit.
Jobs is through changing the world. At least directly. He's left some ongoing projects, but such things seldom can continue without their visionaries. Look at what happened to Walt Disney's urban planning experiments. Job's legacy will be changing the way people think about and interact with technology.
My bet is that will have farther reaching consequences than any actual technology.
Well, sort of. The goal of putting a computer on every desk and in every home doesn't really carry any requirements about the quality of the product does it? It can be fulfilled with absolute dreck, and arguably, was.
Browser marketshare was only one metric for winning. Controlling the way browsers worked and how people used them was much more important. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" never got much farther than the first stage.
What's the point of doing all the work and paying for all the support if you can't control the game?
It's more appropriate to say he lost to the internet. Even by 2006 it was obvious that OS didn't matter any more. Not that I agree with the grandparent.
It's strange you should say that, in his biography it mentions that he was always sure he would have a short life, from a very young age. It's no wonder that he didn't feel he had the time to be nice when he wanted to achieve so much.
> Great people are not necessarily nice people. I understand that Leonardo Da Vinci was a jerk.
I don't understand the deification of Leonardo da Vinci either. He was a nice painter but nothing extraordinary. His science and engineering is basically bogus, like his flying machines. Now Newton and Gauss for example, they were true geniuses. But when historians see a drawing of a flying machine by da Vince they think "amazing!" and so does the general public. When they come across Newton's works the see a bunch of unintelligible stuff.
I think you underestimate the vastness of Da Vinci's contributions.
Have you seen any of his paintings in real life?
I saw an amazing Da Vinci exhibit in South Africa more than a decade ago. It included not only some of his paintings, but also an incredible array of sketches in fields where he made important discoveries such as anatomy, optics, civil engineering, etc.
For me, when you see the depth of his work across a wide swathe of fields, he stands out as a beacon amongst a fog of misery and ignorance.
I have seen some of da Vinci's paintings in real life. Among them his famous Mona Lisa. I didn't find them particularly extraordinary among the other paintings in the Louvre, though I already said that he was a good painter.
What are his important discoveries in anatomy, optics and civil engineering? What did da Vinci discover about optics that Euclid hadn't already discovered 1700 years earlier? It seems to me that his contribution in those fields is mainly as an illustrator. Which of his "inventions" actually worked? How do you explain his nonsense engineering like flying machines?
Perhaps the case that da Vinci was an illustrator-wannabe-scientist/engineer is overstating it a bit. I'm not saying he made no contributions whatsoever, just that there are other people far more deserving of the deification that Leonardo da Vinci enjoys, like Newton, Galilei, Gauss, etc.
When people talk about da Vinci's contributions they always talk in vague terms. Now take Newton and we can easily find numerous contributions that are still extremely important even in our age:
* Calculus - the basis of physics, engineering, and a large part of practical mathematics
* Newton's laws of motion
* Newton's law of gravity
* Major contributions to optics
* Newton's method - one of the most important algorithms
The trouble with these is that they require far more effort and study to appreciate compared to a bunch of drawings, especially if you don't try to look critically at the drawings and try to determine whether the machines depicted actually work.
The reason that I compared Jobs to Da Vinci is that both were visionaries that changed the way the world looked at things.
Don't just compare the visuals of Da Vinci's paintings with their museum neighbors. Compare the dates as well.
Da Vinci changed how artists, engineers, architects, and scientists organized visual information. If his works seem ordinary that's because his methods and systems have been internalized into our culture. People watch building size vehicles fly over their heads and talk to people instantaneously and globally over computer networks, and think nothing of it. Commonplace. Ordinary.
So what's the big stink with Newton? I mean, we have much better mathematicians and scientists now? By modern standards Newton is incomplete and imprecise. <-- Note sarcasm.
Try looking at some medieval European paintings or icons. Beautiful, to be sure, but try and imagine trying to visualize and present complex models at that level. I'm guessing you can't; probably you are having a hard time understanding just what the hell I'm talking about. I mean, he just made pictures, right?
That's how powerful Da Vinci's works are.
(Note: Don't confuse what I'm talking about with linear perspective, developed in the west by Brunelleschi, a contemporary of Da Vinci. Linear perspective is vitally important to this, and Da Vinci made good use of it. Visually, better than anyone else at the time.)
And, back to his paintings for just a second. My degree is in Fine Arts. Back in the '70s if you wanted to do computer image synthesis, there was barely any hardware and no commercial software for such. We had to write our own software. My personal curriculum caused my advisor nightmares. But I did do my share of oil painting. I copied several great masters, to try and get into their heads a bit. It's one thing to glance at the surface of a work in the museum and make a quick judgement. It's quite another to try and recreate something like that.
Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine) was one project. I still have nightmares about it. I spent six months on it and never got anywhere close. And it's considered a lessor work.
So you're basically claiming that what he added to science, maths and engineering was that he was a revolutionary illustrator? I would probably believe that, if it was accompanied by some evidence. Even this claim you describe in extremely vague terms, as always with da Vinci. What exactly did he do different than his predecessors? What were his great accomplishments exactly, that put him in the same category as Newton and Gauss, or even higher than them?
> So what's the big stink with Newton? I mean, we have much better mathematicians and scientists now? By modern standards Newton is incomplete and imprecise. <-- Note sarcasm.
Even though you mark this as sarcasm, I'd like to address this. Of course modern mathematicians and scientists do better in absolute terms. What Newton did is now common knowledge. What makes Newton so great is not his absolute level, but the things he added to science. The delta between scientific and mathematical knowledge before Newton and after Newton is huge. So what is da Vinci's delta? In concrete terms; not just a logical fallacy like "you don't know what da Vinci's contributions are, so they are so entrenched in society that they must be great!".
> (Note: Don't confuse what I'm talking about with linear perspective, developed in the west by Brunelleschi, a contemporary of Da Vinci. Linear perspective is vitally important to this, and Da Vinci made good use of it. Visually, better than anyone else at the time.)
Interestingly, perspective was already understood by Euclid in 300BC and described in his work on optics. Alas, like the Greeks' knowledge that the earth is a sphere (heck they even measured the diameter), this was largely forgotten and didn't become mainstream artistic knowledge until much later.
> Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine) was one project. I still have nightmares about it. I spent six months on it and never got anywhere close. And it's considered a lessor work.
I'm sorry if this comes of as rude, but that's hardly proof that da Vinci was an extraordinarily good painter. Still, I have no problem conceding this point the third time. When I look at da Vinci's paintings I see nothing particularly worthy of deification above all other painters (on the contrary), but then I don't have a degree in Fine Arts so I accept that people who are experts on the matter have it right and my tastes have it wrong.
The problem is that he is in general deified for being an all-round genius, not just a painter.
What Da Vinci did is common knowledge as well. I can't help that you don't seem to value it. Sorry. Most of the world seems to disagree with you on this.
You don't offer to explain in detail what Newton did; but don't bother on my account. In my spare time I'm an amateur astronomer. I've written 3 body force simulation software for projects (my brother, who worked at JPL in the '70s wrote the software that calculated the orbiter orbital insertion engine burn.) I've measured Jupiter's mass with nothing but a telescope, a reticle eyepiece and a hand held calculator. My results were lousy, I learned a lot and got some real, dirty hands appreciation for the efforts of the pioneers of modern science.
You dismiss this area of human technology like it is superficial and not worthy of intellectual respect.
If you want an idea of what Da Vinci's "delta" was, go back and look at that portrait I spoke of, the one I tried unsuccessfully to copy, and compare it to any previous portrait. Lady with an Ermine is considered by many to be the first modern portrait. I don't mean for you to imagine what a previous work might have been like, if you really want to understand, do a little work and find one and seriously compare the two.
Look at the use of space in that portrait. Utterly unlike anything before it. The sense of depth, the lighting, the framing.
It's cinematic. 500 years before the camera.
(There is a lot of speculation about Renaissance artists using optical aids in their work. If you are interested in that, the key search terms are Camera Obscura and Camera Lucida.)
I knew when I wrote the previous post you were unlikely to be able really comprehend what I'm talking about. I find that only people who've actually seriously taken a pencil or brush in their hands and actually tried to make a picture, a real sustained effort, not just a lark, can really understand what a leap in thought and in presentation the Renaissance artists brought about.
There was a similar effect in the history of motion pictures. Look at movies made pre-D.W. Griffith (there are other film makers involved in this transformation, but this is getting long winded and divergent enough). They are like stage plays. Audiences had no problem with them. Then suddenly, we start to see visual tools transform the medium. Audiences were shocked and often unable to follow. It was a new, non-linear visual language.
Modern audiences, who've grown up with this language have no problem and are usually totally unaware of this. In fact when you try to show a really old movie to a modern audience it often drives them nuts. It's like trying to get a twelve year old to sit through a classically presented Shakespeare production. Also, I'm old enough, just barely, to have known people who were adults before the development of modern cinema. Many of them simply couldn't follow the story. It was too abstract and made too many assumptions.
Leonard was one of the pioneers not only of modern visual synthesis, but of modern observational method. Most intellectuals were Aristotelian. Da Vinci was in there cutting up bodies to see for himself. He made copious notes on bird flight; from observations. His flying machine drawings were some of the first serious, methodical efforts at the idea. Seems obvious now. Now that someone's done it.
This approach was not common practice at the time, it was considered a low brow, vulgar approach. Da Vinci could create an organized, methodic, proportional, visualization of an idea. In three dimensions. Backed with some actual, honest observational under pinnings.
That was new.
True Da Vinci wasn't much of an experimentalist, though the local prince found his practical output worth keeping him on the payroll; Leonardo was't a scientist or engineer in the modern sense. There weren't any yet. Fortunately another Florentine, a couple of generations later, would make some small advances in that department...
FWIW, Paul Graham has some very good essays concerning painting and its relationship to technical thought. I highly recommend them. My serious advice to anyone who wants to be a designer of any kind is to learn to draw a bit. Or a lot.
I can't help but notice that you failed to respond to what I wrote. I already agreed that he might be an excellent painter. For the fourth time now, I'm not in a position to judge that, so I'll take your word for it.
> It's cinematic. 500 years before the camera.
I never considered da Vinci to be a particularly realistic painter -- his faces look like they're made of wax and his perspective drawing is off -- I thought that was why people find his paintings special. But thanks for the explanation.
The point is that da Vinci is deified as "renaissance man", that is, a genius in science, engineering and mathematics as well as art, not just as a painter. For this I see no evidence whatsoever. I provided a concrete list of the contributions of Newton. I could do the same for Gauss and Euler and Euclid and Galilei and many others. What are da Vinci's supposed contributions to science, engineering and mathematics that are in any way comparable to those of Newton, Gauss, Galilei, Einstein or Euler? Concrete ones, please.
If you can't, then consider why that is. Why can I give great concrete contributions of all those people, yet you can't do the same for da Vinci? Might the reason be that there are none?
Da Vinci: great painter? Yes. Drew the occasional doubtful machine? Yes. Great mathematician? No. Great scientist? No. Great engineer? No.
Can't see where I didn't respond to what you wrote.
If you mean I didn't break it down into quotes, an anal compulsive check list of points and responses then, yes, I didn't respond to what you wrote. I took what you wrote as a whole and composed a response as a whole. If you are looking for the list, I'm going to disappoint you again.
If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.
I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.
A discussion of realism, naturalism, and abstraction, and their relative merits and practitioners, while fun, is way more involved than I'm willing to go into for a wildly careening off topic post. But go and actually look at a pre-Da Vinci icon. No, really do it. If you don't I've no more time for you. You tell me what the differences are, or their lack.
Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.
This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.
I'm not going to do your homework for you, but here, let me get you started:
You're still not really addressing Jules's main point, which is that Da Vinci made no major contributions to math or science. To compare him to Newton is absurd, as any mathematician or physicist will tell you. A large portion of a first-year engineering curriculum is spent learning things that Newton discovered (that is, calculus and classical mechanics). I read through the wikipedia page you provided, and none of the scientific results even approach the significance Newton's work. I have no problem with his artistic work being appreciated, but I am always confused about why people seem to think his work in any other area was important.
Actually it would never have occurred to me to directly compare Newton and Da Vinci's specific works. If you will look back to the dawn of the thread, I was comparing Da Vinci to Steve Jobs; specifically their achievement in changing the nature of human thought.
(Just for the record, I'd give Da Vinci the edge in that comparison...)
Jules wanted to know why people thought Da Vinci was so great and posited that he was a mediocre artist, and that his science/engineering were bogus. Of course, in the modern sense, Da Vinci wasn't a scientist, and a very different kind of engineer. Galileo, Newton, et al. gave those areas of thought their modern sense.
Kepler wasn't a scientist in the modern sense either, but he was essential for the later astronomers to do what they did. If he hadn't done what he did then someone else would have had to.
You can throw out the Greeks and a most of the Islamic theorists by the same logic as you throw out Da Vinci's achievements. Or for that matter, throw out Newton, as he's clearly been superseded.
What a bunch of amateurs!
I'm not talking about current practice and theory. And I'm not talking about a popularity contest as to who's your favorite intellectual superhero or a video game where players are leveling up to higher planes. I'm talking about the history of human thought and its milestones. People in the past thought very differently than they do today, and I don't just mean that they believed different things. Da Vinci's approach to visualization and observation were singular and in advance of his times.
He was a bellwether of things to come. And that's why people hold him in high regard.
> If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.
> I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.
I'm sorry if what I said about his painting was confusing. I consider da Vinci to be a great painter when judging from the reputation that he has with people knowledgeable about art. His paintings are simply not to my personal taste, mostly due to the expressionless faces (now Caravaggio, he has some amazing paintings). Whether you agree or not, I think you'll agree that art is a subjective thing (unlike science/math/engineering). The world also seems to have reached consensus that da Vinci was an amazing all round genius. This is demonstrably wrong, drawing into question the judgement of the world (also note the general belief in the existence of a god, and that the world is flat).
> This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.
The list of science and inventions you gave contains nothing of significance except in painting. Whenever it is even remotely about math/science/engineering, it's mostly about his job as an illustrator, plus a couple of bogus inventions that neither got built nor work (though I'm sure you can find something trivial that he drew that actually worked -- if you draw enough things one of them is bound to work).
> Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.
If your point is that he came before them, so he had the time against him, then I'll say again: it's about the delta not about the absolute achievement. Also note that there were lots of proper geniuses LONG before him, like Pythagoras (math; ~600BC), Eratosthenes (math, measured the diameter of the Earth; ~250BC -- what's truly astonishing is that humanity not only forgot the diameter of the Earth, it actually believed that the Earth is flat!) and Euclid (math, physics; ~300BC). On a related note: Aristotle is not in that list; his works on physics are basically bogus, why people ascribe some kind of physics genius to him in history lessons is again beyond me. For amazing engineering just look at the pyramids and the Roman empire.
Lets simplify this: name one important contribution to science, math or engineering.
If you are going to measure genius as only pertaining to math, science and engineering, in the modern senses of the word, then sure. In addition to art you are now excluding music, literature, history, politics, warfare, philosophy, finance, economics, ethics, law, and many other important areas of thought that shape our world.
Da Vinci areas of interest and activity were broad and novel. He was part of the milieu that brought about the modern world.
If you insist on one magic achievement, which seems a bit childish and over simplistic to me, call him a visual synthesist. He worked in modeling and visualization. I'll leave pigeonholing him into a modern discipline up to you. He really predated those holes, which are fuzzy and overlapping at best.
He, along with the other artists and thinkers of his time, created the modern concept of a visual representation. Something so basic and fundamental, and so divergent from what went before, that many people today, totally immersed in it, simply can't see it. It's like the air to them. Any time you see a working drawing, a photographic composition, a narrative image, or a pictorial observation, you are looking at a direct descendant of his tradition.
(Caravaggio, by the way, was a direct stylistic descendant of Da Vinci, visually quoting him several times.)
Leonardo did a lot more practical engineering than just making fanciful drawing of flying machines, and his anatomical drawings, for one, were remarkable.
Had his ethics really changed he would acknowledge what he did before, at the helm of Microsoft, was wrong and pressure his successors not to repeat his past misdeeds.
I think the only thing he apologized for was the plan to seize Allen's part of MS while he was dying (luckily, he recovered). And he did so after Allen found out about it.
Have you ever heard something like an apology for all the rest? Me neither.
He didn't do anything particularly offensive while running Microsoft. He shouldn't apologize. Competition on that big of a scale for that big of a prize should be very competitive, it should be painful and brutal. Gates didn't use a gun, he didn't use TNT to kill his competition, he didn't use the government to do it either.
Oh no, the big company competed very much so harshly.
And much like IBM before Microsoft, a new big nasty company came along and made them barely relevant. Now we have Google, Apple, Facebook, all giants that are nasty in their own ways.
Who gives a shit. In another ten years, the world will be turned upside down again. You should be thanking Gates for stepping up to the plate and competing as he did. It's no different than the way Apple or Google or anybody else competes, and it's a good thing.
Back in the day, Bill was kind of a dick, too. From Gates by Stephen Manes:
“The Gates motivational method: You yell, you holler, you point out how stupid something is, the chastened subject goes back and redoubles his efforts to do a better job.” Actually, I’m not sure if he’s mellowed out over time. You’d have to ask someone at his foundation.
I think it's just that Jobs was much more interesting. I'm in the middle of the biography, and I hope to someday read one on Gates as well, but from what I've seen and read to date there was just more to talk about with Steve. He was charismatic and intense, yet somewhat tortured and insane. When people consider Bill Gates they definitely respect him and look up to him, but he's so laid back and humble that there's not much to talk about. He has a ton of money, he's sane, and he's pumping his cash into philanthropic goals that we won't see the effects of for years. I think people just prefer to talk about Steve because he was so vibrant (as Gates put it) and so you hear more about him, which you convert to people "looking up to him."
However this video bothered me, why was the interviewer picking at Jobs' time left to live?
In Paul Allen's autobiography he mentions one time he and Gates were just late for a flight. The plane hadn't actually taxied away yet, so Gates rushed into the tunnel thingy and started manipulating the controls to hook it back up so he could board. (A regular commercial airliner -- they weren't rich yet.)
Really? Wow. I remember a spin-off of this in that terrible movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley," but in that scene the plane had started taxiing and Gates convinced the employees at the gate to call the pilot and have them turn back.
That's how I remember Allen's account, yes. (Anyone have the book handy?) An employee at the gate did take over soon and get them aboard rather than Gates actually carrying it all through, but still. I think of this sort of thing as Entrepreneur Personality Disorder.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. The word is originally Greek (ἀπόκρυφα) and means "those hidden away" - in common usage it can refer to accounts that are not part of the "official story," such as the Bible's Apocrypha.
There are other meanings as well which cast doubt on the authenticity of the story (not surprising actually when you consider the Bible's Apocrypha's relationship with the Church.) Here are the 2 definition OED gives:
1. A writing or statement of doubtful authorship or authenticity; spec. those books included in the Septuagint and Vulgate versions of the Old Testament, which were not originally written in Hebrew and not counted genuine by Jews, and which, at the Reformation, were excluded from the Sacred Canon by the Protestant party, as having no well-grounded claim to inspired authorship.
You've appeared to miss the fact that the OED lists as definition 1 the COMMON usage, and further definitions are LESS USED.
Ergo; using an uncommon usage, you have to accept that many people won't understand you. Creating understanding is the essence of effective communication :)
Actually, you may be interested to know the OED is a historical dictionary and in fact does not necessarily list common usage first.
The OED is a historical dictionary, with a structure that is very different from
that of a dictionary of current English such as ODO... For each word in the OED,
on the other hand, the senses are dealt with in chronological order
according to the quotation evidence. This way the senses with the earliest
quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear
further down the entry – like a ‘family tree’ for each word.
Not to mention, those familiar enough with the word to understand what Apocrypha are should hopefully be able to infer why someone may be referring to apocrypha without a capital A. It's not a long cognitive leap.
If you're suggesting that a number of people may not actually understand how to interpret or use the word, then I agree (as in this thread, I suspect). But that is the case for many descriptive and useful words in the English language and has rarely been a good argument for dumbing down the level of communication.
If you look at the cards that Jobs was dealt with in life (upbringing, fired from his company, cancer...) and what he was able to accomplish, it is admirable and inspiring.
I think Jobs and Gates both exemplify to whom much is given, much more is required.
People look up to Jobs because he managed to achieve the ambitions of many here without giving up his principals. I personally have no burning ambition to cure malaria, does that make me a bad person also?
I you don't have a burning ambition to help someone ... anyone .. yes IMHO that makes you a 'bad' person. Stockpiling mountains of money that you can leverage to make even bigger mountains of money is not admirable in my book unless the end goal is to then use that to help the most people that you can.
Now your twisting things - I didn't claim I have no ambition to help 'anyone', I said I have no ambition to devote my time to charity work. If that makes me a bad person in your eyes, I guess I'll have to learn to live with it.
Also, there is no evidence that Jobs was particularly concerned with 'stockpiling mountains of money'. He was mostly concerned with making great products, which he felt was his contribution to the world. I for one am glad that he focused on what he was driven to do, rather than make some token effort to impress journalist and technology forum posters with what a fantastic man he was.
Microsoft during the late 80s and 90s was famous for its ruthlessness and the way it exploited and crushed its competition. I wouldn't say "Jobs is the nasty one and Gates is the nice one"
Jobs was exactly the same way, he just happened to lose the PC battle. Bill Gates famously tried to help him license the the Mac OS to other PC manufacturers (displacing DOS!) but Jobs thought he could beat them all across the entire stack.
Jobs sold a much better product in most cases; Gates used unfair and monopolistic business tactics to extract wealth and power above and beyond the actual value of his contribution.
All apple products are closed. You can't change out the hardware, software, and in the case of things like the ipod, the batteries.
Jobs was a great visionary, but you can't tell me that he didn't use the exact same sort of tactics. If he had one the PC war, we not only would have closed software, but closed hardware.
It's not physically impossible to change the hardware, software, or batteries of any Apple product, it's just not designed to accomodate that. By selling a separate OS to multiple different PC vendors, Microsoft actually employed the exact opposite tactic, and that hasn't exactly been an unvarnished success.
It's counterfactual to speculate on what Apple might have done if they won the PC war. The fact remains that Microsoft abused their monopoly to undermine Netscape and Java and stole the source code to Quicktime.
> One guy inspired MILLIONS to make a difference.
> Another guy is making a difference to MILLIONS
Well there are obviously no right or wrong answers here as we are both guessing but I'd say that Bill Gates has accomplished both your first and second points.
You don't have to pick between Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Take the best about each and apply to your life as they are appropriate to your goals and strategy.
With that said, if I had to choose, I'd choose Gates... and I do wish there was more about Bill Gates's approach available to learn from.
One shouldn't let the notion of Jobs and Gates being "competitors" from being able to admire both of them. I admire each for different reasons. I think that has to be the case since they are pretty different characters: a closer analogy could be between a great batter and a great pitcher.
NeXT soaked up over $1 billion in investment about a decade before selling to Apple. If it's a success now, it's only because if you traded your NeXT stock for equivalent Apple stock in 1997, it would probably represent a significant return on the money invested in NeXT in the 1980's. But you'd have gotten an even better return by having that money in federal bonds between 1985 and 1997 (and then investing it in Apple) rather than having it in NeXT.
And NeXT's software is pretty much driving Apple's product lines now.
Which is a pretty good result for a 'failed company': Get paid $429 million to take over a larger company, and watch the technology you developed blossom to its full potential that was never possible as a tiny fringe player in the market, contributing to massive, overwhelming, record-smashing success.
very well said. No one is Perfect in everything. From those kind of poeple, we need to pick good things that really stand out in them and for which they became iCons now.
I think Bill Gates was every bit as ruthless as Jobs was. But Bill had his enormous success earlier in life, stepped down from his company earlier, and was thus ahead. Despite being the same age, they were in very different stages of life, career, and success.
Who's to say that Jobs wouldn't have gone into philanthropy once he had stepped down from Apple, had he not been a (relatively) late bloomer and died at a (relatively) young age? Then again, maybe he wouldn't have. But I think it's unfair to lambast Jobs for not living long enough to reach that stage of his life.
There is one possible signal that Jobs wouldn't have chosen to go into philanthropy: He never reinstated Apple's charitable gift-matching program after terminating it during Apple's darkest days. Instead, that turned out to be one of the first things Tim Cook did.
Obviously this is a very limited data point. We know very little about the context around those decisions (e.g. were there external factors that took some time to sort out? did they decide to do it and then deliberately hold back until Tim Cook took over?, etc.). Nevertheless, it is one of the few data points we have on this question.
Gates' parents apparently thought he did not do enough philanthropy earlier on, and Gates was also facing mounting calls from people about it in public long before he started his efforts.
While I don't have much love for either of them, people can and often do change with age. Gates appears to have changed a lot - perhaps Jobs would've eventually too.
Most people seem to go for the charismatic figure. It's interesting how much of a backlash there is when it turns out that they were just human after all, people feel betrayed and manipulated for having placed that figure on a pedestal.
The stories about Steve jobs were always there (the most telling of which I thought was when he ripped off Wozniak with the Atari situation, but Lisa said a lot too), and gates was a dick in his time too.
Interesting people tend to have a few sides, and some of those sides can be pretty ugly.
Is it necessary to just pick one role model? or admire just one guy? Instead of admiring people as a whole, can't we just admire (and pick, emulate etc) habits/principles from many people (and ignore the 'jerk' behavior etc)? For example, Jobs had excellent taste, believed in creating simple/beautiful products etc. Gates is doing amazing work with his enormous wealth and so on.
I'm so happy to see what he's doing with his money. They way he earned it was problematic to say the least (see the ECIS paper for a succinct history, if you are interested: http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...). But I have to say, he's making up for it with how he's choosing to spend it. I definitely did not see that coming.
Every time I heard about his "charitable" works, he seems to be flying into developing nations and taking a stance against more open intellectual property rights (in medicine as well as software) or, coincidentally, giving them lots of cash when they're talking about adopting open computing systems.
Admittedly, I've kind of lost interest so I've not paid any attention recently but I assume he's stopped that nonsense. Because it's tacky enough to actually lower my already poor opinion of him as a human being. (I'd also heard the foundation was mostly his wife and father's doing and he wasn't particularly interested in it, but again that's going back a few years, maybe that's changed too.)
As an engineer, the "Wozniak" stories are my favorites. He's an extremely interesting guy, and has very interesting views on many thing (including education). He's probably the "tech" personality I most wish I could meet.
Oh, it was entirely fair. Microsoft only stopped being evil once Gates left. Its predatory and monopolistic behaviour was driven primarily by him, personally.
Bill Gates is, I suspect, a much better person now than he was in the 90s, and the world is a better place because of it. His current laudable campaigns do nothing to detract from his past misdeeds, however. He was evil, now he's good. I'm glad that he's devoting the same energy and passion to stamping out Malaria and AIDS as he did stamping out Netscape and Linux. Hopefully he'll be more successful, as well.
Evil will be passing your personal information to governments which want to put your life in danger. Or destroying the environment. Or willfully having inadequate safeguards for profit.
> Or willfully having inadequate safeguards for profit.
In the early 2000s Steve Ballmer himself visited my (rather unimportant) East-European country and had a one-on-one with the then PM about the software-procurement decisions the Government was about to take. Soon enough it was decided that all Government-run institutions in the country should be fitted with Windows-run computers, using only Microsoft software.
A lot of my compatriots' tax money (and my own money) went directly into MS' coffers (when it could have find a better use in other, more important places), but I can see that 10 years from that moment some of it is invested in trying to cure malaria. Well, at least we weren't robbed for nothing.
Maybe Bill Gates was never truly "evil". Maybe he just did what he had to do to amass the wealth that is required to do truly great things like stamping out Malaria and AIDS. Who is to say he wasn't planning his philanthropy all along? I certainly am. It's one of the main driving factors behind the business goals I work towards every day. I think Bill Gates has always been kind of misunderstood.
That's entirely possible, but it was never the impression that I got at the time. True, I could be grossly misjudging his motivations in the 90s, but I don't think so. I think he was driven to be successful for its own sake. I'm certainly glad that he's turned to philanthropy, but I think applying his current actions as the motivation for his actions 15 years ago smacks of revisionism.
Or maybe his current philanthropy is his way of assuaging the guilt over his prior evil, and not a planned "the ends justify the means" rationalization for his evil from the outset.
I think Bill Gates is generally misunderstood because we don't fully appreciate just how intelligent he is. He's not routinely creating or providing answers (in the way that a scientist like Einstein was constantly offering up new ideas), so it's hard to really measure. He's inherently private, which only hinders our understanding of him even more.
But I think historically, we will look back on him as having some of the most influential and profound ideas (and decisions) of the 21st century.
No one person has done as much for humanity as Bill Gates has, perhaps in the history of the world. The only comparisons are perhaps to someone like Jonas Salk.
> No one person has done as much for humanity as Bill Gates
Ok, now its clear you're in love or delusional.
What has he done but spend money? I haven't heard of a single breakthrough from that money, btw. Not that I'm really expecting any, these things take time.
Your placement of a ruthless business person (now giving away to charity) above einsteins and saints feels creepy frankly.
I suspect Gates' business methods were relied on because the product was so mediocre.
If your product is mediocre, then you can't really depend on it to sell itself, can you? So you have to use whatever leverage you can get to get it adopted and to keep out competition.
This is some of the most ridiculously biased shit I've ever read on HN. Please explain his past misdeeds that are so unforgivable that his $30 odd billion in charitable donations can't even erase.
The money he's spending is extorted from our industry. If you believe the good somehow outweighs the harm, do you also believe that every tech company and every computer user should be robbed and the proceeds used to further help the poor, with no vote and none of the burden being shouldered from outside tech?
It disturbs me that there's still no real restitution sought from people who knowingly, deliberately attack our society's mechanism for allocating most all resources.
I don't think anything erases the past. On the whole, the world is a lot better off for having Bill Gates in it. But just because he's doing a lot of good now doesn't mean the bad he did doesn't count.
He had aggressive business practices? That's what makes him evil? He wanted IE and Windows to win out over Netscape and Linux? Give me a break. That is as mundanely not-evil in the business world as you could get.
"Give me a break" == lazy. Being willfully ignorant of MS's numerous misdeeds is not an argument. And if you don't have all the facts available, perhaps you should refrain from commenting.
I've yet to see a large company that wasn't illegal, immoral, or anti-competitive by the utopian-fairy-nerd standard.
That standard is more immoral than anything Microsoft ever did. It requires companies to kill themselves once they achieve too great a level of success.
But there can still be an order of magnitude difference between what these large companies do. Just because they all fall short of a "utopian-fairy-nerd" standard doesn't mean they're all equally reprehensible!
Reminds me of something pg wrote in "what happened to yahoo"
"It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them."
Every time I buy a computer that has microsoft windows release 'x' installed which I then wipe to install Linux I subsidize Bill Gates' ability to be a philanthropist.
Doesn't it depend on the harm caused by his misdeeds? If his business practices caused $100 billion or more of harm to humanity (by holding back the tech industry), could $30 billion wash that away?
I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.
> I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.
That's interesting. From my perspective of growing up with computers in the 80's and 90's, Microsoft was a net positive for the industry.
They took a really fragmented and immature industry and helped push it to the mainstream and helped allow computers to be a part of pretty much everyone in the first worlds life.
Yet, when things like this comes out, and stories about Jobs emerge, I start to question whether my choice of a role model was really all that well placed. Do you admire the guy with the entrancing personality, or the one that is about to cure polio?