Leander Kahney seems to think there's something unethical about building products, managing an organization, and benefiting from it. The resentful epithets he throws around (cutthroat capitalist, vengeful nerd, selfish business goals, greedy capitalist, obscene fortune) are shallow tropes and stereotypes. No one has any duty to participate in the ridiculous rock-star, celebutard culture Kahney endorses. The greatest responsibility that "…comes with great wealth and power…" is restraint. Whether Jobs shows that restraint through anonymous giving or recalcitrant hoarding doesn't matter to me, his work speaks for itself. I'm sure he can endure the shame of not meeting Kahney's childishly conventional ideals.
Kahney wrote a book in 2008 called "Inside Steve's Brain". It was very complimentary toward Steve, presenting his leadership techniques positively. Good book, and not at all negative as this article might suggest.
The view of this writer brings up something that sickens me about philanthropy and that's doing it just to get the recognition and attention of rather than giving because you actually want to help someone.
What sickens me is that it's also the other way around.
If you are a billionaire and give money away in private, you'll be publicly criticized for not giving anything to charities. You're guilty unless proven innocent, so to speak.
Or take somebody like Warren Buffet. For years people had criticized him for ignoring charities, while he was of the opinion that he could put the money to better use by investing it wisely. A few years back he decided to join forces with Gates and signed almost all of his money away to charity. And suddenly, of course, the media flips and applauds his generosity.
The strategy of keeping all the money during your career and giving it away in a lump sum in the end may be a close to optimal solution (because you give away everything you're going to think very carefully about how to make the biggest impact. Otherwise you'll pick a few charities at the end of every year for PR reasons and for tax benefits; that's not going to be optimal.)
To criticize a billionaire when he wastes obscene amounts of money (yachts/private planes) I can understand (although I think they earned those luxuries). To criticize people for investing the money they've made, when there's no reason to assume they're not going to give the same money to charity in the future, well, that's just petty.
Gates' early philanthropic donations were primarily to higher-ed institutions. Somewhere along the line he learned that that's among the most regressive, least effective forms of charity, and shifted his focus to the truly poor and needy. That convinced me that he was truly interested in helping others and not just looking for recognition, attention, or improving the MS brand.
Keep in mind he also has some investments in biotech too. Giving someone money in order to allow him to buy your products and prop up your market cap may be a very profitable form of charity ;-)
I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but if you think BG would give most of his fortune just to get recognition and attention... I think that's really unfair with him.
This is silly, all it's saying is that if you're humble enough to donate anon, you're going to be vilified. I'm unbiased as far as windows/mac goes, Jobs does seem very orientated to his visions only, but I refuse to believe Jobs doesn't donate to charities, and I have no information to say he does or doesn't.
My grandmother loved to donate as anon0 to people, sending large lump sums to people in need, directly in the form of cash in their mailbox or otherwise delivered as a "gift" with no "from". I hold humble charity in the highest regard, and whenever I donate, I refuse to put my name to it to this day, as a gift given for recognition feels cheapened.
we didn't find out until after her death, my mother was normally her assistant in sending and getting it to the right places and she didn't disclose any of this until after her passing, in memory of her and to honor her.
Well, most recently and evidently I went out with a girl who helped start a humanitarian organization and in doing so I obtained quite a bit of experience watching and interacting with her and her friends.
Other than that in general, I've observed many occasions where if given the choice between giving or not, the major factor in their decision was whether or not other people would know about it.
I don't know if Jobs is well known outside of the computer industry, while OTOH everybody knows Bill Gates. If BG plays his cards right, he'll likely be not only widely-known and remembered, but he'll be remembered in a very positive light as well.
Why is the focus on money here? The impact of the technologies they create dwarfs any monetary contributions. What's the value of their technology on top of what the obvious sellable product is? That is, how much more valuable is their product to the user on top of what the obvious product would have been?
It affects some products more than others. Productivity tools have high leverage, as do protocols and standards, because they are means to ends. End-user products like food, music, sex (for fun, not reproduction), and housing tend to have little leverage because they are closer to the ends. That is, more of them increases wealth.
iPods are good because they let lots of people enjoy more music than before. However, it is probably on slightly better than the obvious product and in any case, the possible impact of a media player is limited.
UNIX (or HTTP or C) on the other hand is non-obvious and a fundamental tool impacting work higher up the value chain. These things have enormous impact on wealth because of the knock-on effects of the tools and they afford. Innovation and development is approximately exponential and, rarely mentioned, prone to get stuck in local maxima. Here be dragons. Would we have as powerful an Internet if it weren't for a few key UNIX design decisions? What would a Microsoft designed world-wide computer network look like?
Try this: how much time do you think people spend trying to align things in PowerPoint that could be made a snap with better tools (maybe 2007 fixes this)? Let's say 2 min per presentation. With an estimated (by Microsoft) 30 million presentations a day, of which say a tenth are newly created, that means 6 million minutes, or about 11.5 man years, are wasted. Every day. Because PowerPoint doesn't make alignment easy. Not to mention that it may limit people's ideas. What if other Microsoft products have shortcomings more severe than those in PowerPoint?
Microsoft products often strike me as worse than the obvious product, prospering because of lock-in/short-sightedness.
By giving his money away, I doubt Gates could ever make up for the value creation Microsoft has blocked. He would have to find something with enormous leverage that would otherwise not happen -- don't get your hopes up. Thus, though I hope he proves us wrong, Gates is down in my book as one of the bad guys. Things are looking better now, but we've lost years of exponential innovation. I bet Kurzweil is annoyed.
Being a "star" has almost nothing to do with being a good person. It's persona. Jobs has a very compelling life story. He approaches his work with the relentless perfectionism and devotion of an artist. He understands the value of theatrics and suspense. He's reclusive and arrogant but also charming. He's simply a more interesting character than Bill Gates who was a rich kid that went to Harvard and got even richer. I admire what he's doing with his money now but it doesn't change the fact that he's a boring character.
Personally I don't base my opinions of someone on their public support of the things I support. I like Jobs because I like his products, I couldn't care less about Gates because I find his products sloppy and awkward to use. Why do we have to get into a bunch of 'well Gates gave more money to the poor!' discussions? Not even getting into the issue of Jobs being a very private guy in general -- why is this any of our business?
