Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that.
I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.
He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft.
So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."
I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer.
I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot.
I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead.
Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece.
My question is this: what was the goal of your article?
From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table.
For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better.
An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too.
Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great!
I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?
I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.