I don't personally agree with you that Microsoft has done much harm - maybe not even any harm at all on balance, given the positive inventions they made.
Certainly I don't think Microsoft was so bad that saving 10 million people's lives wouldn't go a long way to making up for it.
But if I did think Microsoft was very harmful, like you, I would agree you shouldn't earn to give there.
Microsoft was founded in 1975. The Gates Foundation was founded in 2000. Why did we have to wait 25 years to see any money go into good instead of Gates' pockets?
Also, Gates is still very, very rich, even after giving away a lot of his money. He also helped a lot of his friends get very, very rich, and even the ones of them who give to charity will remain very, very rich. That's billions and billions of dollars that came from crushing smaller businesses, hardening monopolies, and pulling money from governments that could have gone to aid programs.
I am not sure where you got the "saving 10 million people's lives" statistic from, but if it's true, then how many millions more would have been saved by the billions of dollars that Gates and his friends have siphoned off by being middle men? Do you really think even half the money that has gone into MS will come out in the form of aid?
If $x spent to save 10 million lives saved between 2000 and 2015 are good, wouldn't $2x spent between 1975 and 2000 have been better?
I think he intends to give away most of his money before he does - like 90% or so.
As for why the Foundation was started in 2000 - Microsoft wasn't making much money before the 90s so there wasn't much to give. Judging by Microsoft's share price, Gates only truly got rich after 1997.
This is a bit of a foil; 10% globally includes many in the bottom 10% in the US. Buyers also include schools--computer labs are large portion of the increase in cost of education, which most would agree is extremely expensive in the US. And a lot of that money comes from corporations, who simply pass the cost of the tools on to their poor customers while not allowing those poor customers use of the tools. I'm also not sure how one can represent the fact that Windows products are only available to those in the top 10% income bracket as a positive thing.
I'm also not sure how you justify "willingly"; I've bought Windows products a few times because they were packaged with the hardware and I had no other choice.
> I think he intends to give away most of his money before he dies - like 90% or so.
This is true, but this doesn't respond to the point I was making:
1. Bill Gates is not the only beneficiary of Bill Gates' actions. Bill Gates giving 90% of his income doesn't give back all the money that Microsoft amassed.
2. 10% of Bill Gates' wealth is still more than most people will make over the course of their entire lifetimes. If you see this as "Bill Gates took a net of $10 billion from everyone else" instead of "Bill Gates took $100 billion from everyone else and gave $90 billion of it back" he looks a lot less generous.
No, the majority of customers are big corporation with a very large customer base (aka lower and middle class). The customers are the ones ultimately paying for that - e.g. when they buy food at McDonalds.
Some people in developing countries would have paid for Windows too, but they would have been unusually rich to have computers when Microsoft was raking it in. And from my experience in developing countries, Microsoft software was pirated almost 100% of the time.
Would this have actually been cheaper for the government to integrate into their processes? Even though the sticker price is $0, Linux is not actually Free as in Beer for most people and organizations.
When you take my full proposal, which is that perhaps 10% of the money spent on Windows were spent on Linux instead, I think that 10% would go very far toward making Linux cheaper than Windows even if you discount fees. Keep in mind that a lot of the money put into developing Windows goes into branding and creating vendor lock-in, which Linux doesn't have any reason to pursue.
> goes into branding...which Linux doesn't have any reason to pursue.
I strongly disagree, though I suspect we have a different view of what "branding" is. Branding isn't just logos and advertisements. Branding is creating a certain intuitive impression in the minds of prospective customers and partners. This can often involve serious technical investment. To give a specific example, look at the company DigitalOcean. They try to maintain a brand of "easy to get set up and learn how to do stuff". To do this, they pay people to write good tutorials and they spend a lot of effort designing their user interactions.
As a result, when run into someone who wants to learn how to set something up on a Linux server, I point them at digitalocean. Yes, their branding involves some nice graphics, but it also involves solving problems for their users.
Windows at times spent a lot of effort on solving engineering problems in service of their brand. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html
Canonical actually spent a fair amount of engineering effort on branding for Ubuntu, but they just didn't have the resources to create a clean experience around things like wifi and peripherals (at least by 2013, when I switched to OSX).
Linux other hand is very good for developers, sysadmins and technical people. This is mainly because its created by them for them.
Microsoft has added value for business because of this focus.
This strategy is basically, vacuum up a bunch of money and then pour it into doing good. But necessarily a lot of this money gets pulled out of places where it would do good, even if that good is simply putting food on the table of a poor family.
If you're an engineer or someone who creates things, it's probably actually creating value, not just moving it around and siphoning off some of it. But often that value you create is harmful: the Google engineers, for example, probably spend a lot of time working on ads, user data collection, partnerships with banks, etc.
And with CEOs like Bill Gates, the harm is much clearer. The money that has been spent by for example the US government, on Microsoft products could have been spent on building equivalent Linux products for a fraction of the cost, and the remainder spent directly on help programs. Bill Gates isn't some savior because he inserted himself as a middle man in the process of spending money on good. Sure, he's putting money into good now, but only after taking money out of good for decades, spending a lot of it on himself, and still keeping a sizable chunk for himself.
This applies to almost any rich philanthropist. They look good when they donate billions of dollars, but the world would have been better off if they hadn't amassed those billions of dollars in the first place. I'm not impressed when people decide to do a little good after building a fortune on a mountain of skulls.