Still, all the bad things Microsoft did back then are a rounding error compared to all the good Bill and Melinda are doing right now. I understand the idea of not promoting "end justifies the means" thinking, but we need to be pragmatic about this - there are only few people on this planet who have, simultaneously, lots of resources, their heart in the right place, and enough smarts to use those resources effectively for the common good. Discouraging those people from helping is a pretty stupid thing to do.
> you shouldn’t contribute your services pro bono
But I happily will. I want to.
I will readily, and entirely for free, support every single company, organization, government and individual who puts a honest and smart effort to make the world a better place. We're in extremely short supply of groups and people who make a difference; almost everyone - companies, countries, NGOs - are too distracted playing market games and politics for their personal, short-term benefit.
You get what you support. So let's support people who actually care.
So, not microsoft then. Which's the one you're implicitly promoting right now.
> I will readily, and entirely for free, support every single company, organization, government and individual who puts a honest and smart effort to make the world a better place.
This means you're not immune to PR. Sorry, but the world doesn't work like that. Ms constantly says how it'll change the world for the better and look at the software industry. Support those who don't do evil things to get rich, how about that?
I'm guessing you didn't watch the youtube link in the message to which you're responding?
But I assume you imply Gates was stuck in the same personal-benefit games. I agree with that. What makes him part of the pretty small group is that, eventually, he got out, and now seems to both be focused on helping others, and has a more global perspective.
On the upside, you don't have to watch much of the first one to get an insight into the attitude the DoJ was up against at the time. I suspect there's some recommendations on that page for summary / compilation videos of the deposition videos.
And I wasn't implying anything -- he clearly was. In subsequent testimonies he'd obviously been trained by PR types in how to not appear obstreperous, which was certainly to everyone's advantage, though it does invite the question 'which is the real Bill?'.
I've discussed elsewhere in this thread the dangers of considering current-Bill without considering how previous-Bill got him where he is.
Please do not imply that I am unfamiliar with the historical record here.
> Still, all the bad things Microsoft did back then are a rounding error compared to all the good Bill and Melinda are doing right now.
My point is, was, and shall remain that all the good things you allude to require all the bad things that happened.
It is precisely an 'ends justifies the means' attitude, and I feel the call to pragmatism is disingenuous.
I'm not implying that. I was responding to your assertion that "people under the age of about 35 really have no clue about Ye Bade Olde Days" and asserting that people under 35 know they're supposed to hate Microsoft too, even if they don't know the detailed reasons.
> It is precisely an 'ends justifies the means' attitude
It's only "end justifies the means" when people start excusing present bad behavior by arguing that it'll lead to something good in the future.
My point here boils down to:
Dear critic of Bill Gates. So maybe in the past, Bill was evil while you were not. Good for you. But right now, Bill is a force of good, and you're still - at best - not actively harmful to society, so maybe go and do something meaningful instead of making it more difficult for those who do?
I apologise -- I did not intend to sound prescriptive, but rather observe that people over that threshold tend to have a qualitatively different view of MS & Bill than people under it.
> It's only "end justifies the means" when people start excusing present bad behavior ...
I disagree very strongly with this revisionist attitude.
> ... go and do something meaningful ...
This is precisely what I'm endeavouring to do.
Yeah, I was pissed off that I couldn't install Windows 3.1 on my copy of DR-DOS. So what?
He built a successful business using very aggressive and hard line tactics that left a swath of destruction in its path. Now he's using his wealth for good. Let's stop dwelling on the past and focus on the good of the present.
Btw, you're quite famous for being a shitty moderator. No doubt you're part of HN's problem: you're just a shill who tries to keep the bubble intact.
The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad that posts like yours above just seem catty to me.
I’ve found it kind of funny and ironic that Bill was always the evil one and Steve Jobs was the cool “think different” upstart, but looking back on their entire lives, Bill has done so, so much more to make the world we live in a better place for everyone.
I didn't mean to seem catty. Rather, if someone exercises some philanthropic tendencies, but the wealth that backs those things up came from illegal, immoral, unethical, or dubious business practices, should we celebrate, or be cautious about our hero worship?
For my own part, I find the sentiment:
> I think most corporations of a certain size do.
To be particularly apologetic -- we really should be holding our elites up to higher standards than 'many people do wrong stuff, so it's okay'.
Also:
> The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad ...
This attitude implicitly discounts the benefits that other people may have done with that wealth, had it not been redirected into Microsoft / Bill Gates.
Yes, look, undeniably, as I said from the outset, they're doing some really good work -- but it's impossible for us to know what may have been done, or may be being done right now, in a more ethical history.
I too would like the world more if there were less of that. I can't think of a lot of philanthropists off the top of my head who made their fortunes from unambiguously morally-good methods. My personal opinion is that we're probably on an upward trajectory. Comparing how Gates made his fortune with the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, etc. I think Microsoft comes out on balance a bit better.
I agree that we're probably on an upward trajectory -- and that's a very good thing indeed.
Well that's just a defeatist attitude towards society and an uncaring, corrupted government (no matter where you happen to be writing that from).
Comparing Jesus-level sainthood to Bill ... I can't tell if you're trolling there.
I feel I need to be direct: you seem to be failing at reading comprehension 101 all throughout this thread (I assume tiredness).
I was not comparing Bill to Jesus. I was implying that you, and similar critics, think that we have streams of Jesus-scale saints who are smart, rich and ready to help, and we prefer Gates instead. But we don't have those saints. Right now, we can only choose between Gates and no one at all.
I think the Jesus and saint juxtaposition confused me (saints first appeared about 200-300 years after Jesus, and no one has ever claimed Jesus was a saint, etc).
Anyway, thank you for your clarification.
To be clear, I do not think that we have streams of 'Jesus-scale saints' who are smart, rich (as Jesus ostensibly said, that won't get you into heaven), and ready to help.
I do think we have a bunch of problems, and some institutions (governments, for example) that have been developed with the intent of solving those problems.
If the problems of society/ies require that we have [the head of] an organisation convicted for violating the Sherman antitrust act come to rescue us with their ill-gotten gains, then perhaps we (as a society) should be aiming higher.
Mind, I'm coming at this from a naive, optimistic attitude of wanting to not need heroes in order to save us all from each other.
Fair enough. Maybe my "Jesus-level saint" expression was needlessly confusing indeed.
> Mind, I'm coming at this from a naive, optimistic attitude of wanting to not need heroes in order to save us all from each other.
Ok, I get that. Personally, I think I've lost that optimism some time ago now, and figured we have no option but to work with what we have, as imperfect as it is. I liked my utopian/dreamer self better, though.
WRT Gates, I'm not pretending his tenure at Microsoft wasn't full of malicious actions. But then, in my mind there is a kind of quality difference between just being a huge ass in the business game, and directly trying to hurt (or kill) people. Gates was only the former, and never the latter (to the best of my knowledge), and right now his actions are actually saving lives and making more lives better.
Then again, I just figured out an example that lets me emphasize more with the critics. I was never impacted directly by Microsoft's past misbehaviour, and I was a kid through most of the bad stuff that was going down. But if today the top brass of Uber was to create something similar to Gates Foundation, ... well, I'd definitely feel conflicted. On the one hand, I'm responsive to utilitarian arguments, and Uber didn't exactly go around killing people either. On the other hand, the amount of sociopathy they've displayed for the past ~5 years left such a bad a taste in my mouth, that I'm not sure if I'd be able to support that hypothetical help-the-world venture.
So maybe I'm being uncharitable to you and some other critics; maybe my Uber is your Microsoft.
I was going to leave it at that ... but, couldn't. :)
You're right, of course, that we each grow up observing different parts of our societies -- government, elite, and celebrities (a hugely abused word) -- and our evaluation of these shape our own ethics and expectations of others' ethics.
From 2002, an article in The Register (UK) tech rag:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to...
Quoting from same:
"We do hate to rain on a high-profile corporate love-fest, but we have to point out that in addition to the much trumpeted $100 million Billg has donated to India's fight against HIV, he's funding the Microsoft jihad against Linux to the far more impressive tune of $421 million. That means that Linux is more than four times worse than AIDS to Billg and his happy Redmond family. God forbid any of them should learn the bitter truth the hard way and start talking sense.
"Billg's personal $100 million goes to health initiatives over ten years, while $421 million of Microsoft's money goes, over a mere three years, to support MS-friendly development and 'educational' initiatives. And being a monster MS shareholder himself, a 'Big Win' in India will enrich him personally, perhaps well in excess of the $100 million he's donating to the AIDS problem. Makes you wonder who the real beneficiary of charity is here.
"Oh, and let's not forget the five, count 'em, five, vanity puff-pieces appearing in the New York Times this week glorifying Billg's generosity, one of which he wrote himself. That's worth quite a lot too, in PR brownie points for both him and his company. It's far better than free advertising; it actually looks like news and therefore has immensely more persuasive value."
Undeniably El Reg had / have their own agenda, and it was Bill's foundation in one case and Microsoft in the other that they're comparing the dollar-figures of ... and yet ... it's hard to feel the same 'aww gee' response that's expected of us now.
But, for what little it's worth, I agree that Uber's not a net force for good either.
It's a common, but not at all obviously correct, analysis that where we are today was manifest destiny and thus Bill Gates and Microsoft was just randomly the medium providence chose to carry out this destiny. Microsoft got so incredibly many things right, and they started flagging almost the second they got a major thing wrong (the internet).
I really like this interview (Bill Gates on Letterman in 1995). He says the internet is a big deal, but he clearly doesn't get it, not does he provide any sort of thought leadership. Baseball and cigars? Snowcrash had been out for three years by then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lskpNmUl8yQ
It's entirely not clear what would have happened if Microsoft / Bill had not brokered that highly dubious original deal -- if, say, CP/M or even *nix had won that war.
My personal take is that we'd be ahead of where we are now. And I certainly don't think that we're at some kind of manifest destiny today.
Consider this discussion on HN from a couple of years ago around this very subject:
Yes huge role: but not a good one.
> Microsoft got so incredibly many things right
Like the FUD, EEE and the rest of the nasty stuff? Ms gets too much positive credit for all the bad things it has done.
I had a wider range of IT experiences than most people, which necessarily led me to a different perspective than most computer users of that era.
Look, it's clear that he's changed a lot, but how much of this is genuine altruism rather than some guilt mitigation.
For anyone unfamiliar, Bill's deposition (part 1) on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE
There's myriad resources on the net that describe the USA's DoJ's case against Microsoft, and their three days (!) of deposition recordings with the guy.