And we should be really clear. Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. There are scant few developers in the world who can really argue that Gates hurt them, much less destroyed their lives.

And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.

> Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play.

Are we talking about Microsoft as in "Comes vs. Microsoft"?

> Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased

He was not the first and didn't push particularly hard. The first "serious" computer I had was an Apple II (the first one was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone) and a lot of the software I ran on it was acquired well after the purchase.

Yes, that Microsoft. The totality of damage in the Comes case, IMO, is very isolated. And a lot of what they was pushed against MS was tough talk, but not in itself illegal (but a lot was illegal too... I'm not letting them off the hook for that, but I'm not blindly jumping on them for everything).

Your recollection of the history of software is different than mine. I recall Microsoft being one of the biggest pushers of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.

Microsoft was a strong proponent of COTS only after the DOS deal with IBM. Before that they did lots of embedded languages for computer manufacturers. IIRC, I have used only Microsoft versions of BASIC in my early career.

They always had a strong stance against piracy, something that's understandable even when you consider they had limited exposure to it in those early days because of their OEM deals with computer makers.

That anti-piracy stance goes back to Micro Soft BASIC for the Altair in 1976: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html

> Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?

Why are you so sure 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs would be unable to give the world something better? Too many eggs in too few baskets...

/me points to Linux.

Granted, it's not quite 20 years.

I would point to Ataris, Amigas, Transputers, RISC workstations, Lisp Machines, Xerox Star, Connection Machines, supercomputers, ... Not to mention the software that would be developed today if we weren't stuck with glorified 8080s running 60's OSs (Linux is Unix and NT is VMS)...

It is not unlikely that many of those would end up as failed endeavors whether or not MS existed. We can only speculate though.

I figured MSFT's reign of terror was from the mid 80s to the early '00s, then rounded up as a courtesy.

Thank you for pchristensen for a proper demonstration of a straw man.

We don't know that avoiding 20 years of "frustrated tech entrepreneurs" means that this just got missed. Who knows what was loss by Gates' destructive policies. Maybe tech would be so much more advanced by now that 6 billion would be wealthier.

We can't know such things. All we can know is what actually happened. Things turned out ok, just as they always do, but that doesn't mean it was the best possible outcome and it certainly doesn't excuse what Gates did.