I loathe Microsoft but I *love what Bill G is doing philanthropically. Like I saw a great program[1] with Ian Hislop on BBC2 recently partly about this Victorian banker in Britain who was a notorious skinflint all his life, amassed a fortune and then built decent housing for the poor with the lot of his wealth. The mind boggles.
A lot of credit for the transition in priority goes to Melinda Gates, according to Bill on an interview on Charlie Rose Show w/ Bill, Melinda & Warren Buffet if I remember correctly.
Maybe, but you can't change the past, so why not change the future? The haters (righteous or otherwise) get to take their potshots in the history books.
I should read up on it, maybe it's a pattern? Once your basic needs are totally covered and once the guilt sets in you start to give a little something back? Dunno. Wish more people were like those robber barons and the later Bill Gates in that case. Especially with the way income inequality's been going.
Yes, he is Chairman, but not involved on a day-to-day basis. Note that in the link you posted the most recent article wrt microsoft and bill gates is in June 2008
If he was really running the show I think things would be very different (ie they wouldn't have f'd nearly everything up like ballmer has)
Kim Il Sung is also the eternal president of North Korea, but I doubt he is having a direct impact on the governance of the country.
It is a ceremonial position; no doubt he has some impact (it was implied that he was one of the reasons Microsoft didn't pursue Courier if I recall correctly) but he probably isn't involved in anything beyond vague larger-scale strategies.
It doesn't matter. My point was that at one point in his life he was intimately part of a decision making structure that killed some great companies like Borland and Netscape to name but two. And now he seems to be Mr. Awesome. That I find bizarre. It's a bit like the early and late Wittgenstein, something has happened to the man.
I distinctly remember the 90s and understand where you're coming from. Microsoft was a scary 500 lb gorilla. I started college in '94 and remember there were kids who were super pumped to get internships working there... and at least as many who considered themselves conscientious objectors and would never think of talking to them.
Perhaps another way to look at it, is he was Mr. Awesome in the game of business... pushing the concept of using leverage (partnership agreements, legal might, etc) to gain and hold onto market share and maximize gains for his shareholders. And now his focus is philanthropy he's redirected that same energy to success in that endeavor.
The conundrum comes of course when you apply the filter of judgement, someone in the software industry might see these two activities as being at odds with each other. But if you remove that filter and look at it simply as succeeding at something... let's say his earlier goal was to be the most successful businessman possible, he probably achieved it. Now he's taking the results of that and applying it to his next goal.
Great companies survive -- both Borland and Netscape encountered pressure from Microsoft but that alone wasn't enough to kill them. You can't blame Microsoft for terrible business plans, bad marketing, and poor products.
Microsoft did some terrible things, and abused their market power. But overall, I would say the world is a significantly better place than it would have been without MS. Looking at it from an economics point of view, every person who bought MS software made a logical transaction where the benefits outweighed the costs, therefore making their life better in some way.
I loathe Microsoft but I *love what Bill G is doing philanthropically. Like I saw a great program[1] with Ian Hislop on BBC2 recently partly about this Victorian banker in Britain who was a notorious skinflint all his life, amassed a fortune and then built decent housing for the poor with the lot of his wealth. The mind boggles.
1: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/23/ian-hislop-when-...
edit: Enough with the hate already. This is the reason i stopped coming to this site, you can't say anything outside the party line.