Bill Gates always seemed like a more appropriate person to idol, if you must do such things, than Steve Jobs. Not only did he build the worlds largest technology company (in its time), but he's making a global philanthropic impact.
I don't care for Apple products, and I don't like that Steve Jobs didn't seem to be altruistic. But I admire how Steve Jobs was able to come back to Apple and make it big again. Also admire what he did with Pixar and Next.
I like Bill Gates as a person, but I hate how Microsoft used to abuse their monopolistic power in the 90s. I admire the commitment that Bill Gates as a philanthropist.
I look at it this way: both controlled massive, evil companies--MS and its monopoly, Apple and its patent and lawsuit madness. Both were of the same generation, both in the same industry, both were about the same age when Jobs died, both were super-rich.
But one of them was a douchebag: denying the paternity of his daughter for years and acknowledged by all and sundry to be an asshole through and through. As far as we can know he died with his claws on his fortune. (Though it's possible he was an anonymous philanthropist.) Hell, he's a jerk from beyond the grave: he stiffed the guy who built is ulta-yacht!
The other was acknowledged to be difficult to work with in his day (though I've read few descriptions of him that would qualify him as Jobs-level douchiness), but since then has gone to become one of the biggest philanthropists in the history of the world, making contributions to education, science, and medicine that will be felt for generations to come.
I think these two figures are in a uniquely similar position to be judged side by side. Personally I would rather idolize the one who helped humanity, not the one who helped himself by making toys for rich people. (And hipsters.)
This doesn't make any sense. Who is saying that we only have to look up to one of them? Both men are human beings with flaws and motivations and ideals and goals who accomplished amazing and great and wondrous things and have made mistakes and done things others dont agree with. There is no reason, other than some false dichotomy contrived because they had competing companies, that we can't look up to both men and appreciate the fantastic things they've each done for the world. Just as there is no reason why we can't look at the mistakes they've made and learn from them.
Personally: both are amazing people, but only one appears to be a pompous dick. (Not knowing either, I only have hearsay and biographies to base some of my opinions on. Although, one is still producing data points)
Whenever there is a topic concerning Bill Gates, there always seems to be someone in the discussion section that will find a way to shoehorn Steve Jobs into a comment, however irrelevant. An interesting phenomenon.
Yeah, it's weird. Like when Joe Frazier or George Foreman come up in Ali discussions. Or when you talk Larry Bird, inevitably Magic Johnson comes up. Or when you talk about NES, someone brings up Sega.
Oh wait it's because those things are narratively, intrinsically connected because of the compelling nature of rivalry as it turns out that is not weird at all.
The two are inescapably linked. Ali and Frazier. Magic and Bird. DiMaggio and Williams. We'll spend the next few decades putting them in context with each other.
Both of them did absolutely amazing things. They were both very complicated characters. They both made an enormous contribution to society. They both drove their employees to the limit, and sometimes over the edge. Bill is following the tradition trajectory of American tycoons. Questionable business practices amass a fortune, which is then spent improving the world. Jobs was an artist whose medium was technology. His art was his offering to the world. Just my two cents...
Not only did he build the worlds largest technology company
With what tactics and strategies, though?
he's making a global philanthropic impact.
How would one measure the destruction Microsoft caused? The wasted time? The wasted money, the wasted lifes? I mean, if HNers can scream bloody murder about Shirley Hornstein "stealing jobs that would have gone to others" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135436 ), surely that should enter into this as well. If someone takes with one hand and gives with the other, you can't just count the giving. Well you can, but I can't follow. Personally, I judge people solely by how they react to a pie to the face, and Bill Gates scored quite low on that.
How would one measure the destruction Microsoft caused? The wasted time? The wasted money, the wasted lifes?
Wat. I'm sure lots of work that gets done at Microsoft is misguided or redundant. Welcome to working at a big company. The pay is competitive and the environment, from what I hear, is some of the best in the software industry. It's not some sweatshop where you're forced to toil for pennies; I bet a lot of people here would enjoy and benefit from the experience of "wasting their lives" at MSFT for a few years.
I think he meant the time 'wasted' or perhaps just used working with Microsoft Windows. Rebooting, configuring/reinstalling every few months, etc.
Every reboot required during the install or upgrade of a Microsoft product multiplied by an install base of hundreds of millions of machines is a big number.
(Not that this is really relevant to Bill Gates's work today)
Wat. I'm sure lots of work that gets done at Microsoft is misguided or redundant. Welcome to working at a big company.
You misunderstood me, I don't really care about the fate of anyone working there. I am more thinking about the brain space wasted with deceptive marketing claims, the money extracted from people, not to mention schools, and the horrible waste of people investing in learning about the MS ecosystem and the proliferating it. Microsoft learned to eat chalk, and the hard and scary way it learned to open up a little, but Mr. Bill Gates was once perfectly looking forward to the internet being a flop and everybody using MSN, to name just one of dozens examples clearly mapping the ugly underbelly. And far from silentely trying to improve the world without caring about the credit too much, MS was always keen on talking about stuff they didn't come up with as if they did, without technically lying.
Microsoft isn't special in that regard, sure, but to me even the best achievements are seen on the background of corporate armbandism and become morally worthless at best.
I am perfectly fine with someone who owes their life to the Gates foundation loving the guy, and happy for every life saved. But when it comes to me thinking Bill Gates is "cool", it just doesn't work out that way. So when someone else implies I kinda have to agree that this is all super awesome, I resist. Yes it is, but it doesn't make up for the other stuff, not one iota. Apologizing for all the lies and FUD about Linux, now that would be something... because hey, if people save money that way, they can buy healthy food, or go to a doctor of their choosing, and that's good thing, right? right?
Why is it always that we first allow a bunch of clowns to run just about everything, and then are grateful for the breadcrumbs they let trickle down? I am sure there are many people in China singing the praises of some party members who helped them get surgery or whatever. Yes, and? Take a step back, see the individual parts and how they fit together. Suddenly it's much less impressive, and the real heroes turn out to be the ones giving their lives to help others who DID NOT first sell a bunch of drugs or whatever to get the means to do so.
Agreed on the tactics. Of course we've seen incredibly rich people set up charity funds before. Like Alfred Nobel who invented the peace price after he became wealthy because of his invention of the detonator for dynamite and nitroglycerin.
>> "I judge people solely by how they react to a pie to the face, and Bill Gates scored quite low on that."
Please tell us how you'd react? Let me guess, you'd disarm the pie-throwers, crack a joke related to pies, smile into the camera as you're carried out on the shoulders of cheering onlookers?
>wasted lifes?
You should learn more about Gates foundation. Here's a passionate speech he gave recently in London about eradicating polio http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=R-JRogtrwRk
I was not a big fan of Bill Gates in the 1980s and 1990s. But I think the philanthropic work he has done has been wonderful. Steve Jobs was not philanthropic, to a fault. He preferred to give to society by producing good things. I think Gates has given immensely to society by applying his exceptional problem solving skills to some extremely difficult problems.
I've often speculated it may be based on how you are brought up. If you value charity, engineering, and redemption then Bill Gates (of today) is more suitable. If you value creativity, strong will, and charisma then it is Steve Jobs.
Jobs did it because he loved design. It's no more complex than that.
The expression of his ego in running Apple was his style / approach toward implementing his vision for product design. It's how he figured out he could get things done the way he wanted them done. You can debate the merits of his approach, but so what. Nobody put a gun to anybody's head and made them work for him at Apple or NeXT.
The Gates Foundation work is and will likely continue to be disastrous for public education in the U.S. It is simply an attempt to push education into the private sector.
He's pushing for same review system MS uses to be implemented into public schools in order to increase their school rankings, which is apparently riddled with corruption and ineffective according to ex employees like this guy: http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_mic...
"Microsoft's review system, in which a mid-level manager has significant control over all the review scores within a 100+ person group (so it's in your best interest to get on his/her good side), and conversely needs only a fraction of that group's total support to succeed as a manager (so it's in his/her best interest to cultivate a loyal fanclub to provide that support). The cult gives the manager the appearance of broad support, and makes the few people who speak out against him/her look like sour grapes unrepresentative of a larger majority. After a string of successes, the manager is nearly invincible."
The letter led me to wonder about measurment and results in the world of "doing good". I was wondering what this forum's thoughts on the matter are. Should we only fund the things that get results? How should we quantify our results? And probably most importantly: what do we choose to measure? (Decrease in rainforest destruction vs companies that choose to use non rainforest sources for wood or palm oil?)
I worry sometimes--and I co-founded an organization that brings data science to civic and social organizations--that this will be similar to No Child Left Behind (or World Bank like), where non profits do what is best for their metric instead of what is best for the population they are trying to serve.
That can't happen. The foundation was completely dependent on Microsoft happening, so the story of Bill Gates will be in two parts.
Part 1: Microsoft.
Part 2: Gates Foundation.
If I were a bettin' man I'd wager that more people have access to the internet than to public libraries.
Also, no one ever snags that last book that you really need for class. (Instead publishers charge you out the ass for a digital copy you dont even own!)
Steve Jobs keeps coming up in this thread. People seem to be missing two very important things regarding him.
Warren Buffett is giving his wealth away, but he isn't doing much actual charitable giving of his own direction. If you read up on it, you'll find that Buffett regards the best use of his time to be capital allocation, aka running Berkshire to generate profit. And then giving that wealth generation to the Gates Foundation to distribute. Why? In Buffett's own words, he thinks he would suck at distribution, so he picked someone better to do it.
Buffett is regarded as an important philanthropist now. However, he had no intention of being that during his lifetime. Susan was supposed to give his wealth away, but she (unexpectedly) died before him, forcing Buffett to change course. I assume I don't need to elaborate the point that things are not so linear as so many here seem to think.
Has anybody considered that Jobs regarded his best gift as building products? And that his wife would be far better at giving the wealth away.
Jobs died at a mere 56 years of age. He was sick for seven years with a form of cancer that is particularly hard to cure. If we're talking about his fortune, in all likelihood his best use of time was to drive Apple forward (he held something like $2 billion worth of Apple stock), and complete the sale of Pixar to Disney (2006) to secure his billions there as well.
Was Jobs going to suddenly become an amazing philanthropist, while dying from a horrific cancer, while running Apple and Pixar? This is an absurd notion. Bill Gates - by all accounts a highly productive person - had to leave his work at Microsoft in order to become a good philanthropist and go full time at the Gates Foundation.
Gates will spend the rest of his life on the philanthropy course. There was no 'rest of his life' for Jobs, his wife will fulfill that end. His wife will be the great philanthropist. And I believe it's very likely that was exactly what he had in mind. That thought is amplified by his lack of affection for wealth, there's no reason to think Jobs was desperate to hold onto it so he could buy mansions and leave his children billions. The logical conclusion is, he didn't view himself as the one to do the giving. Laurene is a mere 48 years old, she has a long life of giving ahead of her, bet on it.
It would seem that steve jobs was more interested in suing other companies than anything non-ego driven. He wouldn't even pay up for his super-expensive titanium boat.
I'll keep betting on Bill and Warren to save the world, thanks.
I don't know how many of you who have followed the link where offered the reader survey as you visited the link. I found that interesting, in that it asked a few of the same questions before reading the page, with my consent, and then again after I read it. I suppose the questions are designed to track attitudinal change from reading the page. I had read some of the page content earlier as the New York Times op-ed, which I think was also submitted here to HN.
I will always rail at Microsoft products, although I still use them. (Two of my four children have already switched to Linux for their PCs, but I'm still an old Windoze fuddy-duddy.) I do like Bill Gates's approach to philanthropy a lot. I particularly like the Gates Foundation research on effective teaching, some of which I apply to my own work as a mathematics teacher in private practice. Helping charities become more effective would indeed be a great contribution to society.
