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The Softening of a Software Man
theodp writes to tell us that New York Magazine has an interesting editorial stating that no one is afraid of Microsoft anymore. The article argues that Microsoft has noticeably been adrift in the wake of Gates' philanthropy, which some cynics suspect is a Rockefeller-like attempt to 'fumigate his fortune' as he makes a play for the history books. From the article: "Like the robber barons, Bill Gates has moved from trying to take over the world to trying to save it."
I think that many people, as their savings went into orbit, would decide to give more to charity.
Is giving ~2% of your fortune to charity each year really that amazing?
It is more worthy than all of the other donations by people, many of whom might be donating a lot more money in percentage terms, or actually donating their time to the cause?
It's good however, because you don't hear much about other mega-rich people giving to charity. Maybe they do, but don't claim as much publicity from it? And ~2% of a mega-fuck-load is still a fuck-load (20 kilo-fuck-loads!).
I believe he earned the money. I believe the market is actually free. Therefore I am not afraid of MS. I have never been afraid of MS. The market still gets to choose and up till now, it chooses MS, for many reasons fair and unfair. Natural monopolies may seem unfair, but you are still free to steer the market in a better direction. Only the zealots believe that MS is pure evil and that Gates would need to fumigate his fortune. I wonder what excuse the zealots will use to hate the new leader if it doesn't come from your team?
Bill Gates has given more to charity than anyone EVER. Other billionaires, on the other hand (Trump, for example), have given almost nothing to charity. I think the guy deserves a little credit, regardless of why he's doing it. We can't judge his motives, since we don't know them. We can judge his actions though, and they speak pretty loudly.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
I have some suggestions:
Why don't we judge companies based on the company's behaviour, and judge individuals based on the individual's behaviour?
Why don't we stop imagining that somehow a multibillion dollar company is still largely a projection of one man's personality?
Why don't we acknowledge that contributing to charity does not absolve anyone of responsibility they may have for wrongs they committed in the past?
Why don't we acknowledge that a person's psyche is not one-dimensional.. that an individual can do good in some contexts and bad in other contexts?
Does that sound reasonable?
-Laxitive
When he took such an obvious path as creating a nonprofit organization (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and pumping in record billions of $$$ to avoid tax
I guess you got modded "insightful" by people who are really bad at math.
Donating money to charity does not leave one with more money than one would have had if one didn't donate at all.
If I have 120 dollars and I donate 20, I get taxed on the remaining 100 dollars (let's pretend it's 35%) - so I wind up with 65 dollars.
If I have 120 dollars and I don't donate anything, and I get taxed on the 120 dollars (and let's pretend that the tax rate on 120 dollars is 40%) I wind up with 72 dollars.
So, you see, even after considering the tax benefits, one does not magically wind up with more money after donating than if they didn't.
But, you know - if reality were different, I guess maybe you would have a point.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
And very few people would call Gates a robber baron at all.
The parallels between Gates and the robber barrons of 1880-1920 are pretty obvious. Perhaps it is your healthy non-geek detachment that prevents you from observing it. Gates has profoundly distorted an industry of great promise and gathered tremendous wealth to himself through careful construction of a monopoly. He did so through maniacal competitiveness, and cunning much like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Has he affected history? Certainly. Positively? Doubtful. His legacy is DRM and the anti-virus industry. Like the robber barrons, later in life he chooses to disgorge some of that wealth in a very public way in an effort to whitewash his image. He may leave his name on a couple of buildings, but posterity will see him reviled like his predecessors.
an ill wind that blows no good
> I actually was around before Microsoft seriously entered the computing market.
Me too! In fact, I was around before MS entered the computing market, period.
> I remember computers costing $10k (the Apple Lisa).
And you can still spend that (or many times that) if you want. And there were computers that only cost a couple of hundred on the market at the same time. As there are now. So whatcherpoint?
> I remember dozens of machines with no interoperability (TI 99/4, Atari, TRS 80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple...)
Yup, those were the cheap ones. And I was writing cross-platform apps for those machines with supposedly "no interoperability" at the time! And we did it basically the same way it's done today, with compilers to hide CPU differences, and libraries to hide other system differences. Sure, the overheads associated with cross-platform work made it a non-starter for, say, video games, but for business apps and such, it was clearly, even at the time, the wave of the future.
> Microsoft, love it or hate it, established a defacto standard.
No, IBM established a defacto standard. And, in the process, managed to kill of a lot of the existing market for cross-platform support (anyone remember UCSD Pascal or Fig-Forth?), and, arguably, set the industry back by a decade or more. Microsoft just happened to be lucky enough to be in a position where they were able to hijack the standards created by IBM. People didn't go with Microsoft because it was better (or even very good); they went with Microsoft because it was "IBM-PC compatible".
And, in fact, by the time the PC came along, the small business computing market had already pretty much standardized on CP/M, and Digital Research was already looking at porting CP/M to a new generation of sixteen-bit chips. All the indicators, at the time (before MS came along), were pointing clearly in the direction of cheaper, more powerful computers with more standardized interfaces and APIs. What bucket you were hiding under to believe otherwise I can't imagine!
> Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent.
Complete, utter hogwash! How many vendors were supporting CP/M at the time? How many were supporting Unix? Dozens, if not hundreds! I call shenanigans! We even bought one of those Apple Lisa's you mentioned around that time, but we didn't buy it to run LisaOS (or whatever it was called)--we bought it to run BSD! Gee, there was already a FREE cross-platform OS even way back then! Kinda makes you go "hmm", doesn't it?
> As far as Gates' generosity being a "new" thing...no, its not.
No, but Gates' personal generosity towards humanity in general has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Microsoft's role as an evil, predatory monopoly! My feelings for BG are completely separate from my feelings for MS, and my feelings for MS are that I haven't used any of their software since '98, and hope to never do so again.