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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."
Rockefeller, who was perhaps the richest man in all history, also used his fortune via nonprofit foundations, not only to enhance his character as publicly perceived (Gates has already done this), but also to mold and shape the American culture, especially the political culture.
In fact, arguably, plutocrat fortunes, as used to fund foundations, might be said to be the primary force used to direct and channel American leftism. Read more about this in Roelof's book _THe MASK OF PLURALISM. Basically, her main thesis is that plutocrats funded the large nonprofit foundations so that they could fund leftists who were not oriented towards economic oriented leftism, but instead towards identity politics. Thus, the white lower middle class was turned away from leftism in general. Well, there is more to it than that, but it was a major factor.
I doubt Gates could ever match the effect that Rockefeller, Scaife, etc had on American political culture. Too many other players in the game now...
eat shiat and bark at the moon
All men come to realize they reap what they sow. All mean come to realize they too will die, and whatever is said afterward, and how people remember you is all that will remain. Perhaps mortality finally caught up with him, perhaps not. We'll see.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
There are certainly hard, well-documented instances of Steve Jobs sinning against his fellow man. Going way, back, i.e. to the instance where Wozniak helped him (performed the whole task, really) by optimizing some hardware for Atari. Jobs received a $5000 bonus from Atari for the task, but then told Woz that he got $700 and gave him a 'half' amount of $350.
No, you get the feeling from Microsoft that they just roll on like a column of amoral tanks over their opponents, whereas Jobs' actions make him seem like a targeted, deliberate agent for the secret police.
And in the 1980s, when Microsoft was beating their opponents in the marketplace with over- (and under-) handed business deals, Apple was running opponents out of business (i.e. the whole Apple II clone industry) in the courtroom.
Almost nobody knows that John D. MacArthur, who funded the "genius" awards (posthumously), made his money with a life insurance company scam. His unauthorized 1969 biography, "The Stockholder", by William Hoffman, gives the details. MacArthur introduced mail-order life insurance sold through newspaper ads, and his company, Banker's Life, was notorious for refusing to pay claims.
If it worked for them, it should work for Gates. Gates isn't even alleged to have killed anyone.
Gates has given massive amounts of money to various charities ever since Microsoft became successful. This isn't anything new. Maybe, just maybe, Gates is a genuine philanthropist? Of course, if you already hate the man, which so many here do, you could probably never come to accept that.
Get over it. He doesn't have any alterior motives here. There's no smoke and mirrors. He's just continuing to do what he has done for decades.
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Bill is doing a lot of good with his charitable work and that deserves recognition. But if he steps back guess who's going to be running the show. Steve Ballmer has shown himself to be more ruthless than Bill, more aggressive and much more willing to threaten competitors.
On the other hand Ballmer is also impetuous, and may lead Microsoft back to the law courts.
At the same time, Gates no longer cuts the profile he once did as a high-tech titan. While he's still respected, he's no longer scary--and the totemic company he built from scratch seems increasingly ordinary, even irrelevant
What the article doesn't go into is why Gates and Microsoft are no longer seen as scary. It's because their products are no longer the only choice. It used to be that for many things, you had to deal with Microsoft, because all the stuff you wanted to do required Windows to run. That meant that you had to agree to whatever terms Microsoft cared to offer, and they could be pretty onerous (and expensive). These days, with the easy availability of open source alternatives and the shift to web-based services, people are no longer compelled to accept lousy deals from Microsoft. If they don't like what Microsoft has to offer, they are free to go with something else. That means that (a) Microsoft has to treat its customers better if it wants to keep selling product, and (b) customers no longer have to live in fear of doing something that would anger the giant in Redmond.
So yes, Gates and Microsoft are no longer as scary as they used to be. But it's more because of the actions of Torvalds, Stallman, Jobs, and Berners-Lee than any change of heart by Gates.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You obviously don't understand corporate culture and how a poisoned athmosphere can perpertuate long after the original source has gone.
How can a company behave any differently than its employees? Its NOT a living thing. It is a creation of the legal system and its demise is strictly a feature of the economics of the times. They can merge, meld, divest, split and otherwise morph in ways that human beings can't. (A large corporation can sell off a transportation services division and sometinmes, that even mares sense. Try doing that with your legs.)
Some companies in Europe can date their origin back hundreds of years, longer than any of the individuals working for them. I believe that part of ELF-Aquitaine goes back longer than that.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The market is not free. Tax structures encourage exactly the type of spending (and selling) that Microsoft happens to engage in.
The way US taxes work is this: you can make all the money you want, but you have to get rid of it this quarter. If you use it to buy things of value, you pay more taxes. If you fritter it away on worthless services or give it to employees, you pay less taxes. So there are basically two strategies you can take in order to pay the least amount of taxes possible: give away every dime you make, or make sure you never make a profit.
Did you ever wonder why companies hire people when times are good and fire them when times are bad? It's not because they need more employees to help make widgets. The amount of widgets made has more to do with employee productivity and availability of natural resources than the number of warm bodies employed. And the amount of widgets sold and consumed has almost nothing to do with macroeconomics. When the company is making more profit, they need to hire more employees to write off their taxes.
Now, this applies as much for Microsoft as for its customers, businesses. If you run a business and want to hire your worthless nephew, you don't want to give him an actual job to do. You want to pay somebody else to make it look like he's doing a job. So there's Microsoft with their point-and-click busywork crapware. Now everybody's nephew can make 50 grand surfing the internet and writing spell-checked e-mails. And software is worthless. It's not even legal to re-sell. So you don't pay taxes on whatever you give to Microsoft. It's win-win-win. You get a tax write-off, your nephew gets what you would just give him anyways, Microsoft gets billions of dollars, and the government gets to increase taxes on those too stupid to cheat.
Cheap PCs, idiot-proof software, and the fruits of a successful oil war turned the 90s into the high employment, zero productivity fuck-up that we all remember. And it turned Bill Gates into the wealthiest person on the planet.
But this is nothing new. It's been US policy since Henry Ford rolled the first Model A off the assembly line. He figured out that he could give all his profits to his employees, and that they would just turn around and give some of it right back to him to purchase the cars that they made. That's worked pretty well, of course, until those employees stopped needing new Fords to drive. So for nearly a hundred years there was no incentive to use robots instead of humans to increase the quality of American cars. It took a competitor outside the reach of the ridiculous US tax policy to build a better automobile.
Somebody mentioned Donald Trump. He has taken the second strategy. The man spends more time in bankruptcy court than in the penthouse. He owns half of Manhattan, but I'll bet, on paper, he never turns a profit. So, in reality, he probably gives away as much as anyone, but instead of going to his personal charities and foundations, it goes to his customers and employees.
There are all sorts of other consequences to US tax policy, from the byzantine schemes that Enron engaged in, to companies not looking (or investing) past the next quarter, to recent generations having to change jobs (and careers) every few years, to artificially high employment rates, to volatile market shifts and recessions, to the rise of government services and the catastrophic collapse of those services due to generational demographics, to successful start-ups that turn to crap when the profits and investments and accountants and employees start rolling in.
So, in conclusion, if we had a truly free market, 90% of people would be out of work, products would last longer, society would openly (rather than secretly) engage in the type of "gift economy" that out dipshit president ridicules in countries in the Middle East, and there would be less lying and bullshit going on in the US in general. Really, besides full employment, piddly busywork and products that are designed to fail, lies and bullshit and idiots who believe them is all our obtrusive taxes have gotten us.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
That line is just classic Gates, the computer time may have been worth $40,000 but Gates never paid for it. Gates and Allen did not even have authorization to be using the university machines in question, something Gates himself would probably liken to "theft". I don't think Gates has changed at all, he's still a liar. As for Microsoft, they still market vapourware and I believe the next product will be called "Vista".
Seriously. I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life. Prior to getting married, the regional in-joke regarding any local charitable project was "Bill Gates declined to participate, because he was afraid it would be confused with actually caring about his home and neighbors" (see any number of 'Almost Live' reruns for verification). But after he got married, this seemed to gradually change.
I, for one, am happy to see the Gates's speading their wealth around. Bill's motivation is more or less irrelevant to me - I'm just glad it's happening.
#DeleteChrome
How has Microsoft set computing back? The fundamental problem with this argument is that there is NO evidence that there were other more advanced technologies that didn't advance because of Microsoft.
There is plenty of evidence of this. There were far better GUI systems that Windows when it started (anyone who tried to program under Windows 1.0/2.0 as against a more rational system like GEM would have realised this). Even as Windows as developing, it was intended to move to a more stable and secure system (OS/2). Microsoft abandoned that effort, and moved us back to buggy Windows 3.0. There were plenty of ways Microsoft could have given a robust and usable system on the desktop, but they were still shipping (carefully hidden) DOS-based systems (Win95/98) until the late 90s!
Combine this with their proven abuses of monopoly in an attempt to supress competitors, and there is no question Microsoft has held things back.
Nobody has ever compelled you to spend even one cent of your money on Microsoft products.
How about the computer manufacturer who was strong-armed into charging a "Microsoft tax" on every system sold even if they shipped their system with OS/2? Granted, you could likely find a place which didn't factor in this cost, but how would you have known that back then?
Not that I agree with the person you replied to, but at least on that point there is some merit.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It's really hard to tell what was motivating Bill Gates at any one point in time. Most would say that he was motivated by greed, while others might say that he was actually trying to make a difference. One might also say that he knew he couldn't make a difference unless he had the power to do so. In this case, a shitload of money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending his previous actions, but how many of us *really* know this man? Given the resources he has, would any of us have turned out differently?
The problem here may fall in line with the old saying: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
As people get older, (and many young slashdotters won't understand this yet, but they will - eventually.) how they think, act, and see the world changes. Most of us are so bent on seeing Bill Gates as some kind of extreme demon that we fail to recognize that people are dynamic, and he's no exception. We don't stay the same, things influence us, change our minds, and cause us to act differently all the time. The change is typically gradual, but it does occur in everyone.
Think about how you were 10 years ago - the things you thought about, how you acted. Compare it to how you are now. I'm sure most people will find that they are not the same people.
I can't say if this is exactly what is happening to Gates, but it seems plausable enough to me.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The problem with ill-gotten gains is that it's a negative-sum game -- for whatever Microsoft gained, everyone else lost incomparably more.
Gates and Microsoft are responsible for poisoning software development, creating a culture of a complete disregard of quality, turning intellectual pursuit into mindless race for features, destruction of countless good projects, technologies and ideas, turning software development industry into a mix of a Microsoft fan club and a slaughterhouse, and nearly complete destruction of all research that is in any way related to computer science. This will take decades to reverse -- likely our grandkids will still suffer from consequences of this.
If Microsoft declared Windows to be free, and refunded all its customers, this damage would be still done -- and it's not like Gates has that much money on hand. So there is absolutely nothing Gates can do to go into the history as something other than a bloodthirsty monopolist, and a man who caused a massive noosphere pollution -- what is worse than John D. Rockefeller who is also the first but at least not the second.
No one but some panderers to the rich consider Rockefeller to be anything but an evil man who caused massive amount of misery, and the same will apply to Gates. How much of their shitty money will be paid for whatever causes, is irrelevant because the damage done is beyond anyone's capabilities to repair it, even if some of that money went into such repair.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.