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Gates to join Simonyi in Space?
gadgetopia writes "On Russian state television, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin tells journalists in a live video interview from the ISS that "Charles said that Bill Gates is also preparing to visit space"." Gotta wonder what that insurance premium is going to look like.
Slashdot provides a link to what Fyodor Yurchikhin said about what Charles Simonyi said about what Bill Gates supposedly intends to do.
Why would Gates even have insurance, it's not like he needs one with that wealth.
It's already fallen.
Like Andrew Carnegie, Gates is like a bear who went over the mountain, saw another mountain, and being somewhat smarter than the average bear had a shrewd guess about what he'd find on the other side of that mountain.
We're in the post-Gates era of Microsoft now. If he wanted to be back in charge, he could be, but he's onto phase II of his career, which is not about Microsoft. There'd be no ego gratification, no fun in maintaining the status quo. So he's on to changing the world. It's not an unheard of late career move for the evil genius who has no Sherlock Holmes against whom he can test his mettle. If Spassky hit his mid career, and found the only people left to challenge him played chess like me, he'd have taken up crochet instead.
What would you do if you had to be Bill Gates, not for day, but every day for, say, the next forty or fifty years? You'd want to do something pretty damned amazing with your life, not only amazing, but amazing compared to what you did with the first half of your life.
Now you have Microsoft, which is built around Bill Gates ego, except Bill Gates' ego is on to bigger and better things. They're a ghost of their former selves. Seriously, the old Microsoft would not have been humiliated by a startup whose motto was "do no evil". Google would have been crushed or coopted. Crushed and coopted more likely, in whatever order suited Bill Gates master plan best.
I think we can expect better things from both Gates and Microsoft in the coming years than we've seen from them yet, but the transition is going to be painful for people who are overinvested in Microsoft. Overinvested in more ways than money.
So, overall, I think people, even Microsoft haters, ought to be rooting for Gates to make it back to the Earth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.