Bill Gates To Stanford Grads: Don't (Only) Focus On Profit

jfruh (300774) writes "The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems."

Comments

Also focus on

[Anonymous Coward]

Destroying your enemies.

Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems

That's because it causes most of them.

Re:Water is wet

[blue trane]

Kleinrock and others have explicitly said that economic gain was not a motivation for the beginnings of the internet. And Berners-Lee wasn't interested in profiting from the World Wide Web. How much did Mendel profit from his theory of inheritance? Why didn't Pasteur pursue profits instead of basic research? Were Watson and Crick thinking of money when they thought of the double helix structure of DNA?

Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.

Re:Water is wet

[Immerman]

If you work for money you have my sympathies, perhaps you should re-evaluate your assumptions.

There is the option, especially prevalent within academia, of working for your pleasure. You still make money, and have to deal with financing, but it's not the point - if you weren't getting pay you'd make money elsewhere and then want to do the same work out of your own pocket as a hobby. Because the work is it's own reward.

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it. Make your choices carefully. Or at least consciously. Don't let yourself become a cogg in the machine whose life has been optimized to serve the economy.

So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

Cartoon lightening should hit gates in his weedy little head. What a hilarious hypocrite.

Tell you what, Gates... after I hit 70 billion I'll stop making it all about the money too. What a giant joke.

Yes, gates does a lot of very nice charity work around the world... and that's lovely. But he didn't just hop on a couch airplane and then do relief work in africa for years. The man amassed an insane fortune and then casually jet sets around the world making appearences for his charities. Don't get me wrong... he writes checks that clear. But that's his contribution to all these issues... writing checks. And that's very important... but to do that you have to have money. If you don't you can't do that.

So... I'm a little confused about his message. Because if I judged him by his actions... the sensible thing would seem to be... make billions of dollars by any means and then retire to run various charities and tell people what a good person you've always been.

I don't know... this charity kick that some of the super rich go off on seems like more of a donation to the "Everyone love me" fund. I frankly respect the anonymous donations more in most cases simply because you know they actually care more about the cause then they do about what people think of them.

honest profit

[stenvar]

The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.

As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.

Re:Fuck the world

[Immerman]

640 Megabucks should be enough for anyone.