Sure I’ll give credit for his recent philanthropy, but the man crushed a generation of innovative software companies under his heel. Fortunately he didn’t see the web coming and failed to stop Linux, but make no mistake was not a good person for most of his career, and we are still feeling the effects of the damage he did to the software world.
Microsoft also gave countless thousands of people the opportunity to get into the field. I know it's easy to shit on them now, because we can look back and say that just about everybody then was an idiot by today's standards, but if you compare what your options were, Microsoft was by and away the best option for a lot of people getting started. I have an interest in what computers were like around 2000 (I didn't live it at the time, so I don't have any warm, fuzzy feelings towards any of these systems in particular), and as far as I've seen, you had three options:
1.) Proprietary UNIX vendors. Cheap workstations? Fuck you. OS without a support contract? Fuck you. First party compiler? Fuck you. These started to improve after 2000 with ports of open source tools, but most people would realistically be in way over their head price-wise unless they were accessing these systems through a university or workplace.
2.) Open source UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Linux was still pretty rough around the edges, and BSD derivatives were still pretty widespread. All said and done, you had to know these existed, know how to be involved in the community, and deal with the reality that the money just wasn't there yet. These options were not without compromise -- it would be years before Linux began making inroads in the "serious" deployment market.
3.) Microsoft. They did shitty things, but it was possible to get affordable development tools on affordable (and actually quite performant, all things considered) hardware, instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars for option 1 or being in the right place and time for option 2. Windows, VB, etc. causes lots of moaning and groaning today, but it had to have been magical at the time.
Give them all a try on period accurate hardware, one after another. You will become acutely aware why people put up with Microsoft.
Eh, bullshit. By year 2000-2002 you could install Mandrake and SuSE with ease.
And Windows and VC++ were expensive as fuck.
In comparison, Mandrake was 30 EUR (~$35), which was a bargain.
Also, later you could get the 4DVD Debian release for 20 EUR.
As of 2021, the year of the linux desktop still ain't here. PC users still choose windows over linux now, and this is after god know how many enhancements.
In the 2000s, getting linux to work with wifi was a mess of command line commands and other PITAs that no normal users would put up with.
I agree that most UNIX vendors short-sightedly priced themselves entirely out of the PC market, but Microsoft’s threats are the reason OEMs didn’t dare to sell PCs with OS/2 or BeOS preinstalled.
Microsoft tried to spread FUD about Linux patents and by trying to scare the industry into buying patent licenses from Novell (which had acquired SuSE).
Being competitive and successful does not make someone a bad person. Being on the other side of open source does not either. You can't judge a person's character by these things.
If you want to focus on just his business, initially, Gates was a tech hero, upsetting the incumbents as much as any modern disruptor. His company came to be known as a villian, was itself upset, and is going through a reinvention period during which I think they are doing really good things. But none of that should be about his character. He played the game and won, then got out and focused on more important things.
> Being anti-competitive and successful makes someone a bad person. You can judge a person's character by these things.
Corrected that for you.
In all seriousness: I think Bill Gates is probably sincere in his philanthropy, but that the reason is emotional maturity and reflection... that and he's sitting on a fuck ton of money that one man can only squander if not put to better use.
I'm fine if we disagree on this. I go back and forth myself. Ultimately, I believe we're applying too much hindsight to Gates middle years. The anti trust suits were well founded. Someday we'll demonize the Google guys and Zuck and everyone else in adtech. That's good. They played the game, won, we didn't like the outcome, so we change the game. That doesn't make them evil either, it makes them products of a system we asked for and supported and along the way they brought immense value. What became evil in all these cases was not the people, necessarily.
What gets me is people who so vehemently hate that they talk about killing the person, not the business.
People are already, rightfully, being very critical of Google, Zuckerberg and others. Just like we were back in the day of Microsoft.
Are we going to applaud Zuckerberg in 20 years when he's going to use his money for good? He could already be doing good right now, instead of being a net-negative to the world, but he chooses to make billions instead.
I know we’re in a form of technology people but to put it bluntly — nobody cares. Microsoft is a massive massive successes story for the US in which a US company has a dominant position in the world market for software.
You forget that outside of tech everything that MS did that we rail on about will be remembered as good business. Nobody except people on the inside have these idealistic views about software and freedom and all that.
