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Comment by jack9 | Hacker News Reader

> he was openly reviled as an abusive monopolist and robber baron with a long reputation for having been mean and abusive to employees.

For some people (like me), he isn't anything more. Jobs and Gates were both rather disruptive people. Gates held the entire computer industry back, technologically, and abused his employees to stash wealth. What he does with ill-gotten gains is well and good from an absolute standpoint (no eye toward history), but the damage he did on his watch, doesn't make up for the relatively short-term altruism he has shown. Saving 10 or 100k lives via water treatment and scholarships or sabotaging technological innovation for decades, is not equivalent to me. It's immoral for Gates to take from others so he could make the decision of where that time and to what end to spend some of his lifetime of hoarded wealth.

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You may dislike him all you want, he deserve credit for his philanthropy. Credit where credit is due is one of the more important values in engineering. There are criticism to be made against Microsoft, but as with praise it has to be based on facts and not vague allegations.

"For some people..."

I think there are a lot of people who share a similar perspective.

For every Gates and Jobs, there are many other equally talented programmers and marketers who were not and will not be as lucky as these two.

But if these other talented programmers and marketers conducted themselves in the manner of Gates and Jobs, would anyone forgive them?

It's tempting to retort with some rhetorical rationale like "the ends justify the means," but then no one has any proof that behaving like Gates or Jobs has any causal link to the level of success they experienced.

Microsoft and today's Apple are what they are. Some people love these companies' products. The word "cult" is sometimes used and people get quite defensive about their computer preferences, too. Effective marketing I guess.

But not everyone has been so impressed.

For people in the later group, there is little reason to celebrate Gates or Jobs, unless one is on the receiving end of some of their cash, whereby it can be put to beneficial use.

> Gates held the entire computer industry back

The industry does this job well by itself, I doubt things would be much different if Microsoft wasn't around.

> What he does with ill-gotten gains

Yet all transactions that contributed to his gains were voluntary.

Technically no, if we're talking about installs of OS on platforms. Bad business decisions and uninformed consumer decisions don't necessarily line up with "voluntary". Voluntary on the part of the manufacturer, yes. But less obviously so on the part of a less informed consumer. And complicated further by the fact that some of those manufacturers later came to regret the deal they entered - specifically that MSFT got a cut of all shipped machines regardless of whether their OS was installed.

Ignorance isn't an excuse - otherwise we are the baddies for being at fault for not steering consumers towards better alternatives, not Gates.

> later came to regret the deal they entered - specifically that MSFT got a cut of all shipped machines regardless of whether their OS was installed.

Then they should've developed their own OS, as they were completely free to do.

> I doubt things would be much different if Microsoft wasn't around.

The man-hours wasted working around the bugs with Fat32 and NetBIOS and the slew of broken MS implementations can never be recovered. MS Office is STILL an endearing testament to what has been spent cradling flawed MS technological choices. The idea that the world would be the same without MS is nonsensical. The question is if we would have developed things like VMs a decade before (we would have through Sun filling those gaps with their existing tech). Maybe Sun would have burned down anyway, but that's besides the point.

> Yet all transactions that contributed to his gains were voluntary.

They were often coerced. They were tried and convicted in multiple arenas, for abuse of the de-facto monopoly.

Where does this revisionist thinking get incubated?

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