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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fac...
Microsoft's customers weren't all robbed of their money. And on the other side, Bill Gates has committed to giving away all his money before he dies.
Its like, a man steals one pizza from his neighbor and makes 10 more. He eats one then he gives the rest to the homeless. Should we call him a hero? No - that theft wasn't ok! Is he a villain? No - he made pizzas and gave them away. Villains don't do that.
What is he? He's a man. He exists somewhere in the ethically murky middle. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes through every human heart." History will remember him for a lot of things - some good, some bad. Saint and sinner both. Like the rest of us.
Yep, corporate GMail had made me detest email, but corporate Outlook made me stop using it.
Also, Outlook for Mac was the only app that I had to actually quit before sleeping a macbook or the battery would die in my bag. Nothing else could compare.
On the server side, nothing mutilates mail quite like Exchange, although recent versions aren't as good as that as the old ones were.
Word and Excel are kind of nice, but I don't use them enough to pay for them, so OpenOffice it is.
But this isn't about us. The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers. From your nephew with an xbox, to devs in the C# ecosystem, to office workers who use word and excel to get their work done the answer is obviously yes.
I'm pretty sure Outlook convincing me not to read corporate mail was not of value to my employer (Microsoft's customer). At the very least, it added confusion and delay when other employees expected me to see things they emailed. Perhaps letting me focus on other stuff was of benefit to the employer, but that's tricky to measure; it's hard to imagine employers want to use a terrible email system to subtly discourage email use, there are more effective ways.
“What they do” as in “Suck in money based on path-dependence of familiarity, lock-in, and network effects”?
OK, now I know you're kidding.
There's about 40 lawyers in her office, and they have a lot of ongoing cases between all their clients. She spends some of her time each week "filing". For her this means sifting through the firehose of emails and documents that their office receives and assigning every one to the correct case, marking if it needs attention (and from whom), tagging the types of documents, etc etc.
She does all this from home through a custom workflow built on top of Outlook. I'm sure its not pretty in the backend, but can you name a system that would let her do her job more effectively? MacOS Mail? Gmail? Hah! No. Outlook is the tool they use; and it looks like it works well - even working from home.
I don't use anything in the office suite myself, but for my neighbour's office I don't think there's a better choice. Hate on outlook if you want, it solves problems for real users.
He simply got smarter than the shenanigans he did in 90's when almost got buried. Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core.
Its not that simple. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does amazing, mostly unsexy charity work the world over. Governmental aid organizations rarely want to fund boring infrastructure work like building roads in poor countries, or (before the pandemic) overfunding the world's vaccine manufacturing capability. Nobody wants to fund things like that because it doesn't sound sexy to voters or at charity fundraising events. The B&M Gates foundation does this stuff - and they have for years. Through their principled giving they've improved the lives of millions of people. And selfishly, there would be fewer doses of covid vaccines today without them.
Did they make that money through shady business practices at Microsoft? Yes. Are they using the charity to get out of paying US taxes? Yes. Is the money doing good in the world? Also yes.
The world today would look different without Bill Gates. Microsoft strangled tech innovation for decades, but their charity work has had a massively positive impact on people's lives. Bill Gates also deserves credit for that.
But even if the high stakes testing problem was entirely forseeable, thats my point! Its not simple. Bill Gates isn't Simple. He's not a comic book villain - Nobody is outside maybe mass murderers. Comic book heroes and villains don't exist in the real world. (And increasingly they don't exist in comic books either.)
If you want to know what he's like, watch some interviews with the man. Gates is obviously trying to make the world a better place. And he's going to continue to do that imperfectly, because he's made out of meat like the rest of us.
And yes, I'm also angry about standardized testing, and the historical stain microsoft has left on computing from the 90s. Angry and grateful, all at once.
Isn't FDA emergency use still an approval?
Quite a bit removed from being approved.