Comment by zohebv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zohebv | Hacker News Reader

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> Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs.

While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

There were quite a few pure-software platforms that never got off the ground because OEMs didn't dare even offer them as options for fear of angering Microsoft. Unless you were savvy enough to build your own machine from parts, they made it as hard as they possibly could to avoid paying for a copy of DOS and later Windows whether or not you would have preferred to run something else. Most famously, Be got a $23M settlement over this, yet never managed to get fair access to the marketplace so they could compete on commodity hardware. Gates's tactics cost us years of progress, and now he's getting accolades for giving away extorted money DOJ should have seized for his victims.

That's what I mean, it's BS. "Software is king - hur hur".

Hardware is king - try executing your code manually if you disagree. Try wiring the world with a particularly clever algorithm or executing that massively parallel algorithm on a single-core CPU.

When he says software is king he means that it's profitable to dominate because its incremental costs are minimal. And with the DMCA preventing reverse engineering, software patents preventing use of trivial algorithms, etc, they're assuring the monarchy will last forever.

> If Apple/Amiga had won that round we [...]

... could still have a free market where competitors weren't locked out before they started.

Microsoft delivered crippled products to its customers specifically to preserve its marketshare. If I did that as a consultant it'd be criminal.

> poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

Hardware is ultimately fungible so the same boom would have occurred regardless. The boom was happening before MS and the PC, and before Apple too.

Just as an example, it'd be as reasonable to credit RMS for the hardware commoditization as Gates. Stallman was largely personally responsible for reinventing proprietary lisp-machine functionality. By killing off one of the most potentially profitable specialized hardware companies Stallman started the commodity hardware trend.

If anyone really influenced it though it was one of the computing pioneers like Turing simply by proving computational equivalence. After that it's a given.

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