Things like this are neat because they remind folks that tech titans, billionaires, celebrities, and the like are, at the end of the day, people too -- not that dissimilar from everyone else. It's so easy to forget that.
It's awesome that Bill Gates decided to participate in the gift exchange.
This is also quite assuredly one of the best ways he could have possibly advertised for Heifer International.
So, yeah, he's a regular dude in a lot of ways. He's also still a ruthless billionaire who created a company that was known for crushing its competitors.
People are complicated, and just because he can be nice doesn't mean that he's not other things too.
I really can't think of another person that I've had to reevaluate my opinion of as drastically as Gates.
In the 90s he was widely seen as the face of the evil empire of Microsoft by the technorati, completely cutthroat and unfairly crushing anyone that stood in his way.
But over the past decade, he's arguably been one of the single greatest contributors to good in the world. He's been a staunch and consistent advocate for the overall betterment of humanity. He's put his wealth and influence to use in beneficial, high-impact ways. He's directed his ruthlessness away from business and toward hunger, poverty, and disease. And it's making a very real difference in the lives of people around the world.
He's gone from somebody I viewed as a reviled caricature of a man to one I can't help but profoundly respect.
Yeah, people are complicated. In the Mr. Gates' case, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
A quick browse of his foundation's Wikipedia page [1] makes me think old habits die hard. I hope all the positive press coverage is true (and not the work of extremely well funded PR agencies) but these questions keep coming up. I don't know enough about this to decide yet but I'd like to see some more impartial examination of the foundations net benefit to society, as I think the coverage so far is lacking.
Investments: a potentially valid criticism, it also applies to a lot of other charities, including the very high profile (in the UK) Comic Relief.
Diversion: Well, ultimately you can't win, every significant investment diverts from other things, but his endgame is to eliminate these diseases. Then the diversion will stop. It's worth bearing in mind that malaria wasn't nearly as high profile before Bill started attacking it.
Education: An awful lot of improvements to education are criticised for undermining public education. IMHO, public education needs undermining. (If you have no idea why I'd say that, I'm guessing you a) haven't got a child in a failing state school and b) haven't seen Season 4 of The Wire)
Grantee Communication: Looks like they agreed with the criticism and addressed it.
> Education: An awful lot of improvements to education are criticised for undermining public education. IMHO, public education needs undermining. (If you have no idea why I'd say that, I'm guessing you a) haven't got a child in a failing state school and b) haven't seen Season 4 of The Wire)
My issue isn't that they're undermining public education, but rather that they're actively making all education worse by doubling down on its worst aspects.
The only thing Gates has done w.r.t. education that I'm okay with is backing Khan Academy and the notion of flip teaching.
It may not be a good system for long term repeated application, but for an organization that has a lot of incompetent members that need culling like US public education, it could help a lot.
These are extremely minor points in the grand scheme of things. Seriously, read the rest of the page, also.
That's not saying that they may not be fair and relevant criticisms (but also not saying that they are - there's certainly pettiness in there). Nobody and no organisation is perfect, not by a long shot, and the inability to raise concerns at all with such a large operation would be a total failure of imagination.
Some of those criticism are arguable. For instance one of them is criticizing higher paids in AIDS research arguing that it taking away professionals from the regular care. Well, yeah, that's a side effect and a challenge but it happens in any area where you gives incentives.
No, they don't. Having studied the case histories of Monsanto, I can say with confidence that they are careful to bring cases only against farmers who they think have deliberately infringed on the patent agreements.
As a plant scientist who has studied the history of agriculture, I can tell you that since the 1950s, farmers have freely chosen to purchase seed every year from suppliers. This was initially because hybrids became the best-yielding varieties, and hybrids only keep their best characteristics for one generation ("hybrid vigour"). Now it's because licensing requires it to fund the massive R&D spend that improving crop productivity requires. For the vast majority of farmers, it makes economic sense to buy every year. It's not a trap, and they aren't idiots being fooled by "big ag".
Monsanto have done some evil things in the past when they were a different company. Now they're a pretty decent company with a terrible PR problem.
I've been reading up on Monsanto recently, and I've grudgingly come to the conclusion that they aren't as bad as propaganda paints them. There's a couple of big stories that paint them as heartlessly oppressing helpless small farmers, but if you look into them further you find that they're not nearly so black-and-white.
That, and GMO as a concept is absurdly demonized. Like everything else, it needs to be done carefully and with suitable oversight, but people act like genetic engineering means "putting poison in it." As the population keeps rising and arable land keeps disappearing, we're gonna need GMO crops to keep large parts of the world from starvation.
I don't know if it is Monsanto or another company, but I read recently that GMO companies have given away a lot of innovations over the years. People have to remember that most of the people working for these big orgs want their work to mean something and do good for the world. Feeding the worlds poor with better crops is far up there along the 'doing good' scale.
The first, Bt crops, have the gene for a Cry protein from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis inserted so that they are toxic to the larvae of lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). The Cry protein works by aggregating into crystals in the lepidopteran larval digestive tract which then pierce the lining of the midgut, killing the larva. It doesn't affect any other animals, including us, because the crystallisation requires strong alkalinity and the presence of certain bacteria that are unique to the lepidopteran larval midgut. Bacillus thuringiensis is also widely used in organic certified agriculture. So no, this isn't poison.
The second are glyphosate resistant plants. These have a bacterial form of the ESPS gene inserted that doesn't get inhibited by glyphosate. We ingest many different forms of the ESPS gene every day - it's in basically every organism - and it's harmless. Glyphosate is one of the most harmless pesticides ever invented, which is precisely why resistance is desirable. Using glyphosate means we don't have to use the much more harmful pesticides we used to use. So no, this isn't poison.
I would still consider things that are designed to kill moths and herbs to be poison, conceptually - especially in contrast to GM crop that is designed to be bigger/healthier/more resistant to weather/quicker to grow. I don't think people would be as skeptical towards the latter group.
That's a good technical point about the vocabulary - it's poisonous but to very specific species. I should have said not poisonous to humans.
Regardless of how people feel, the need to use toxic pesticides and insecticides are a huge problem in agriculture and Roundup-ready and Bt crops tackle those problems.
Next-generation GM crops will be much more geared towards disease and salt/drought stress resistance.
I don't know about Monsanto's product specifically, but a lot of genetic modifications aim for larger yields; greater inherent resistance to pests and/or disease; greater resistance to extremes of temperature and/or moisture; and greater concentrations of certain nutrients, among other things. There's a lot more to it than just pesticides.
And pesticides aren't exactly an optional luxury, either. People can die if an entire region's crop is eaten by locusts or aphids or caterpillars or whatever.
Because he has a great team of advisers who understand plant molecular biology and are betting on Monsanto's technology playing a role in future food security.
I loathe his business practises (albeit less evil than Apple's...), but the rest of his life seems admirable. He certainly stands well above such other tech billionaires as Jobs and Ellison.
While I'm no fan of many of Apple's business practices, I don't think they're quite as bad as some of the extremely anti-competitive stuff Microsoft pulled in the '80s and '90s.
In person, however, Steve Jobs was apparently a tremendous jerk (he often parked in handicapped spots, to name just one small but telling example), whereas Bill Gates seems to be a pretty decent fellow.
Apple could get away with much worse business practices than Microsoft because it didn't have a monopoly, and was therefore held to much lower standards. Oracle even more so.
I remember huge fights on mid-90s usenet about Apple's anti-open source practices, up to and including Stallman trying to prevent FSF code from being ported to System Whatever, it was so bad. (But I'm not going to go digging through 20 year old gnu.misc.discuss flamewars)
Steve Jobs (a) accumulated only about 25% of Bill Gates' wealth, and (b) died. I haven't heard news about where his money went, but I haven't heard they spent it paying people to self-flagellate or rape each other or overtake a nation by force. He just worked his whole life and bought a couple of nice houses and a nice car and traveled, and then willed away his money to his wife, who spends her time doing high-society philanthropic dabblings.
I'm so sick of the "humble Jobs" meme. This guy bought himself a super yacht and seems to have had a anti-charity attitude, which would fit in with his otherwise Ayn Rand laden cut-throat philosophies. Remember, this is the guy who emailed the execs at other companies to keep engineer's salaries low and threatened the guy at Palm if he didn't play along: how? Via a lawsuit from his patent arsenal.
Jobs was a right bastard. Ask anyone who worked with him.
When you say "bought a house", you mean "bought a historic mansion", then left it to rot while he lived somewhere else. It rotted to the point where it was eventually torn down.
It was designed by a noted architect for a copper baron. It doesn't matter how old it was, the fact that a famous architect designed it means it's got history associated with it, therefore it's historic.
There's no need to get ageist with your buildings. Yes, Europe has old buildings. That doesn't detract from the fact that buildings in North America, even if they're fewer than 100 years old, can be considered "historic".
Given that, travelling through Palo Alto, one can still see one of the two "tall sticks" after which the town was named, that white men hadn't set eyes on the San Francisco bay until January, 1770, and much of what had been built in the area was destroyed in 1906, an 86 year old structure, particularly with ownership and design significance, can indeed be considered "historic".
Though I am well aware of family residences to which I've some association on other continents approaching 500 years in age.
History and longevity are also not universally revered: in Japan the tradition is to destroy and rebuild temples frequently (every 20 years in the case of the shrines at Naikū and Gekū).
He made billions, essentially conquered his industry. Why bother being greedy into old age when he can buy a legacy and still live a billionaire's lifestyle. Best of both worlds.
If you or one of your children were one of the <who knows how many> lives he's affected in a very positive way you'd have a more mature perspective of the world instead of making flippant criticisms from the comfort of your living room.
You're probably living in the top 10% at least of humanity, what have you done for the world lately?
And if you or one of your parents were one of the <who knows how many> lives he affected in a negative way... you'd still be allowed to make informed decisions and not be painted by a single circumstance because people are more complex than that.
>you'd have a more mature perspective of the world instead of making flippant criticisms from the comfort of your living room.
So instead of disagreeing with the merit of my opinion presented, you just throw insults at how I couldn't possibly know what I'm talking about. You have much to show me about maturity.
And yet, the cynic in me will go 'Yeah, everyone will turn into a good guy / philanthropist if he's so rich he doesn't have to worry about anything, ever'.
A lot of them don't trust charities due to management scamming so Gates has built one of the first orgs other billionaire's feel comfortable donating to like Warren Buffet who signed over basically his entire fortune to Gates.
And Buffett's was Carnegie, Rockefeller and other titans of the industrial revolution that gave away a huge portion of their wealth, setting the standard.
I can't place the reference now, but I've read that Gates studied the lives of the big industrial titans - Carnegie, Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan at GM. He clearly found advice on building empires... but he also, I believe consciously, emulated the charitable aspects of their lives. I think he's a Buffett fan because they share an admiration of the earlier generation of American titans.
Didn't Andrew Carnegie do basically the same thing? Alfred Nobel's good works were mainly posthumous IIRC, and Rockefeller was mainly his son, but Carnegie did good things late in his own life.
That's not very hard to do when you're worth billions of dollars, because even if you give away 99% of your wealth to charity, you'd still be worth tens of millions of dollars at the end of the day.
Regular folks can't afford to do that without putting their financial stability at risk.
Nevertheless, I do respect Bill for his actions, and I believe all modern tycoons should feel responsible for making the world a better place through charity.
Bill Gates earned his wealth in his own lifetime. He's self made and still wishes to give away most of his wealth. I don't understand how you can criticize someone like that. At the end of the day, he is parting from his hard earned money.
By what definition is Bill Gates "self made?" He had a million-dollar trust fund going into life, which let him take risks and exploit opportunities that others could not have.
I think you do justice no favors by disregarding the microsoft employees (and acquisitions) that did the overwhelming majority of work to earn that wealth, not Bill Gates. Sometimes in violation of law, and sometimes via questionably legal business practices that forced many people who don't use their products to pay for them. But I guess in capitalism, owner-takes-all and might-makes-right, huh?
Going from a simple millionaire to creating a company like Microsoft takes a lot of hard work to pull off.
But if you want to run with your line of reasoning then no one in the US really qualifies as self-made, from the point of view of let's say a poor person in India. We're all rich to someone who makes less than a dollar a day.
Completely reasonable. I think wealth is almost always created by communities and not individuals, so I'm skeptical of the idea of anyone being purely "self made."
I am willing to concede there is a common definition of the term that is less strict. However I've never heard a definition of the term where a millionaire by birth is "self-made."
If all Bill Gates had ever accomplished is that he inherited a million dollar trust fund - if that's all his life had amounted to, living off of that fund, growing that fund - then your argument would have merit. As it is, your argument is about as far away from meritorious as one can be. Your argument attempts to rob Gates of his accomplishment due to the conditions of his birth, it's an extremely dark argument that if applied to the human race would mean that nobody ever deserves individual credit for anything.
"The appellation 'self-made man' or 'self-made woman' describes a person who was born poor or otherwise disadvantaged, but who achieved great economic success thanks to their own hard work and ingenuity rather than to any inherited fortune, family connections or other privilege."
Bill Gates was born with inherited fortune, family connections, and privilege. He was not born poor. That's not his fault any more than it's a poor child's fault that their parents are poor. But it is a fact.
A million bucks of wealth, with a conservative safe withdrawal rate of 3%, entitles you to $30k a year. This puts you in the 30th percentile of household income. That's not luxurious, but for zero work at all that's a much better outcome than someone who was born with nothing not working at all. A million in the bank puts you in the 96.3rd percentile of wealth in the US.
Say what you want about Bill Gates and his accomplishments, that doesn't change the fact he was born into wealth and inherently disqualified from being able to claim to be "self-made."
How much of that trust fund was invested into Microsoft, and how much of it did he receive prior to becoming a self-made billionaire?
As though a person should be disqualified of their own accomplishments because of their circumstances at birth; as though a person has a choice where and when they're born. I can think of few notions more evil than that, whether applied to the rich or the poor. By your theory, a poor person is never self-made either, after all it was their impoverished circumstances that made them successful, not their own work ethic. It was the poverty that motivated them, drove them, and lifted them up; after all, the poor person had nothing to lose and everything to gain! It is thus there are supposedly no self-made persons anywhere (welcome to collectivism, where there is no individual achievement, only borg achievement).
Did that trust fund keep him comfy during those hard Albuquerque days, struggling to get Microsoft off the ground, pay the bills, pay the employees, while living out of a roach motel working 20 hour days and living on soda and pizza? My, what a glamorous lifestyle a trust fund delivers.
I guess Paul Allen isn't self-made either, because it was Bill's trust fund that was responsible for Microsoft. Whoops, you just robbed every self-made Microsoft employee of their credit.
Did that trust fund make him work harder? It should have made him work less hard.
Did that trust fund give him ambition? It should have made him slouch around, after all, what worries could he have? Why strain yourself so much if you're already rich from birth.
Did that trust fund make him spend his youth writing software, selling software, evangelizing software? Surely sitting on a beach drinking a nice beverage is more fun than that.
Bill Gates is self-made by the only definition that matters: he earned his wealth of his own ability, effort and self-motivation.
Does everyone with a million dollar trust fund automatically acquire an 12 figure net fortune? There are over nine million millionaires in the United States today. Lucky for them they all get to be automatic, non-self-made billionaires.
The truth is, Gates didn't need that trust fund - which he never used to begin with. It didn't create Microsoft, didn't seed Microsoft, didn't do any of the work, didn't make any of the decisions, didn't negotiate any of the deals, didn't hire any of the employees, and didn't pay any of the bills, and didn't do all of that successfully for three decades without destroying it all.
Even if we take an uncharitable view of Bill's time at Microsoft, the harm is fairly limited. Some companies went out of business, computers are slightly more expensive, things crashed quite a bit, IE6 is still mucking things up, and really old bugs in Microsoft Office occasionally make life miserable. You know, first world problems.
On the flip side, thanks to Bill's philanthropy, there are now billions of dollars flowing towards vaccines, mosquito nets, life-saving research, and other undeniably Good Things.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but if you could quantify and compare the impact of old Bill and new Bill, I'd say he's a net positive.
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. Gates, Allen, Myhrvold and others at MS in that era were some of the most powerful influences on intellectual property expansion, in particular software patents and business method patents. That's having a lasting impact. And many of the Gates Foundation's activities re-enforce the same boundaries in the area of drug patents.
If you want to net it out into a number, the game is far from over.
Edit: lest my comment seem one sided: Gates could just be all scrooge mcduck with his treasure and there's not much anyone else could do to stop him, so I do give him a great deal of credit. I don't put much attention into casting people as good guys or bad guys; but the world is complex, and consequences matter.
The relationship between Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures, and the relationship between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Intellectual Ventures has me slightly concerned.
That's too simplistic. If Gates had not done what he did at Microsoft, hundreds of billions in revenue could have been distributed differently, and we don't know, or have a realistic way of knowing, how much of that would have ended up channeled into equally positive endeavours down the line.
We also don't know how it would have altered the technology landscape - whether positively or negatively. Thing could be far better, or far worse or anything in between.
I think it is a meaningless thing to try to evaluate, and can be debated endlessly. What we can do is judge the up against the standards we hold/held others too. By that standard, Microsoft was judged to have unfairly and illegally engaged in anti-competitive practices, almost putting them at risk of being broken up; and multiple competitors got substantial amounts out of Microsoft in separate cases, based on damages incurred.
That he is redeeming himself personally through charity now is great, but I've also seen little indication that he accepts that the way he illegally stomped on a number of competitors in the 80's and 90's was wrong, which tempers my excitement somewhat.
You don't judge moral actors actions by outcome, you look at their (the actors) expected outcome.
>One thing we have got to change in our strategy—allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples [sic] browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends [sic] on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
Not trying to defend the couple of illegal things that Microsoft did, but Microsoft was never the most agile company. There was plenty of opportunity for Lotus, Word Perfect, and Borland to get their acts together, for example. Apple always sold expensive computers so they were never a threat. Linux has been around 20 years and it comes in over 200 flavors. The reason we never had "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" isn't Microsoft's fault. Sun is gone because they tried to protect the past, and commodity hardware took them out. Google could probably do some serious damage with a Chrome/Android solution. At this point it looks like Microsoft is going to finally take a hit as mobile evolves into a real desktop replacement.
>Google could probably do some serious damage with a Chrome/Android solution.
Frankly, the evolution of rich web apps that we've seen over the past few years is exactly what terrified Microsoft in the 1990s and lead to the Netscape and Java antitrust suits.
I never understood what was the big deal on that matter. Netscape was a horrible browser and the only thing that MS did was shipping a free alternative on its OS. If IE would be that inferior people would still turn into the best solution. Right now IE is still free and ships within the OS and I still use Chrome on a daily basis.
It was far more than just shipping IE. MS also did things like use their sales agreements with PC manufacturers to block Netscape from being preinstalled on new computers. Back in the days of dial up, this was a very big deal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of things Microsoft did to prevent Netscape from being able to compete.
Do some reading on it. Microsoft absolutely engaged in a pattern of predatory behavior that was only possible due to their dominant market position.
The way Microsoft tended to act with blatant impunity toward their competitors is a lot of why they were so hated in the 90s.
As a matter of fact, Netscape's business practices did more to block the distribution of Navigator than Microsoft's. For example, it wouldn't allow third-party sites to distribute it, and at one point it withdrew the standalone browser to try to force the adoption of its internet suite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator
Microsoft's biggest concern wasn't with OEMs bundling Netscape (because it was investing in making IE a better browser) but with the idea of OEMs removing IE, which Microsoft regarded as part of the operating system.
In short, his thesis is that a lot of the successful companies got that way by f'ing up less than the competition, which in many cases managed to make really, really bad mistakes.
> The reason we never had "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" isn't Microsoft's fault.
Microsoft played an important role, at least 10 years ago. I was involved in a Linux user group in Spain in 2001, and back then it was impossible to find a computer that didn't came with Windows installed (so the computer had the OEM license price included in the price etc) and in most cases changing the OS would void the guaranty.
Microsoft put a lot of pressure into hardware manufacturers to not offer anything but Microsoft Windows, and that didn't help. No surprise that PC is synonymous of Windows.
The reason we haven't had the year of the Linux desktop is entirely due to the fact Linux has never been ready to be a desktop operating system for the masses. I love Linux. I use it on my primary laptop, but it still sucks for non-technical people who don't have on-demand access to technically-inclined family members.
Linux often breaks when you upgrade it. The solutions may seem trivial to you and I, but non-technical people won't get it. I've had programmers ask me why their internet isn't working when they accidentally kicked their network cable out of the wall or ask me why they couldn't get a monitor to work when it was obvious that their computers weren't turned on. Imagine what the ubiquitous "grandma" is going to think when her graphics drivers stop working after an prompted update. Stuff like this happening in Windows and OS X is so rare that many average users have never experienced it.
Linux has come a long way. Ubuntu in particular is ridiculously user friendly compared to Linux from 5-10 years ago. But its still not ready. Not even close.
The sad reality is that a computer is a complicated thing. Sometimes, your car breaks and you need a mechanic to fix it. Same goes for computers. And of course, businesses have strong expectations regarding mechanics and liabilities.
One main difference between linux and windows is that for the most part, MS isn't concerned about how 3rd party apps should install, upgrade, or remove themselves from the system, outside of security considerations. This burden however falls back mostly on distros in the linux world. Ye. I'd be curious to know how much of upgrade failures are due to userland apps as opposed to OS configuration issues for mainstream distros these days.
Also, Windows started with imperfections as well, but customers didn't have much choice at the time, and had to do with all the issues of DOS+Windows 3.11 and then migration paths to Win95/NT and then XP. The road wasn't exactly straight and flat at the time. MS always played the card of compatibility, which was a major factor for companies (who wants the extra headaches of migrating her apps on top of migrating the OS?).
Anyway, this topic has been discussed to death already, I'm pretty sure it all boils down to MS having been there before competition, and having managed to keep that step ahead (UEFI anyone?). Businesses can adapt if necessary, they just won't pick the hardest road if it doesn't make enough sense for them money wise, and MS made sure it never did.
> Imagine what the ubiquitous "grandma" is going to think when her graphics drivers stop working after an prompted update.
That wouldn't be a problem if OEMs sold computers with Linux pre-installed and fully supported. Dells would run a Dell distro of Linux that's properly tested on their hardware.
Dell does sell computers with Linux pre-installed. Personally, I'd love to one of their developer ultrabooks, but they are still subject to having things break after an upgrade.
As long as it's a minority market, their efforts will be half-hearted.
That said, the only PC I ever owned, an HP, had things break after an update of Windows - the graphics card and audio drivers. never quite got them working right again, so I don't exactly have a favorable opinion of that famed easy usability of that OS either.
Advertising for a charity is quite different from advertising for a for-profit corporation...
Regardless of Microsoft's numerous past and current transgressions, I don't think Gates has any ulterior motives with his current work and philanthropy.
Let me disclaim this with the fact that i think Heifer International seems like it does good work, and the interviews i've heard with their people have left me with a good impression. Okay, that said:
Why shouldn't we skeptically evaluate non-profits and charities the way we evaluate the ethics and responsibility of for-profits? There are piiiiiiles of truly awful charities who take money in the name of doing good only to enrich themselves and let their ersatz causes languish unattended (see: http://cironline.org/americasworstcharities ).
I think it's awesome that Bill Gates donated to Heifer International on this woman's behalf. But I think maybe it's better if people spent more time learning more about Heifer and donating on its merits, than just because Bill Gates donated to it.
So, actually, i don't agree that advertising for charities and for-profits is that different :)
I used to see him at Shaky's pizza in Bellevue, WA on occasion as a kid during the 90s. There I was playing on a Street Fighter 2 arcade cabinet and Gates is chomping on a slice of pepperoni 5 feet away.
This is also quite assuredly one of the best ways he could have possibly advertised for Heifer International.
Indeed he used his reputation for something that would go viral, and in the end helped that charity quite a bit.
It also suggests to me that he's not above having a little bit of fun too. I'm sure the gift took some thought, and this was more than "I'll have my admin think about it."
During his tenure at Microsoft, I think Bill could be fairly judged as evil and maniacal at times. He crushed competitors into the ground and punished his enemies with reckless abandon.
He now seems like a nice guy, in large part because he can afford to be. He has no competitors, and his only agenda is to give away his billions. If I had that much money and was retired, you would rarely find me in a bad mood either.
> I think Bill could be fairly judged as evil and maniacal at times.
I hear this a lot and I think it is grossly unfair. I lived through those times, and my company (Zortech) competed directly with Microsoft.
Microsoft is one tough competitor, no doubt about it. But evil and maniacal is frankly ridiculous. MicroPro, Novell, Lotus, etc., all failed due to their own decisions.
For in-depth information, see the book "In Search of Stupidity".
Even back then I never saw gates as a mad tycoon like others seem to. When running a business at the end of the day the non software problem you are trying to solve is not necessarily to make the best thing in the world but to sell the most things and maintain future sales. It is just another problem to be solved along with getting your memory model right and ensuring customers aren't dissatisfied enough to abandon your platform. Of course it comes at the risk of having to allow hurt to other companies but that is the nature of survival.
If all the did was compete fairly, it would not have been an issue, but they more than once were found to engage in unfair business practices. Such as financially punishing OEMs that opted to offer competing OS's.
The bundling that got them convicted of monopoly abuse - including Windows Media Player with windows, so that they could sell a video streaming server for which the client program and browser plugin were already installed (where competitors like real and quicktime had to offer a separate download). Similar story with IE (netscape's server product was actually amazing for the time, with ideas that were only beginning to be adopted ten years later).
Selling IBM an OS that they hadn't actually written yet - you could argue no harm no foul, but MS's actions meant IBM was taking on much more risk in that contract than they realized.
They also had an infamous habit of announcing vapourware alternatives to competing products, knowing that many potential customers would hold off buying if they thought a Microsoft-developed alternative was in the works (e.g. PenPoint OS vs Microsoft's Windows for Pen Computing - the latter of which had very minimal functionality when it finally came out).
I never understood the crying over that. If you have a good product available right now, and you can't sell against a vaporware product that may or may not be available for year(s) in the future, you're simply not good at sales, or your product isn't good.
At Zortech, we found selling against vaporware to be easy sales.
"This can be seen as a hack (and a violation of abstraction layers; there is intended to be a logical separation between operating system level SEH support, and language level SEH support; this special support in RtlRestoreContext blurs the distinction between the two for C language support with the Microsoft C/C++ compiler). This layering violation is not the most egregious in the x64 exception handling scene, however."
It was pretty well known at the time that he was dating both of them. It turned out that their views of the relationship(s) were pretty similar, except that each was biased to thinking she was #1.
I won't name them clearly. One should be obvious even so, even today, as she went on to a pretty big career -- bigger than mine -- and was open about the relationship. The other -- a lesser peer to me -- is more forgotten, except by industry old-timers.
My epiphany was that one shouldn't string along women for long periods of time, even if in the literal sense one is not being deceptive.
True, but don't forget people can also act egoistically or produce harm to others completely on purpose too, just to say that this gift doesn't automatically makes Bill a good person in average, nor his bad actions from the past make this gift dishonest.
Well, maybe it reminds you of that. As for myself, it reminds me that Bill Gates has a PR agency working for him that engages in stuff like this as a way to "relate to the community".
As a different way of expressing the same thought: Bill Gates found out that Bill Gates was participating in the reddit gift exchange at the same time you did. Or more probably, is entirely unaware of his participation even now.
I'm sure he's a nice guy, likes puppies, Mom, and apple pie, but you need to be aware how public relations works if you're going to have any hope of mentally combating its power.
>Bill Gates found out that Bill Gates was participating in the reddit gift exchange at the same time you did. Or more probably, is entirely unaware of his participation even now.
...Did you even read the post? It had a picture of Bill standing and holding the gifts, one of which was a note mentioning his participation in the gift exchange.
You're argument is that it's literally impossible that Bill does something like this just for fun. Yes, PR is a real thing, but lighten up. You have no idea if what you just said was true.
>Bill Gates found out that Bill Gates was participating in the reddit gift exchange at the same time you did.
Come on, did you even see his AMA? Its pretty clear he's invested in reddit and online culture pretty deeply.
While I'm certain he has some level of image consulting done, I find it hard to believe that he's on the level of Woody Harrelson and other stars who use places like reddit as a quick promotional stunt that they're forced to do by the studios.
I'm glad I'm not as cynical as you. I'm not much of a Gates fan, but he's always been a manboy and nerd at heart. Now that he's semi-retired, I imagine he dicks around on the internet quite a bit. It would be crazy to be culture blind to places like reddit and still think you have your finger on the pulse of technology.
That's a fun gift. I used to get solicitations from Heifer international years ago, and the sad thing is that they advertise themselves such that if you donate 50 dollars, a family will get a flock of chickens; if you donate 100 dollars, a family will get a baby goat. Etc, etc. But all the money goes into a common fund.
I know charities have to use modern marketing, but that left a sour taste when I found out about it. On the other hand, I suppose Bill's underlings conduct proper due diligence.
I know charities have to use modern marketing, but that left a sour taste when I found out about it.
Amusingly, this exact issue, of Heifer International putting money into a common fund vs. buying a water buffalo as expected, led Philip Greenspun to make a blog post on Dec. 26, 2006 (which I just stumbled on yesterday) wherein he wrote, "We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present."
Then he went on to he ask what it would mean to actually buy water buffaloes for poor families. It turns out, a guy named Robert Thompson, an American living with his Chinese wife in China, left an informed answer in the comments and, long story short, Greenspun and his business partner put up the money and Thompson, with the help of his wife and her family, bought a deserving family a real live water buffalo.
You can read about it (be sure to read comment #1, which is from Thompson) and/or watch the short film Thompson made of the buying and presenting of the animal to a Chinese family, which shows the impact such a gift can have:
Looks like they've had a drastic drop in rating from Charity Navigator, from 4/4 stars to 2. Apparently due to them spending 22% of their income on fund raising [1]. This is the first I've heard of them and I may still give just because I like the idea.
I would think overhead would be the 7.3% cited on Charity Navigator and the 22% fund raising would be separate. Maybe that 22% will really pay off in the future. If Bill likes them though they can't be doing too bad.
The proportion spent on fundraising isn't a good indicator of effectiveness either. Generally, the metrics tracked by Charity Navigator are easy to measure, and aren't very useful.
GiveWell is a much better evaluator of charity quality. Since they spend much more time on analyzing each charity, they cover way fewer charities. They are quite strategic about prioritizing which ones to interview.
http://www.givewell.org/international/process
It would be ridiculously inefficient to literally use your money to buy the chickens or whatever. So yes, it's abstracted a bit, but so is every charity.
They just need to count the number of donors who have selected 'baby goat', count the number of baby goats you've distributed, and make sure they're equal. Charge enough per goat to cover some reasonable management overheads. If donors are supplying more goats than you need, stop accepting the donations and ask them to choose chickens instead.
Organisations do things like this all the time. Orders are placed, orders are paid for, orders are fulfilled. Internet retailers manage this millions of times a day with very low overheads. What's the problem?
If a charity wants donations to a general fund rather than a specific use, they should be honest about that in their marketing materials.
I think the idea is to show that worthwhile things can be done with what seems like a small amount of money, otherwise potential donors may feel that their $10 can't make a measurable difference to a real person's outcome and will be less inclined to donate.
Ringfencing money like that would be very inefficient unless you can perfectly balance supply/demand beforehand. What happens if a ton of donors donate goats but then you find that nobody needs the goats anymore but you could really use the money for something boring like employment liability insurance?
I think there's a middle ground where you are giving the gift of x dollars in real food / livestock to a family in xyz. Then the actual logistics of what that means are figured out and told to you.
Kiva is sort-of iffy in some areas, for example pre-dispersal means that most loans are funded long before they're live on the website[1]: when you're loaning $25 to an individual, you're actually just sending money out to the field partner, who have already granted a loan to the individual. Another concern some people have is that because of the way field partners work they can be aggressive with gathering loan repayments as every delinquent loan reflects poorly on the field partner.
Personally I find the amount of good that Kiva does far exceeds the negatives that some people put forward, and while they're far from perfect they are a very well managed charity[2] that I have a lot of confidence in.
[1] They do include this information on each borrowers page though, it's transparent if you know to look for it, but a lot of people don't understand it.
Loan disbursal can happen anywhere from 60 days before to 90 days
after the loan is posted on the Kiva website. The disbursed date indicates
the date that the borrower receives their loan funds from the Field Partner.
Many of Kiva's Field Partners choose to disburse loan funds before
the loan request is posted on Kiva. We allow pre-disbursal because
it ensures that the funds reach the borrower as soon as they are needed.
Loan funds from Kiva lenders then go to backfill that amount and as a
lender you assume the risk of the loan. By doing this, our Field Partners
assume the risk that, if the loan isn't funded by Kiva lenders, the Field
Partner has to fund the loan without any funds from Kiva lenders."
I used Kiva during one of their "Free $25 Loan" promos. Unfortunately, several months before "my" borrower was able to finish repaying her loan, I received an E-mail saying that she had passed away. The thing is, Kiva still shows the final few months' repayment as having been received.
This made me question the numbers that I was seeing; while it's definitely possible that her family paid everything off, I'm not sure that I trust them.
I don't believe that anything malicious is going here, just misrepresentation.
For this reason I'd much rather support the microfinance institutions themselves (even though Kiva doesn't take a cut).
I'm sure they are doing good, but I was a lot less enthusiastic about Heifer International after hearing their responses on a This American Life show about the best way to help people through charity:
I wonder if there is a generational difference between people, say, 30+ and the under 30's of their view of Bill Gates?
For people my age he was "evil" personified during the Netscape/IE/Anti-Trust era. I wonder if people who came of age after that period see him more as a global good guy and philanthropist?
As for me, if he keeps this up I'm going to have to start liking the guy :-)
I'm way over 30 and I've always had a positive view of Gates. That's largely because I don't view business competition as a gentlemen's duel. It really is cutthroat as hell. In my early 20s I found the strategy docs for my mega-tech corp on an insecure network drive. Spent the weekend learning about how companies really compete: backroom deals, legal maneuvers, strange contracts, and even political pressure. Very few companies can be the Ghandi of the Fortune 500.
Everytime Gates is mentioned on HN we get the exact same 200 comments detailing his alleged crimes. Gates bought a cow? Sure, but he killed Netscape. Gates built an AIDS research center? Sure, but he added the Office ribbon. Can't we all calm the fuck down and just appreciate 1 rich dude trying to do some good his own way?
I remember reading about one of the robber barons in the gilded age - a Rockefeller or similar - and it was along the lines of (forgive any misquoting):
"People always commented that although he was a ruthless businessman, how kind and considerate he was in his private life. But isn't that the same as most sportsmen? They are determined to win when competing in their sport, but once off the field are not expected to be the same."
> I wonder if people who came of age after that period see him more as a global good guy and philanthropist
From personal experience, almost exclusively.
The difference is more marked outside the tech sector, too. None of my acquaintances in the 19-30 age range outside the tech industry consider Gates evil, and many love him.
Within the tech industry, I can think of one acquaintance within that age range who considers Gates evil -- and he is exactly 30.
It's difficult for people of my generation to quite understand Microsoft's wrongdoing during that period, when now the company's not nearly so powerful. The 'evil' all seems quite abstract and far away, while the Gates foundation seems to have much more direct results.
My results are skewed because I know an awful lot of people who work for charities and non-profits, who'll naturally have a better opinion of someone who works in the same (ish) sector.
When I was at Microsoft, I actually remember Bill talking about how he's a hard person to buy gifts for. I think he said (I could be misremembering this) that he doesn't watch certain TV shows he really enjoys because he wants to be gifted the DVDs. He specifically mentioned 24.
I know he also really enjoys DVDs from the Teaching Company and has a pretty extensive collection.
A note, which will attempt to explain him how his 'Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help'[1] and Open source movement are basically one and the same.
There is no documented proof he ever said this. I'm sure he is sick of hearing it repeated when he has had to tell everyone how he didn't say it and no one listens.
His recent Wired guest-editor issue talked about his passion for books, I'd look through the books he has and pick out a couple of my favourites that he hopefully hasn't read yet.
Not just his mother. It was his father who instilled in Bill the need to do something good for the world. Bill Gates Sr. was also in charge of the charitable giving when Bill Gates Jr. (fun little piece of trivia: nicknamed "Trey" in his family to avoid confusion) was still very much involved in the day to day running of Microsoft.
I know celebrities with have done AMAs, and I can say with the exception of proxy PR people coaching (usually when they have a movie coming out soon or something), you end up getting pretty honest and direct responses on reddit from them.
All of them, because it is ridiculous to assume that you know what every person in a particular group of people is like in real life based on the actions of a subset of that group on a message board.
Some celebrities "get" reddit, and some don't.
Some answer three questions and leave, and some stay for days.
Some see it as a promotional tool, and some are actually part of the community.
Some participate anonymously, some have AMA accounts, and some have both.
Most of all, even if you did know a good portion of them on and offline, you can't possibly extrapolate what the rest of the group is actually like in real life.
The idea that you can encapsulate an entire person into a couple dozen comments (on average) that they leave on a message board is absurd to me.
Going on to extend that abstraction to an entire class of people is even more ridiculous.
After a gushing review of how great Bill was and what a wonderful experience. "...ps: Sorry for the apple ipad on my wishlist, that was really awkward..."
This was a great article, and a reminder that the internet allows us to make a difference in people's lives in ways we never could before.
Reddit Secret Santa is definitely a very cool project. Kudos to Bill and all the others for participating. Though as other people have mentioned Heifer spends quite a bit of money on advertising, like most other charities I suppose. My roommate donated $10 about a year or 2 ago for a contest and every other week we receive letters, magazines, and photos asking for more money (way more than $10 worth of material). It would be sweet to see a charity spend their money on the actual cause rather than just promotional material.
I think this is really cool, though the cynical part of me thinks that so will the social media strategists of quite a few celebrities out there, looking to promote things around Christmas...
Bill Gates has been aggressively giving for several years now, and he's quite consistent with his messaging regarding the need to give to and enable the quality of life in the third world. If anything, the strategy is to put a spotlight on those causes, rather than himself.
The fact that your parent poster is apparently unaware of the fact that the work done by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had a huge hand in eliminating polio in India would be a good example. The country just marked two years without a new reported case.
There is a lot of unimportant noise out there, and a lot of education and awareness holding needed to keep moving the world towards the better.. everything counts.
If throughout the unwrapping of the gifts, there was a Microsoft Surface, then I'd agree with you but for the most part I believe this reads as genuine.
