Curmudgeon or not there is no way I would let this go by without a public response
Some thoughts on Bill Gates:
1.He made his fortune because he had rich parents behind him. Yeah, right! Starting from what he got from his parents and running it into over $50 billion is no mean feat.
There is something to be said for being in the right place at the right time.
2.He is probably the most astounding "visionary" of the last 100 years.
Bull. Einstein makes him look like George W. Martin Luther King, JFK, Margaret Sanger, the guys at Los Alamos - those are visionaries. Gill Gates is a reasonably astute business man whose arrogance and greed have put his company at risk.
3.He has given more of his personal wealth to charities and truly needy causes than any man in history.
My career started in fund raising. Ted Turner has given far more than gates. Consider his net wealth, his giving would be equivalent to me giving $100 a year.
4.He should open source all his program code so others could compete against him. Again, yeah right! If you truly believe this, send me all of your best source code so I can sell it too. It would be much easier than developing it for myself. Ever hear of competitive advantage; it is what most companies strive for and few attain.
Ever hear of anti-trust? Microsoft would lose nothing by separating their operating system business. In fact, history has proven that breaking up companies actually makes them more profitable. Bell Telephone for example. As far as making the operating system open - that would be a visionary move.
Windows in all its forms:
1.Can you write several million lines of code that is bug free. If so, Bill Gates will pay you one hell of a lot of money to work for him.
You cannot be serious here. I turned on my new Dell Laptop, loaded a few software programs, got the blue screen of death and had to wipe the hard drive clean and re-install Windows 2000. My Win 98 stock market machine GPFs twice a day. When I load Win 95 or 98 it often omits Plug and Play (should be Plug and Pray) devices and I have to shut down and restart. LINUX and UNIX are far superior to any Windows operating system, but we know as RBase programmers that the best does not always win.
2.If IBM had not been so mired in muck that they could not move we might all be using OS/2 now and it would be a pretty good operating system. Bill Gates did a lot of the development on it. It is still around as WARP 4 and not a bad operating system as far as it goes, but try to get a new printer to work with it.
IBM has never understood the PC Market which opened the door for Mr. Gates.
3.Without Windows a large number of the technology companies in the world would not exist now. It is very likely that RBTI would be one of them and Razzak might still be a surgeon who you never heard of. Horror of horrors, we might all be on mainframes.
Bull, bull and more bull. If it wasn't for Microsoft stifling competition we would be march farther along then we currently are. The PC would have survived and someone would have filled the void.
4.But some of the other operating systems are free or very cheap. Mayhap that is about what they are worth. Do you want your company to work its way up to where your products are priced between free and $19.95?
LINUX is already routing Windows in Japan. UNIX blows Windows to bits.
On the greedy side, Bill Gates made me over $8000 today and for that I thank him profusely.
I have actually made more by investing in companies that he buys (SoftImage for example)
Again, if you want to blast me, please do so privately. Next time you want to blast Bill Gates and Microsoft make a two sided list as they directly affect you and if the negatives outweigh the positives, fire away.
This is something Bill Gates would do. If you don't want public replies then don't post publicly
Jeff Ward
