[Gllug] Bill Gates To Leave Microsoft

[Justin Perreault]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 22:48 +0100, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 11:22 +0100, Richard Jones wrote: 
> > But would the world have been better if all that PC "rent" money that
> > he forced out of people had stayed with the people?
> 
> I actually doubt it. I'm no fan of Gates or of Microsoft, but the wealth
> he has amassed in one place has made it possible for him to do things
> that, were the cash still spread out thinly, couldn't happen. The
> Microsoft tax has probably slowed down innovation in computing, and has
> definitely had an effect in terms of keeping old architectures around
> long after they should have died. However, the monoculture forced upon
> us has created economies of scale that have probably offset the costs.
> Just look at the price of SPARC CPUs compared to x86, and then consider
> what a fast chip might cost if there were 20 vendors, each with a
> different architecture, and a 5% market share. I'm not sure that
> hardware would actually be cheaper.

Hardware may not be cheaper at this point, if that were the case,
however I think it may have led to better hardware by this point and
more open standards. (the various major players would have more
competition from education)

I do however, not blame Microsoft for this I believe the culprit to be
commercialism and the consumers who support its activities. (I am not
excluding myself from this) and no I do not have a solution :)

> > It's nice that he's giving some of it to charity, but just remember
> > that for him to have that money, PCs cost hundreds of pounds more than
> > they should do[*], and whole economies ship literally billions of
> > pounds each year to a site in the north west of the USA.
> 
> There's a good possibility that the work done by the Gates foundation
> will save the lives of thousands in developing countries, and it may
> also contribute towards a cure for malaria and other diseases, many of
> which have received little attention for a long time due to the
> demographic they affect. I think that whatever one may think of Bill
> Gates and Microsoft, it's difficult to refute that he's doing real good
> with the foundation these days. The cynical view is that having got to
> where he is, he's now rather more worried than he used to be about how
> he'll be remembered. Anyone remember the not so subtle historical
> omissions in Encarta? Motivations notwithstanding however, it may be
> more important that the sort of stuff he's funding gets done than the
> reason it gets done.

Ends justifying the means is usually not considered acceptable. I could
pick out some sensational historical examples but I am a little to tired
to do such properly at the moment.

Justin
-- 
If you are an adult, you can choose to act like a child. If you do not
accept being an adult, you are only a child. -JJJ

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