Bill Gates did not have $90 billion to begin with.
This is not the son of a poor sharecropper we're talking about. The Gates family had been extremely wealthy for generations before William Henry "Bill" Gates III came along. You know, William Henry "Bill" Gates II's boy?
He created something IMHO amazing.
By which you mean a pile of money, right? Something about the tone of awe you have brings Scrooge McDuck's swimming pools of coinage to mind.
Mixing of tenses implies Gates is not a brilliant genius but neither is (presumably) Steve Wozniak
You know Woz was in an airplane crash, right? Head trauma? That he's not the same now? Or are you not familiar with his work?
I think we can all agree that Gates' signature in business is creating and running a multi-trillion dollar turnover company called Microsoft.
No, I don't agree with that. If we're going to start evaluating the legacy of an American titan like this, here and now, let's make sure to remember that instead of plowing those astronomical cash inputs back into developing new system software from scratch around sound practice and solid engineering, Gates' Microsoft was all about achieving absolute market dominance and maximum profit extraction at all costs. Even when it meant grossly unfair trade practices and outright cartel collusion. Gates's primary accomplishment may've been, in the long view, snatching away from IBM their lock on the "computing trust." Turnabout is fair play, though. IBM'd snatched theirs away from NCR.
Or are you perfectly content that Microsoft has always done what it could to make good products? Me, I think they wasted a lot of money, a lot of chances, and made enemies for the sheer sake of it.
If you are referring to Microsoft's accusation and licensing of DOS to IBM in 1981- there was nothing fraudulent about that deal.
That's not the way the story was told around the campfire by Digital Research survivors in the DR-DOS and GEM era. You can have your hagiography of Saint Bill, and I'll have mine, however apocryphal either may in fact be. There's a lot of lore about how Microsoft climbed to the top the way it did that doesn't exactly mesh with the going version of their corporate history. You know what? A lot of it's absolutely true, but very little known.
W.T.F.
Seeing as how you have no end of 'WTF's to give, make sure to pipe up if you've never heard of trusts before, and don't know what anti-trust laws are meant to deal with.
This is not the son of a poor sharecropper we're talking about. The Gates family had been extremely wealthy for generations before William Henry "Bill" Gates III came along. You know, William Henry "Bill" Gates II's boy?
By which you mean a pile of money, right? Something about the tone of awe you have brings Scrooge McDuck's swimming pools of coinage to mind.
You know Woz was in an airplane crash, right? Head trauma? That he's not the same now? Or are you not familiar with his work?
No, I don't agree with that. If we're going to start evaluating the legacy of an American titan like this, here and now, let's make sure to remember that instead of plowing those astronomical cash inputs back into developing new system software from scratch around sound practice and solid engineering, Gates' Microsoft was all about achieving absolute market dominance and maximum profit extraction at all costs. Even when it meant grossly unfair trade practices and outright cartel collusion. Gates's primary accomplishment may've been, in the long view, snatching away from IBM their lock on the "computing trust." Turnabout is fair play, though. IBM'd snatched theirs away from NCR.
Or are you perfectly content that Microsoft has always done what it could to make good products? Me, I think they wasted a lot of money, a lot of chances, and made enemies for the sheer sake of it.
That's not the way the story was told around the campfire by Digital Research survivors in the DR-DOS and GEM era. You can have your hagiography of Saint Bill, and I'll have mine, however apocryphal either may in fact be. There's a lot of lore about how Microsoft climbed to the top the way it did that doesn't exactly mesh with the going version of their corporate history. You know what? A lot of it's absolutely true, but very little known.
Seeing as how you have no end of 'WTF's to give, make sure to pipe up if you've never heard of trusts before, and don't know what anti-trust laws are meant to deal with.