Bill Gates had vision and talent and it didn't hurt to be from a wealthy family either. He nurtured that talent on the computer with time paid for by his school and family. The charge per hour at that time would have been ruinously expensive for an average person or family. He put his 10,000 hours in programming (read Malcolm Gladwell's books) and through luck and perseverance was in the right place at the right time to offer IBM a ready made “operating system” called DOS, written mostly by Tim Paterson, to IBM for $75,000. After lucking out with IBM and catching them off guard he proceeded to use the exclusivity of IBM, nee Microsoft's, operating system to leverage a stranglehold on the blooming computer industry. By buying or putting out of business smaller companies like Borland, Netscape, Ashton Tate, Lotus, Visicalc, Wordstar, Wordperfect and Fox (owned by Tim Paterson), to name just a few, he made computers both more interchangeable and less innovative. That hegemony lasted until recently with the proliferation of “smart” devices, which are now taking away the ubiquity of the desktop computer (see Micheal Dell). But the real issue was support. Microsoft developed a way around the need to support their own product by leaving support up to the OEM (original equipment manufacturers) many of whom came and went in the early days with startling rapidity. What that did was guarantee Micro$oft an overwhelming edge in the marketplace at the expense of the end user. Most of the physical support of Micro$oft products devolved to independent individuals and small companies fixing computers. What is overlooked is that it was impossible for a person in that position to charge their time on an hourly basis. Imagine if you will charging $75 an hour (a reasonable charge in a technical field) to individuals fixing their home computers when it might take 4-12 hours to find and repair many common problems that plagued Micro$oft in the early years (1980-2000)? In many cases the actual times spent, if charged, would have been more than a new computer cost, even in the 1980's when they were relatively expensive. Those unsung technicians gave millions of hours collectively to end users in the name of Micro$oft. Bill Gates is essentially giving billion dollar chunks of money away to charities of his choice that every independent technician who worked for free for Micro$oft earned. Sour grapes? Those technicians were between a rock and a hard place because the end users were friends, relatives or customers for their products. I think that LINUX and now iPhone and Android apps are the heir's to those technician's lack of a profit avenue. Today instead of all the money going to Micro$oft it's being spread around to individuals and small companies and it doesn't take a Malcolm Gladwell to see that innovation is on the rise. Had Micro$oft acted responsibly in 1980 where would computers be today? And as far as being jealous I'd never act that way in a million years. At least my greed, such as it is, knows bounds. In the end how many billion dollars is enough for any one person to get all to themselves? Not every billionaire is a rapacious blood sucking parasite but of the 1011 billionaires in the world today you've got to wonder who's at the head of the class.
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