“In case you haven’t noticed there’s been a lot of media coverage about Bill Gates retiring from Microsoft and quite a lot of it has been more than a little fawning. Well it’s time to set aside the fanboy accolades and cut to the truth about Bill Gates,” Jim Lynch writes for ExtremeTech.
“Bill Gates’ reign at the top of tech plunged the computing world into a new dark age that only the Internet, Apple, Google, and Linux have begun to liberate us from,” Lynch writes. “Gates’ operating system products were second-rate copies of more elegant, stable, and technologically superior products such as Mac OS, Linux, and Unix. Gates’ retirement will be remembered as the beginning of the end for Microsoft.”
“And it’s not coming a moment too soon,” Lynch writes. “So much damage has been done by Gates and Microsoft that it will take the computing world years to finally escape their grasp.”
Lynch writes, “There are some who try to defend Gates’ actions during his career by saying ‘well geez, he’s giving a lot of money away so he’s really a nice guy!’ Aaaaw, when you put it like that what’s not to love about Bill Gates?
“Plenty,” Lynch writes. “Gates is simply following in the footsteps of the robber-barons that came before him and he’s taking his ill-gotten wealth and trying to buy himself respectability and a better legacy than greed and bad products. Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon, and others are who Gates is using as his role models.”
“These men all accumulated truly vast concentrations of wealth through ruthless suppression of competitors and other shady business tactics. And many of them later tried to buy respectability through charitable foundations and giving,” Lynch writes. “Bill Gates doesn’t want to be remembered for what he truly is: A robber baron and convicted monopolist. So he’s deploying his ill-gotten billions as he prepares to buy-off as many people as possible to create an alternative view of himself in history.”
“So enjoy your ill-gotten money, Bill, as you sail off into the sunset… Good riddance to you and don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out,” Lynch writes.
This is only scratching the surface, there’s much, much more in the full article (and, no, really, we didn’t write it, Lynch did) – very highly recommended – here.
Afterwards, in case you missed it, you might want to check out this AP article and our accompanying “Takes” which may or may not have inspired Lynch: Bill Gates moves on; a troubled Microsoft remains – June 27, 2008
