THE GATES FILE
News Item: Bill Gates Wishes He Weren't the Richest Man in the World
The news is Bill Gates feels encumbered by the billions his software monopoly has extorted
from PC users. The media is filled with stories celebrating Gates as a visionary
philanthropist. Alas, the personal qualities required for the accumulation of vast wealth
seldom comport with its intelligent disposal. Why doesn't he just give it back to the
people he stole it from, the PC user community? We have paid for his atrocious operating
systems several times over in the guise of 'upgrades,' which were essentially cosmetic and
have shown only the faintest semblance of reliability in the last five years. It is said
the American public craves self-deception in massive doses; this is nowhere more in
evidence than in its choice of cultural heroes. No, Virginia, Bill Gates is not a second
Thomas Edison; he's the greedy, short-sighted Machiavellian creep who set the computer
revolution back 20 years.
A Memo to Bill Gates on the Eve of Retirement
1. Mr. Gates, you have often spoken of the dismal quality of secondary education in
America. Can you name one piece of educational software, with the possible exception of
Encarta (which only you would call an encyclopedia), the Microsoft Corporation has
produced in the last 20 years that is used in America's classrooms?
2. Considering the huge multimedia potential of the computer and the enormous resources of
your company, don't you think you could have come up with something more educational than
all those violent video games?
3. You recently donated billions of dollars to various charities throughout the world.
Wouldn’t it would have been more ethical to return this money to the PC community
from whom you and your monopoly extorted it in the first place?
4. Your operating systems have been notoriously unreliable and substandard over the past
25 years. Considering the manifest superiority of Unix and its various implementations
(Linux, OSX, etc.) and the fact that you owned Xenix at the time, wouldn’t it have
better served the user community to have standardized on Unix back in the early 1980s
rather than MSDOS and Windows?
5. Aside from setting the computer revolution back 20 years, what do you think your legacy
to the world will be?