I thought this was a well written article and I loved the graphics (especially the one about 30 minute meetings actually taking 68 minutes). However, it's worth noting that this company is fairly small (48 members according to their About page) and that the group has been together for quite some time.
I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.
Why does this myth keep getting pushed - by tech people no less? Bill Gates emphatically denied ever saying it and no one has ever come forward with a scrap of evidence he actually said it.
I don't think the (most charitable use of the) quote depends on whether Bill Gates specifically said it. The point is, variously:
- To emphasize that the definition of "a lot of [computational resource X]" changes over time.
- That people previously had to do a lot of similar computational tasks with a lot less (which this article is making use of).
With that said, I agree that he shouldn't be asserted as the author of the quote like it's a fact, but that just means you should quote it as "attributed to Bill Gates".
It is an urban legend. I used QEMM for my Dos to get access to the rest of the PC memory by loading things in high or extended memory it freed up more memory on the bottom 640K conventional memory.
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general.
He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress over 1-2 decades through market abuse.
Here's one example of many of how the pro billg PR is done:
Another guess: He actually said it and a few people heard it, but when he said it was before everything in the universe was constantly being recorded, photographed, and pushed to the internet, so there's not necessarily a record of it.
Back then, you could just deny something happened, and often get away with it because you weren't being surveilled 24 hours a day.
It's like when someone very knowledgeable about a subject posts information on Wikipedia. Even if they were there first hand; even if they were personally involved with the event; even if they wrote magazine articles about it and did radio interviews about it, and it was covered by television — if it happened before 2000, it'll get erased from Wikipedia by someone on the other side of the planet because there's not a web link or an ancient library book to cite for "proof."
It's a bit distressing, in away, how hard it is to access information from before like year 2007. Most of it is locked up in government reference libraries and you generally have to bonafide "researcher" to even access physical copies of publications. Oh, and it's not allowed to make copies of the material.
I’m a child of the eighties, I grew up in the nineties, I remember waiting in line for my boxed copy of Windows 95 one August night in 1995, I remember ruling at Microsoft’s antitrust case (as related in WIRED), I remember how Slashdot featured an icon of Bill Gates with Borg add-one, but... I absolutely love the guy now and wish he would run for President (I am not American, just terrified).
You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates.
Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries.
It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.
I think most people are angry he put a lot of businesses out of business by bundling IE with Windows to put Netscape and other companies out of business that did web browsers.
Microsoft made their own version of Java that almost killed Sun. I think it was J++ and later J# and then Microsoft made C# to replace it.
The original DOS was CP/M that Seattle Software and Microsoft made their DOS do CP/M API calls and a program to convert CP/M programs to DOS. At the time this was not illegal, ECT. Microsoft did Basic, Fortran, Cobol without getting a license for them for 8 bit Pcs.
Those are just a few examples, mostly unethical but not criminal in 1970s and 1980s. By 1999 the DOJ investigated Microsoft.
Also Apple fans claim Microsoft ripped off the Macintosh with Windows and tried to put Apple out of business.
To people like Gates there are good and bad things, and people only know the good things and ignore the bad things because Microsoft built their own industry, ect.
I never liked Bill Gates when I was a power user in the nineties and early 2000s but it really is amazing that one could offset his contribution to disease eradication and his philanthropy generally with some aggravation about his business’ tactics and nebulous what-ifs about what might have happened if he had not been on the scene or had behaved differently. (Moore’s Law would did it’s thing anyway, whether he was there or not, and even with him there, Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop market relented anyway.) Do you really think the annoyance of a free browser warrants indicting his post-business career?
>Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop market relented anyway
Hardly. Market share is still roughly 85% Windows, 15% Mac, and fuck-all % Linux, which is reflected in the level of support provided for applications, games, hardware etc. Even disregarding compatibility, MacOS is not a straightforward alternative as it only runs on Apple hardware, which is very expensive and only offers a narrow range of opinionated designs.
Just noting that this comment first only talked about the browser bundling antitrust thing, and then, after I commented, completely morphed into something else.
I’m not really sure what you are referring to because I have not edited any of my comments, but this one probably closely resembles another one I made further up and therefore might give you the impression that there had been some ’morphing’ involved.
Hello, I have also lost karma points on this subject. I also feel that Microsoft had a very negative effect on the progress of computer science during many years but it is very difficult to convince other generations. There were many positive and negative effects. To grasp the global effect, you need to have lived all the progress of the previous years before Microsoft and you need to have followed all the commercials fights to eradicate concurrence (dr dos, stacker, borland c++, ...).
The main thing I remember from the era of Gates Is Literally Satan was the browser wars, and how awful it was that Internet Explorer was both free and tightly integrated into the operating system.
Dishonest comparison is dishonest. I'm pretty confident it's actually possible to uninstall Safari, and that macOS will continue to work.
Besides, the integration with the operating system isn't the problem. It's the integration with the only operating system. It isn't monopoly abuse if you don't have a monopoly.
If not Bill then Bob. At least he's doing some good in the world with that cash instead of hoarding it for him and his family. If it weren't for him, how long would have malaria persisted?
I think his primary motivation is so simple.. he wants people to like him.
Many, many people disliked him after his predatory business days. This is the perfect way to a) keep doing interesting work, b) getting people to like him again, c) get some personal karma.
I can quite easily see the appeal of this.
Also; I'm a big fan of his current work. I loved how my country (Sweden) matched a very large billg foundation program funding the other year; I think he's way better equipped with handling that money than my government's idealistic but fumbling people.
I just think we shouldn't forget his past just because he's turned into modern day santa. We should learn from history...
I’m not American but I wish he would decide that the situation there warrants ’philantropy’ and would this casually pour a billion or so into getting himself the Democratic nomination and the presidential election just for the sake of ousting Trump I’m a Battle Of The Billionaires (alleged, in Trump’s case).
> I think his primary motivation is so simple.. he wants people to like him.
Yeah, you definitely have something against him, don't you?
I don't really care what his motives are, I just look at the results of his contributions and there is no doubt in my mind he will be remembered as someone who was instrumental in saving millions of lives and advancing our civilization.
> Many, many people disliked him after his predatory business days.
I profoundly disliked him as well back in the days, especially since I was a hard code Amiga fan.
As opposed to you, I have changed my opinion based on additional data.
> Yeah, you definitely have something against him, don't you?
Well, yeah.
I think we'd be at least 5 years further into the future in terms of software than we currently are, possible 10, unless he hadn't abused the markets so gravely.
> How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing
Please no ad hominem attacks, focus on what I said, not how old I am.
But if it matters to you, I wrote my first lines of code in 1979 on an Apple ][ and I've lived through the exact same times you did.
I find little point in speculating on what could have happened that didn't, I focus on reality and what people have actually achieved in their life time.
It wasn't an attack (heck, wtf, I was just asking your age, maybe stop over-dramatizing?); I was trying to find out if you had some sort of personal experience or was just parroting the newer reddit hivemind.
What you did is the text book definition of an ad hominem attack: undermining someone's argument by attacking their character instead of addressing what they said.
"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing,"
What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
Hey there one of the Co-Founders of Estimote here, that makes the Sticker Beacons and coined Nearables.
Sometimes we think of Estimote Stickers as 'Tile for Developers', at least among the community that knows Tile.
Meaning, we're a developer facing platform, more B2B2C and anyone can create a digital tethering application, and any app can adopt it.
We have a big vision for the 'Nearables' concept and hope that the community can push this narrative forward together. Sometimes we think abstractly of beacons as place URLs for physical objects.
It's rather more of a grab-bag of ideas on the future of oven technology. Which is very cool, but far from a simple linear trajectory toward a better oven. It's the promise of perhaps a better oven, which maybe if we're lucky might be affordable and practical, or perhaps not.
Every single day of your life that you use the oven, as opposed to eating something fresh or cooked stove-top. And strictly, just for those things cooked in the oven that the oven-improvement improves.
We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.
After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.
There are financial system problems. If we don't value engineer our products to rapidly fail, the mfgrs will go out of business and we won't have any ovens.
So imagine a "super oven" that is rust proof and thermal shock proof to tolerate high humidity cooking. Someone is going to figure out that running that dude dry means it'll operate theoretically for 500 years, and 90% of the home cooks will be too lazy to ever fill the distilled water tank anyway, so 50 years in or so, that mfgr will go out of business, and no new ovens.
There are some examples in the automotive world, where in the old days when farm trucks were really farm trucks and not marketed as a macho station wagon for starbucks runs, some people bought them for 100% asphalt use anyway, because they'd last 25 years if treated better than farm trucks. That value engineering epic fail has been fixed for decades now, but in the old days this was a serious problem. Ford had no problem selling commuter cars that would rust out and require replacement in 3 years but they couldn't figure out how to keep farm trucks on the farm and off the roads for 20 years, back in the 70s.
Going from a simple millionaire to creating a company like Microsoft takes a lot of hard work to pull off.
But if you want to run with your line of reasoning then no one in the US really qualifies as self-made, from the point of view of let's say a poor person in India. We're all rich to someone who makes less than a dollar a day.
Completely reasonable. I think wealth is almost always created by communities and not individuals, so I'm skeptical of the idea of anyone being purely "self made."
I am willing to concede there is a common definition of the term that is less strict. However I've never heard a definition of the term where a millionaire by birth is "self-made."
If all Bill Gates had ever accomplished is that he inherited a million dollar trust fund - if that's all his life had amounted to, living off of that fund, growing that fund - then your argument would have merit. As it is, your argument is about as far away from meritorious as one can be. Your argument attempts to rob Gates of his accomplishment due to the conditions of his birth, it's an extremely dark argument that if applied to the human race would mean that nobody ever deserves individual credit for anything.
"The appellation 'self-made man' or 'self-made woman' describes a person who was born poor or otherwise disadvantaged, but who achieved great economic success thanks to their own hard work and ingenuity rather than to any inherited fortune, family connections or other privilege."
Bill Gates was born with inherited fortune, family connections, and privilege. He was not born poor. That's not his fault any more than it's a poor child's fault that their parents are poor. But it is a fact.
A million bucks of wealth, with a conservative safe withdrawal rate of 3%, entitles you to $30k a year. This puts you in the 30th percentile of household income. That's not luxurious, but for zero work at all that's a much better outcome than someone who was born with nothing not working at all. A million in the bank puts you in the 96.3rd percentile of wealth in the US.
Say what you want about Bill Gates and his accomplishments, that doesn't change the fact he was born into wealth and inherently disqualified from being able to claim to be "self-made."
I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.
Either way, I'm glad they published this.