• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        He’s really awful too, or at the very least he used to be.

        He’s done a lot of rebranding himself as being a great guy as of late, and put his money towards some great causes.

        But when he was in charge of Microsoft he’d openly treat people like shit, openly steal things, openly do anticompetitive and illegal business practices, deliberately put small companies out of business, and openly bribe politicians to look the other way as he built his illegally-gained business empire.

        The technology landscape today is vastly more closed and monopolised because of his/MS’s actions.

        • OscarRobin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          All the recent stuff is him trying to whitewash his image so he isn’t remembered as the bastard he is. Unfortunately, it’s working.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          1 year ago

          If you accept his research money (which people don’t seem to do anymore) there are so many strings attached that if you find something you’ll probably be liable even if you give it all up for free.

          I’m still waiting for something good coming out of his pocket money spendings for good causes.

          • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I’m still waiting for something good coming out of his pocket money spendings for good causes.

            The eradication of polio isn’t good enough for you?

      • kamenoko@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago
        1. He’s a billionaire.
        2. Cheated on his wife.
        3. Travelled to Epstein’s Island.
        4. Got removed from Microsoft for propositioning female employees for sex
        5. Used Microsoft’s market position to kill off any competition. Remember Netscape?
        6. His foundation pushed hard to make the COVID vaccines intellectual property of drug manufacturers so they would get richer, leaving the world dependent on them for doses instead of allowing everyone to produce it.
        • Not_Alec_Baldwin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Don’t forget the incessant lobbying for charter schools even though nobody wants them and there’s no research to suggest they are better than the public system.

      • nyoooom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        He’s a giant asshole too (I mean when you look at Microsoft it’s not very positive) but he’s worked a lot on his image in the last decades

      • explodicle@local106.com
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        1 year ago

        With money he got from a monopoly, meaning the money he took plus the deadweight loss are even worse for humanity. Computers would be even better today if it wasn’t for him, and we would’ve produced better things than we have today.

        Monopolists “giving back” is insidious because it’s much easier to see what they gave us than what they took away.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I agree with you but he’s not on the same page as Steve Jobs, not in my book. Billionaires can’t exist in a fair system so they’re existence isn’t justified but comparatively speaking he is better than Jobs

          We may have better computers but Malaria may be more of an issue, whereas without Jobs nothing of note would be missing other too many biopics.

          • lad@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            It might as well be that if Jobs were still alive, he’d be running some PR washing campaign to also be all good ¯_(ツ)_/¯

          • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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            1 year ago

            Malaria is still around though, spending pocket change for a cause doesn’t mean it’s helping (especially with all the strings attached if you actually get a grant).

            Malaria will be beaten with classic research. I mean it’s still all around…

        • porkins@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          The standardization of operating systems was an important step though. If there were hundreds of different OS’s on the market, then the PC generation would have stalled. The fact that there were basically only three dominant platforms meant that we could have market stability.

          • explodicle@local106.com
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            1 year ago

            Where have you heard that a monopoly can be more beneficial than harmful because of standardization? Has that happened with any other monopolies?

            • porkins@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              It’s common sense. If you have hundreds of operating systems, then it becomes a pain to get the right software. First, developers are discouraged because they don’t know what platform will be best to develop on and users will be discouraged because they might need to install twenty different OS partitions in order to run the software they want to run.

              • explodicle@local106.com
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                1 year ago

                No offense but no it is not common sense. The economics of monopolies have been studied for centuries, including any benefit from standardization (like with Standard Oil). It creates a costly deadweight loss.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Monopoly_and_efficiency

                For what it’s worth I was there, and the handful of OSes in the 1980s (not 20) weren’t as problematic as the monopoly later. It seems like common sense to me that today’s multiple browsers are better than IE standardization was.