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It's funny. Laugh. Businesses Apple

Call the Apple Store and Get Bill and Melinda Gates 84

Posted by pudge from the dontcha-think dept.
oosid writes "The area code in Seattle is (206). Right across Lake Washington in Bellevue the area code is (425). If you're trying to reach the new Apple Store in Bellevue from Seattle, don't forget to dial the area code or you'll find yourself talking to the reception desk at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The 7 digit number, coincidentally, is the same for both places. If you make the mistake I'm sure that the Foundation will be able to suggest some solutions to all of your Apple problems."
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Call the Apple Store and Get Bill and Melinda Gates More

Call the Apple Store and Get Bill and Melinda Gates

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  • Is there a number I'm missing? (Score:3, Informative)

    by GreenHell ( 209242 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @05:02PM (#6042280)
    From the Gates Foundation contact info page [gatesfoundation.org]:

    Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
    PO Box 23350
    Seattle, WA 98102
    Phone: (206) 709-3140
    For general questions or grant inquiries, please contact the foundation via email, info@gatesfoundation.org

    From the Apple Store page:

    106 Bellevue Square
    Bellevue, WA 98004
    425-709-3100

    Someone please tell me, am I missing something here?
  • There was a coincidence involving a phone number for an Apple store and some foundation involving Bill Gates, the name most associated with Microsoft, Slashdot's favorite target to blame for the ills of the world.

    What's the discussion? Does this matter? To anyone? At all?

  • Please don't harass the Gates Foundation. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 26, 2003 @05:09PM (#6042315)
    Just because it's funded by Bill G doesn't mean that the people working there deserve to get a phone call from you inquiring about Apple products.

    They're a charitable organisation for crying out loud. It's not much different from harassing the local hospital - the less time and money they waste, the better.

  • OT: On A Side Note (Score:5, Funny)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Monday May 26, 2003 @05:21PM (#6042380) Homepage
    I remember hearing recently that about 470k votes didn't get counted for American Idol because if you dialed a number wrong your phone would ring up some poor little church. Watch those phone numbers people.

  • Give to both (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rumpledstiltskin ( 528544 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @05:37PM (#6042474) Homepage Journal
    If you're trying to reach the apple store and get the Gates foundation, great. while you're out buying the music you'd otherwise probably be pirating, go ahead and contribute to the Gates Foundation. Even though Microsoft is often seen as the Great Satan here on slashdot, they are one of the most giving charitable organizations in the world. Support a good cause. buy some music, fight aids.

    • Re:Give to both (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @07:27PM (#6043125) Homepage Journal
      Even though Microsoft is often seen as the Great Satan here on slashdot, they are one of the most giving charitable organizations in the world.
      I decided to give 0.001% of my net worth to charity once, but they didn't accept pennies.

      It literally isn't costing Bill anything to buy your admiration here. So he goes out back and shovels a load of thousand dollar bills into a wheelbarrow and gives them to charity in a box with his return address on it. Call me when he gives until it at least itches, ok.

      • That's not fair. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @08:03PM (#6043376)
        It literally isn't costing Bill anything to buy your admiration here. So he goes out back and shovels a load of thousand dollar bills into a wheelbarrow and gives them to charity in a box with his return address on it. Call me when he gives until it at least itches, ok.

        Just... hold on a second. Listen, I used to think exactly that same way, and there's obvious tax advantages, etc. in what Gates does with his charity work.

        Having said that, did you happen to catch the recent Salon article about the Gates Foundation? The man is planning to give away 98% of his wealth. Just ponder that a moment.

        You can yell about Microsoft's business practices all you want - and I'll agree with practically every nasty thing spoken about them - but Bill is a different story. When I read about Bill Gates, I don't agree with a lot of what he has to say about technology, but he is a man who has clearly understood that his position in the world is unique. He speaks quite a bit about poverty in the 3rd world and particularly about hunger and disease control. He is probably already the single biggest money donator in history in terms of pure monetary value.

        Now, as I understand it, the physical limit of wealth is somewhere around a hundred million dollars. That's literally the breaking point where, short of creating orbiting death platforms or underwater citites, you cannot spend more money and see a difference in your lifestyle. Perhaps Bill recognizes this and has decided to put the rest in places where its needed most. Perhaps, this merits a little better mention than "call me when he gives until it at least itches". I hate sounding so preachy, I'm sorry about that, but it bears mentioning. Look into the Gates Foundation, you'd be really surprised. I was.

        • Re:That's not fair. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by msouth ( 10321 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @08:38PM (#6043634) Homepage Journal
          Just to fill in where you speculate on his motive:

          I heard Warren Buffet talking one time and he said that he and Bill agreed on the fact that leaving all that money to your kids was a Bad Idea. I don't know if they pointed at the Kennedys specifically, but I remember it that way :). Anyway, the theory was, "leave enough to your kids so that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.". Buffet said that his kids didn't agree with his theory.

          Gates really is planning on giving that money away. I used to believe many bad things about Bill Gates. I certainly saw how bad things were happening as the result of MS dominance. Then I read some very interesting stuff and changed my mind about him as a person.

          First, there is that conversation where he is arguing that windows 98 wasn't just a "bugfix release". He says that's a stupid reason to do a realease, that people wouldn't pay for it, they only pay for features. Then the interviewer says something about all the bugs in '95, or in MS software in general, and Gates bristles and say "did you ever here of user error?"--suggesting that there were not bugs, but just people incorrectly using the software and thinking that there are bugs as a result.

          That's point 1. Point 2 is something that a Mac advocate (I'll call him Bob, no idea what his real name was) said about a conversation with an MS sales person. Bob's company was going to all-Windows because it solved compatibility issues, eliminating Bob's beloved Macs. Bob mentioned this to the MS sales rep. The rep went ballistic. "Who's telling them that? We're not telling them that!" and I think there was also an assertion that Windows is extremely compatible with other platforms--I could be misremembering that part, but I know that the MS sales person was very peeved at the idea. The point of the article or website was that this Mac advocate had shifted the point of blame in his mind from "MS conspiracy" to "bone-headed tech managers".

          Point 3. The anti-trust case. There was a Wired article called "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth", about the anti-trust trial, by a guy who had a lot of access on the condition that he released none of it until after the judge's ruling was out.

          In this article, there are a couple of interesting things. One is that he talks to some random engineer in MS's cafeteria, who says "I think everyone's just mad at Bill because he has so much money." But far, far more interesting than that is the fact that, after the legal process gets started and Gates meets with the board, he actually seems to be genuinely in disbelief that it is happening.

          I know, I know, he could fake that. Would he fake crying? I don't think so, but that's exactly what he did. I think it might be in the same article that he says something along the lines that the other players just aren't trying hard enough--"If I had AOL's position, or IBM's position, [maybe he names another in here, etc]" that he could knock MS off the top. He really (I think) believed that--that IBM or AOL or maybe even Sun could beat them.

          Now, _we_, on the outside, look at that as being ridiculous. But have you ever seen how other people behave around a person with a lot of power? They generally either fear them or fawn over them or fawn over them in fear. That was why I put in the story about the engineer in the cafeteria. Gates was undoubtedly surrounded by people who would do anything to prevent him from knowing about a bug that their department had introduced, etc, etc.

          Now, I'm not saying that MS never did anything wrong. But I am saying that, (a) a lot of the fault for the total dominance of MS lies in the way people behaved, like deciding to eliminate all Macs even though the same number of PCs took two to five times as many people to look after them, etc. And (b), even if Bill did engage in and/or sanction things that were illegal given the monopoly, I don't think he ever really believed that he was i

          • Re:That's not fair. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @12:34AM (#6045060) Journal
            someone that powerful is going to be surrounded by people who reinforce whatever he believes. It is very hard for someone in power to get honest feedback from anyone.

            That's still his fault. If he can't manage to surround himself with honest people who will not be afraid to contradict him, then he needs to take full responsibility for it. We're not talking about people falsely complimenting his golf game. We're talking about potentially illegal business deals here!

            This is not to say Bill Gates is a bad person. When somebody donates billions to charity, I would rather not second guess his motives. However, to extrapolate that into believing that he's not responsible for his company's dealings is just silly.

          • Re:That's not fair. (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Keep in mind that this is the business man whose sliding scale pricing practices on the original version of DOS caused it to become the de facto operating system for all computers sold in America--a pricing system that was later declared anti-competitive and illegal.

            Bill Gates is a shrewd businessman, and he knew what he was doing all along. He was just better at it than anybody else.

          • Re:That's not fair. (Score:3, Interesting)

            by eet23 ( 563082 )
            Then the interviewer says something about all the bugs in '95, or in MS software in general, and Gates bristles and say "did you ever here of user error?"--suggesting that there were not bugs, but just people incorrectly using the software and thinking that there are bugs as a result.
            Gates blames the users for Windows 95, and that made you think he was a nice person? It gives me the exact opposite impression.
            • Gates blames the users for Windows 95, and that made you think he was a nice person? It gives me the exact opposite impression.

              When I read that interview several years ago I had the same opinion as you. What a dirty filthy shyster! Then I started doing commercial software development, and realized he was correct. People do not pay for bug fixes, only features. My current project has a ton of outstanding bugs that will never get fixed until a major customer complains about them, because fixing bugs does no

          • Re:That's not fair. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by mbbac ( 568880 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @08:20AM (#6046964)
            Now, _we_, on the outside, look at that as being ridiculous. But have you ever seen how other people behave around a person with a lot of power? They generally either fear them or fawn over them or fawn over them in fear. That was why I put in the story about the engineer in the cafeteria. Gates was undoubtedly surrounded by people who would do anything to prevent him from knowing about a bug that their department had introduced, etc, etc.
            Do you think Bill Gates is using a Macintosh for all of his work at Microsoft? No, he's not. He eats his own dogfood. He knows about all of the bugs and crashes. When I worked for MS, I remember hearing about a meeting with Billg and all of his product managers. The Windows product manager was telling Bill that Windows really doesn't crash as much as people say it does. Bill said that was bullshit and that it crashes on him about three times a day and ususually when Outlook was running. Obviously, this wasn't a good day for the Outlook PM.

            Anyway, my point is that he knew about the bugs, crashes, vulnerabilities but he never did anything about them! It took way too many years before he started their "trustworthy computing" initiative to address the vulnerabilities in Windows, and the motivation behind that is questionable. I think it has more to do with providing a good environment for digital restrictions management than for eliminating vulnerabilities.
          • He really (I think) believed that--that IBM or AOL or maybe even Sun could beat them.

            He was, and still is, correct. IBM and AOL/TW are so much larger than Microsoft it isn't funny. OS/2 could have knocked Windows off its throne if only IBM had gotten their act together. They had the resources to make it easy to install and to work with all the prevalent hardware. And Sun still dominates over Microsoft in its respective niche.

            What makes Microsoft different is that it focuses almost exclusively on its soft
        • I too am going to give away 98% of my wealth. Oh wait actually I'm going to give away 100% when I die. That's what a freaking will is!

          If he wanted to truly make a difference he would create companies to do research and open their findings to everyone (a la free patents). Think of what good a free pharmacutical company could do for the world? How about fuel efficient engines that could bring inexpensive power to the 3rd world? Or any number of other things.

          Everyone gives away their money when they die. I g

        • Re:That's not fair. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by naelurec ( 552384 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @01:43AM (#6045357) Homepage
          Well lets see .. He gives away 98% of his wealth .. currently worth around $45 billion ... that leaves around $900 million..

          First off .. man .. if I could say 2% of my wealth was almost $1 billion .. that would be sweeeet.

          But second, it truly is a situation of "what am I *REALLY* going to do with 44 billion dollars?" -- With that 900 million or so .. even if he didn't earn a penny off of it for the rest of his life (lets say 55 more years), he could spend $16 million a year, each year -- about $44k per day.

          I dunno .. even if I was living on a grand scale, I think I'd find it hard to spend $44k a day, each day. Granted, I know for a fact that this is absolutely not going to be the case ($900 million .. do some poor investing, make 7% or so .. generate ~44 million per year after capital gains..) -- $120k per day.

          So whats the motivation? It seems pretty simple to me. There are the three motivators --> wealth, power and prestige.

          He has been pretty successful with the first two -- wealthiest man in the world and a significant amount of power .. but what about prestige?

          I'd have to argue that outside of perhaps the Microsoft fan-boys (shareholders, MCSEs, MS employees, etc..) there is not a lot of prestige. People seem to dislike Gates for his money and power. People poopoo the products, security issues, etc..etc.. (not that I am saying this isn't justified)

          So what would someone that already has proven himself to have power & wealth really want? Prestige. Prestige to the likes of Andrew Carnegie (who seems to be perhaps a role model for Gates) who went beyond the steel industry and was able to achieve to a high degree the 3 goals of wealth, power and prestige.

          From what I have read about the Gates Foundation, it truly does seem to be a noble cause that is not some type of marketing scheme (now Microsoft's own personal persuits of umm.. charity leave much to be desired [slashdot.org]..) I'll be interested to see where the Gates foundation is in 10 to 15 years from now. Given Gate's current selling pattern of Microsoft stock over the next 8 or so years, I'd expect to see a LOT of his wealth go toward the foundation, assuming of course, he is truly motivated to do what he claims. :)

          • No NO NO! (Score:3, Informative)

            by Lysol ( 11150 )
            Most people do not dislike billy because of his vast oceans of cast, but rather the methods he employed to get the cash. I'm amazed that this is continually overlooked.

            m$ has left a trail of corpses of other vendors over the years that they've pummled into insignificance: novell, lotus, word perfect, borland, dr. dos, etc...

            there's no way in hell i'm gonna feel bad for gates. and i'm also not going to treat his philanthropy as some 'awakening' to the humanitarian plight. this guy is directly and indirectl
          • So he will still have a lot of money left. Is that against the law? Should be a law passed that everyone with a net wealth over x must be required to give 99% of their wealth to charity?

            And so what if he wants prestige?

            I don't get it. The man has probably donated more money than anyone alive today and he still gets hacked to bits here for being a greedy bastard. I'm pretty amazed.

        • And if you want to be cynical about it...

          Microsoft could just be a platform for taking money from stupid rich bourgeois Americans, and funnelling 98% of it into charity to the third world. If that is in fact the case, then this man has to, ironically, be my hero. It's mandatory charity. :)

        • Now, as I understand it, the physical limit of wealth is somewhere around a hundred million dollars. That's literally the breaking point where, short of creating orbiting death platforms or underwater citites, you cannot spend more money and see a difference in your lifestyle.

          I beg to differ.

          Once I hit the $200,000,000 mark, I was able to replace my legions of minimum-wage henchmen with properly-trained death merchants who could actually shoot and hit targets, and who don't stand in a big circle arou

        • It's nice that Bill will leave 98% behind. But what I am really interested in is how he plans to keep the other 2%. Is this a secret form of Angel Investing that we haven't heard much about yet?

          Also, isn't it true that any obscenely large number divided by any countable scalar is still a really obscenely large number?

          It really makes you wonder how much he expects to have at the point of death. Let's assume modern medicine keeps him alive till 100. And let's assume he manages to keep his investments cl

  • Bill? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bellings ( 137948 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @07:06PM (#6042993)
    Wow! If I try to call Steve Jobs, I get Bill Gates instead! ROTFLMAO! Kikikiki! LOL LOL LOL LOL! Hee Hee!

    God, it IS so damned funny!

  • "Hi, I'd like to speak to Steve"

    "We don't have anyone working here"

    *laughs* "Sure you do, it's _the_ Steve that I need to talk to."

    "Nope. Sorry. Can I be of any assistance?"

    "Yeah, tell him that the apple machine I got didn't work"

    "Uh, this is the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation."

    "That's nice but I really need to speak to Bill. I guess next time I call you'll answer Pizza Hut right?"

    "No sir. This is a charitable organization."

    "Stop screwing around - I need to tell Steve that my computer messed up

    • Re:My Conversation (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Can I assume that this is another one of those conversations with your imaginary friend, or did you actually pay money for a long-distance call to try to harass a charitable organization?

  • Finally.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by astrodawg ( 54943 )
    ... something that Bill Gates did first!

  • Slash-Phoned? (Score:5, Funny)

    by nilspace ( 676196 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @10:16PM (#6044311)
    So is it possible to get slash-phoned? I imagine that's what's happening to the foundation right about now...

    • Re:Slash-Phoned? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by micq ( 266015 )
      Nah, for the same reason your too lazy to call and see if it's slash-phoned, others are too lazy to call and slash-phone.
  • This just in. If you intended to get to Stuff that Matters but you accidentally typed slashdot.org into your browser, you'll end up at a site with nothing better to post but inane stories about how to dial an area code.

  • Coincidences like this... (Score:5, Funny)

    by davesag ( 140186 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @12:41AM (#6045085) Homepage
    Coincidences like this are just a copy and paste error in the matrix.
  • ...you can call either number and reach a result of the generosity of Bill Gates.

    That is, if you believe that Apple couldn't have made it without the IE/Office deal of several years back.

  • They let you buy anything (Score:5, Interesting)

    by York the Mysterious ( 556824 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @04:13AM (#6045909) Homepage
    Sorry to break it to you, but the B&M Gates Foundation will let you buy any hardware / software you want. They're really not interested in MS at all. I went to a school that received a nice large grant from them and all the Mac heads (me included) were worried when the grant went through that our G4s were gonna disappear. We ended up getting 4 more. (We had 250 PCs and 3 Macs. 4 more was a big deal). Right now I'm typing this on G4 that was purchased using my paycheck from this school (summer work) that was funded by billy boy. So if you think about it my G4 was bought using money from the profits of Windows. Kinda funny.
    • A lot of non-public funding for the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (invoving iBooks for every 7th & 8th grade student in the State) was funded by the Gates Foundation.

      On the other hand, if the foundation engages in that practice of giving away free MS software, I would find that to be a huge conflict and a contradiction.
  • Well, the "call Steve, get Bill instead" thing is okay I guess but here's a better one:

    1-800-SOS-APPL (apple assistance center)
    1-800-S0S-APPL (a different kind of assistance center)

    note that the second Save Our Ship contains a Zero, not an Oh.
  • In a twisted way, if I were in Bill's position and wanted to further my self-interest, I would similarly give away a vast majority of my wealth.

    Why? because I want my children to do well and I have some suspicion that too much money may be quite a hindrance to that.

    Unfortunately, I'm not Bill, and I haven't found any takers on my debt yet.

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