History Will Revere Bill Gates and Forget Steve Jobs, Says Author 679
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, has stirred up quite a controversy in tech circles with his off-the-cuff remarks that history will remember Bill Gates fondly while Steve Jobs slips into obscurity. Gladwell likened Gates' charitable work to the German armaments maker Oskar Schindler's famous efforts to save his Jewish workers from the gas chambers during World War II, and added that because of Gates there's a reasonable shot we will cure malaria. 'Gates, sure, is the most ruthless capitalist. And then he decides, he wakes up one morning and he says, "Enough." And he steps down, he takes his money, takes it off the table ... and I think, I firmly believe that 50 years from now, he will be remembered for his charitable work,' said Gladwell. 'And of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs. Who's Steve Jobs again?' For all his dismissal of Jobs' legacy, however, Gladwell remains utterly fascinated with him. 'He was an extraordinarily brilliant businessman and entrepreneur. He was also a self-promoter on a level that we have rarely seen,' said Gladwell. 'What was brilliant about Apple, he understood from the get-go that the key to success in that marketplace was creating a distinctive and powerful and seductive brand.' Gladwell concludes that the most extraordinary moment in the biography of Jobs is when Jobs is on his deathbed and it's over and he knows it. 'And on, I forget, three, four occasions, he refuses the mask because he is unhappy with its design. That's who he was. Right to the very end, he had a set of standards. If he was going to die, dammit, he's going to die with the right kind of oxygen mask. To him it was like making him send his final emails using Windows.'"
Probably. But he doesn't deserve it. (Score:4, Informative)
I was just discussing this on G+ where it was claimed that Billy boy has wiped out Polio in the third world. To which I said, Uh, No.
Bill Gates has temporarily suppressed Polio in certain parts of the third world and helped sell it out in the process. In order to get vaccinations you have to provide strong IP protection to Big Pharma. So strong that if your people are dying and you make the medication to save them instead of buying it because you can't afford it that the WTO will end up owning your asshole. Meanwhile, they're not going to get into every nation, which is what it actually takes to eradicate a disease. Instead they are lending a false sense of security while creating a ticking time bomb.
Meanwhile, the foundation makes for-profit investments in industries literally killing the people they are vaccinating. When caught in this they first announced that they would review their investments for ethics; the next day they took down that press release and put up another one saying that they would not be reviewing their investments' ethical nature because it would be difficult and expensive.
The Gates Foundation is not and never has been about improving the world. The money that went into its foundation belongs, by rights, to the American people, because Microsoft was found to have illegally abused its monopoly position by the USDoJ, which had a profound effect on essentially every player in the computing industry. However, Bush's dog Ashcroft announced that there would be zero repercussions, and the Gates foundation was founded, and now does the work of Big Pharma and the WTO.
And of course, let us not forget that Gates is personally, massively invested in pharma; the operation of a nonprofit which was created with illicitly-gained money and which exists to spread the laws desired by Big Pharma is therefore a clear conflict of interest. You may start with the LA Times article "Dark Cloud over Good Works of Gates Foundation" and perform your research from there. Bill Gates has never done anything for the benefit of mankind. If you fell for the Gates Foundation, you need a course in critical thinking in the worst way.
Anyone who believes that Bill Gates is trying to save the world probably also believed that Larry Ellison just wanted to reduce crime in the USA when he was backing that unified national ID program, too.ï
(quick comment since I was JUST talking about this and just had to do a bit of edit and reformat, not an appropriated copypasta.)
Re:Probably. But he doesn't deserve it. (Score:2, Informative)
We have a real shill here, people.
Says the person who created an account just for trolling this one story, with no comments prior [slashdot.org]...
Does Microsoft pay well? I hear the benefits are pretty nice.
Re:The big difference here is (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The big difference here is (Score:4, Informative)
Please remind me again; who at Netscape invented ActiveX?
Re:error in submission (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed, give them time! -- time, like say the years 2002 through the present.
Re:The big difference here is (Score:5, Informative)
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critique
As I said : there are dozens of critiques outs here. Including from the prestigious The Lancet medical journal.
Search for it. I am not your personal Google.
Re:Half Right, Half Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Making your gadget slightly shinier then the other gadgets is not anywhere close to the same thing as inventing the assembly line or industrialised research.
Re:The big difference here is (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I couldn't read that properly, could you perhaps use layers and the blink tag?
Many stories about abuse by Bill Gates: Linked. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The big difference here is (Score:4, Informative)
But even if you focus on just his charity, it's arguably a very damaging charity. He's using his wealth to basically create another monopoly but this one's in the charitable sector rather than computers. The end result is all the talent and skill gets dumped into things he wants to fix and other areas suffer. There have already been numerous complaints about this.
His charity only gives away minimal amount of money to basically avoid taxes while investing the rest and they invest in companies that won't work with poor countries so they can buy needed drugs and oil companies that are destroying the same countries he claims to want to help. People in the niger delta have loads of vision issues, asthma and bronchitis because of the companies he invests in. How is curing measles for these people helping them? They get to die from something else which is probably worse? What a great guy. Oh and when he gets that malaria disease will poor countries even be able to get it or will it retain a high price and basically only help Gate's rich buddies?
I suggest more people need to take a critical look at his foundation. The information is out there and has been reported on like in the L.A> Times http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,2533850.story [latimes.com] but for the most part he gets a pass because it's charity work and they think they can cure AIDS. But that doesn't excuse that actually most of the foundation's money actually goes to help rich awful companies through investment. With 48 of 100 be labeled as "transgressions against social responsibility".
On education, all they provide a racist scholarship which poor white families can't benefit from. They push privatization of education as a reform. They want standardised tests to rate teachers and schools and pay to be based on test scores. Sure that sounds like a good thing until you realise that standardised tests don't work and if a school's reputation and a teacher's pay is based on test scores then tests just get easier. How the hell does that help?
The UK does the same sort of crap and because of things like the League tables schools aren't giving kids the best education possible. They're giving them something they'll do well on to make themselves look good and get crap like students not getting zero marks for work they don't do at all. Only work they hand in which results in stories like this. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/teacher-who-gave-students-zero-marks-becomes-a-folk-hero/article4230726/ [theglobeandmail.com]
The guy, imo, is still a scumbag. But he's just become smarter at being a scumbag and realises he gets a free pass on whatever he does if starts a big foundation and claims they'll get rid of AIDS and other diseases.
Re:The big difference here is (Score:5, Informative)
No, you're an idiot. Read the fucking article: according to it, he's been doing it for DECADES, and not just at his own company. He hasn't been "dyeing" [sic] of cancer all that time. If he was doing it for his cancer (which was relatively recent), he certainly could have gotten an official handicap tag.
You Apple fanboys are ridiculous.
Re:The big difference here is (Score:3, Informative)
Jobs did it privately as it should be done. Do good, and don't talk about it.
Why?