this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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The fuck are you even talking about? Bill Gates is a piece of shit for his underhanded and anticompetitive business practices; it has fuck-all to do with Epstein.
Gates was underhanded and anti competitive to other underhanded anti competitive companies. It was billionaires competing against other billionaires. Gates was a saint in the business world compared to IBM that came before it or Apple that it competed against as a peer.
If Apple has been victorious in the 80's instead of Microsoft, it wouldn't have been, "MS has an unfair advantage over Netscape because IE comes bundled." It would have been, "You can't install Netscape because we're Apple." Netscape would have been reduced to a reskin Safari. Because that's exactly what Apple did with the iPhone.
Oh, just against other big, bad corporations, huh?
Nope!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Fuck off with the dishonest whitewashing of history.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish wasn’t Microsoft against big corps. Someone else linked the Halloween Documents which come after this. In ‘76 Gates wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists decrying any unpaid work and later stole everything from The Mother of all Demos (specifically its descendants at PARC) without compensation.
I’m not sure what you’re on about in any of your threads defending Gates. Whataboutism doesn’t reduce any of his problems.
The letter to Hobbiests was valid. An Altair was $2500 in today's dollars and you still needed to spend a thousand more on i/o. If it was so trivial, they could have written their own Basic. Instead they copied it because they could. I get it. I have copied software utilities/games/etc too without ever caring that a small team spent months writing and debugging. That doesn't make it right.
MS in 1976 was not the giant global corporation it is today. It was maybe 10 guys.
As to MS stealing from Engelbart, this
https://www.quora.com/Did-Bill-Gates-get-Windows-from-Xerox
claims MS stole from Apple.
I’m not coming down one way or another on stealing code from Gates. It was a drastic departure from how things worked at the time. I am saying you can’t write a letter like that and then not pay PARC.
Both Jobs and Gates visited PARC and were aware of what Xerox was doing. Apple lost their suit against Microsoft for this because Xerox got involved. It’s so tenuous to argue it was stolen from Apple and that’s mostly based in Jobs fandom. Jobs was, surprise surprise, also a huge piece of shit and an incredibly, unapologetically deadbeat dad until his death.