Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

IS GATES EVIL? I RESPECTED HAD AFFECTION FOR, AND ADMIRED THE MAN I KNEW
Last I interacted with Gates was before he left MSFT. I’ve spent a bit of time with Ballmer a couple times a year, and very little bit with Nadella doing one of my larger deals.

The man I knew as Gill Gates, bumped into around town, sat near in restaurants, and worked down the hall from, was someone I admired and respected and found a good kind and publicly humble member of the community – even if he was rather demanding of employees, and abrasively intimidating at times.

And I was grateful to him because I built so many companies with his democratization of computing – in partcularlly programming. It was like printing money. And he was a driving force between building the microsoft stack developer community and collecting evanglelists (like me).

Something changed when, in response to the complaint of monopoly he said ‘My own government turned on me’. And he changed further the more he was embedded in the Gates Foundation (both Microsoft and Gates foundation were long term customers of my company, with Microsoft always in the many tens of millions every year, over twenty years.)

As far as I know he’s a true believer in what he does, and in his mission, and he is surrounded by a cadre of people who he believes he is helping.

I can’t really judge the complaints about him other than his rather odd deciation to a very old girlfiend that sort of bothers me. And as a fellow Aspie (and a worse one than I) I have a higher tolerance for his patterns of speech and behavior.

So, I choose to believe the man I respected believes he is doing the right thing, and partly because he is surrounded by positive reinforcement for it. And partly because he is trying to build a legacy in charity after the goverment all but had him forced oub of the company he founded – just as Jobs was.

I quite doubt he is simon bar sinister. I do believe that he, like many of us, may have become misguided and misdirected by the incentives we are buried in.

Though, at times, I would rather his public relations firms talked to someone like me instead of stumbling to recover from the fact that like many fellow supernerds, the degree of abstraction in the service of the many people in his organization and those that are influenced by them, is not understood in the context he intends to communicate it. 😉

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