I don’t know if it is what he set out to do, but I believe Bill Gates has established the gold standard for what an enormously wealthy person (one of the richest people in the world) should do with his life and his wealth, spreading it around to very worthy causes and applying it to where it can do the most good. Whether it is carbon capture technology, or new forms of clean energy production, or medical research, or any other function he has applied his wealth to assisting, he has made a point of putting it all to good use for the planet and its inhabitants. Plus he already made humans vastly more connected and productive with the software for the personal computer and other digital computing devices. He is an American treasure IMHO.

Bill Gates is not now and hasn’t been running Microsoft for many years.  You can speak well of Bill Gates but that has nothing to do with Microsoft anymore.  Just my opinion.

The original Microsoft –

I don’t want to get banned for politics or medical stuff but this has been eating at me for over a day and I have to get it off my chest. IMHO Gates is a no good POS. Yes, he brought computers to the masses (didn’t I read once that he stole it?). Everything he’s done sickens me. If I’m banned so be it!

Let the flame wars begin!

I’m a retired CPA. This brings back many memories from the days I started as a tax preparer in the early 1980’s. Back then, we filled out the tax forms by hand and the secretaries typed up the final return. It was an amazing event, when the first portable computers arrived to be used at the client’s location for audit work. They were the size of a sewing machine and heavy. The women on the audit team liked to carry them to prove their strength. The MS-DOS operating system had to be loaded off a disk at startup and the screen was only 6 inches square. The audit partner laughed at me when I wondered if someday the screen would be in color, instead of green on black.

cyberSAR wrote:

Yes, he brought computers to the masses (didn’t I read once that he stole it?).

If memory serves me, Bill Gates was asked by IBM to create an operating system for their new line of personal PC’s.  Gates wrote the software which was called IBM DOS.  Gates and crew at that time were not in the business of making or selling computers, only software.

“A deal with IBM allowed Microsoft to have control of its own QDOS derivative, MS-DOS, and through aggressive marketing of the operating system to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones Microsoft rose from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry.”  –  This part from Wikipedia via Google.

Msft has done some good stuff over the years, but ever since Windows 8 things have been going downhill IMO.

I use to have two linux PCs and 8 windows boxes…

These days I have 8 linux PCs and 1 windows vm

I have a feeling I will not be a Win11 user at all

I remember when a new Windows release meant something. It was exciting and most embraced the new version. But I think anything beyond Windows 7 has been less than a feeling of progress. Especially releases such as Windows 8. It’s more a feeling of mundane forced improvements or sometimes regressions that don’t make much in the way of excitement. It’s Windows with a coat of new paint, maybe you hate the color, like it or just tolerate it. Given that Windows 10 was supposed to be the last release version except now we have Windows 11 and potentially 12 the ideal of a static version is now dead. Do we even care anymore what version we use?