Bill Gates’ contribution to the world — the practical Desktop Computer — put a lot of secretaries out of work as businesses found it more cost-effective to put a computer on every worker’s desk and ultimately network them. Businesses made that decision, and it made Bill Gates a wealthy man. Now Bill presumes to tell “Business” that it can’t make self-interested decisions, that government with it’s arbitrary tax code should force outcomes. He then goes on to cite the usual list of do-gooder dreams like “smaller class sizes” and “reaching out to the elderly” to sugar-coat his ideas.
Bill should just write a huge check to the US Treasury if the guilt is getting too much for him.
Gates’ contribution to the world — the practical Desktop Computer — put a lot of secretaries out of work as businesses found it more cost-effective to put a computer on every worker’s desk and ultimately network them.
I was in on a lot of office conversions, “taking the job away” from people doing tasks of unimaginable drudgery filling out logs, ledgers and records manually. In the process, I saw a whole universe of new jobs open up. Not just for networking people like myself, but for the very people who were being “replaced” from their former jobs of maximum drudgery