Posted on 06/15/2006 1:33:07 PM PDT by HAL9000
I bought a few years ago. It's down slightly from my purchase price, but with the big dividend in 2004 I still have a net profit.
I agree with you. I just hope he (or more to the point, his wife Melinda) realizes that money alone won't solve some of the major problems of the world. Like the $24 Billion they promised for Africa. It won't do a damn thing but go down a rat hole as long as monsters like Robert Mugabe (Congo) and Somali warlords and imans are in charge.
Depending upon what he does with his money, it could be a lot of people. Rich people and bad politics are not good. Look at people like George Soros and Peter B. Lewis and then ask, do we need another one of them, only bigger?
Yes, Gates created a lot of wealth. But, had he been born 10 years later, I wonder what would have become of him.
Now, maybe he'll have to struggle on his own with the cruddy software his former company puts out.
Many times I have had a 'Bill Gates Moment' when I wish I had him in the room with me and could ask him, "Why did your software do that? Why, after all these years can't you make it work right? Can you fix it for me? No? Why not?"
And an imaginative, hard working entrepreneur, and wealthy capitalist. He learned a lot after he flunked out of Harvard.
I'd say he's done okay in his "geek" career.
Agreed. Lots of Gates bashing here. Sounds like sour grapes of Gates' success. Few remember he told IBM to shove it, and he went on to build an empire.
Yup. That's the ticket. People who are charitable only do it because they want to dodge taxes. Dick Cheney gave away $6.5m this year. I just know he did it to dodge taxes.
(rolling eyes)
Ah. The uninformed speak up with little knowledge and zero facts to substantiate their comments.
Many people, despite their wealth, continue to work because they like to. Especially those who started their own business. My brother started his own company, his net worth at $7m, doesn't need the money but he works 10-12 hours a day and he's almost 60.
Plenty on Free Republic hate his company, products, and some even the man himself, but they are irrelevant. The man is a monumental hero to those who assign that title to those who truly deserve it.
If anyone alive has earned a permanent vacation, it is Bill Gates.
Just Do It.
Apple has a sale on refurbs on its website. Get one of the old G4 PowerBooks. I have the 12" for travel, hook it to the monitor at home. I do lots of photos, use Bibble or snag PS7 on eBay.
Tiger is just trouble free, buy a copy of Little Snitch for your outbound firewall. Then install FireFox with Adblock+, the FilterSetG, Noscript, a real hosts file (komando.com). Then Scrapbook, FasterFox, Unplug. No more getting killed with WinXP no more hassles with Linux. Networking troubles just go away with the Mac. Everything runs as a limited user in Tiger. Heck, even QuickBooks needs admin (read suicide) privileges in WinXP.
The Mac Just Works, Just Do It. I should have done this years ago.
Try Isabel la Catolica de Castille or Marcus Licinus Crassus.
Adusted into today's dollars, Gates wouldn't even make the top 100. He's got quite a bit in the bank for himself, but in terms of creating wealth for others he'd be way behind John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan or Friedrich Weyerhauser.
Do try to remember that Gates only got the contract to provide the OS for the IBM PC because Gary Kildall was out flying his plane. Well, that and a bit of fraud on Gates' part.
William H. Gates III. Kicked out of Harvard for theft, he's become the most successful snake oil salesman in history. If he was as a good a programmer as he has been at his two true vocations, dirty tricks and marketing, Microsoft wouldn't cost U.S. businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost revenue due to spam, viruses and worms.
His stepping down is probably a good thing for Microsoft. Whether it's a good thing for the U.S. remains to be seen.
Considering that his politics are about the same as George Soros, I'm continually surprised at how many Freepers sing his praises.
Now that's he retiring from overseeing the building of Big Brother into the next version of Windows, he's free to help his father, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner and the other left-wing billionaire collectivist pigs make the world safe for "Transnational Progressivism," or as it's otherwise known, international socialism.
Well, that and a bit of extortion.
You a big George Soros fan too?
Gotta put a shameless plug in here for Steve Jobs. Far from retiring from day-to-day operations, his role at Apple is only growing. Head-to-head there's no contest between Jobs and Gates. The terms "Nerd" and "Geek" fit in here, just not sure how... ;-)
Sounds wonderful. Too bad it's more like:
remember he entered into a contract with IBM to build their next generation OS, then after IBM had sunk millions of dollars into OS/2, stole a lot of stuff and ran, eventually giving the world Windows NT.
Actually, he's a socialist and the son of a socialist.
He learned a lot after he flunked out of Harvard.
You mean "Asked to leave after stealing $40,000 in computer time and if his daddy hadn't written a big check to Harvard he'd have been imprisoned."
Now the Open Source Community will know how we felt when we got Saddam and Zarkowi.
I remember his brief relationship with IBM in the late 1970s. That's when he told IBM to stuff it.
I'm not aware that William H. Gates III had any dealings with IBM before his mommy got him the MSDOS gig.
Care to enlighten us on the particulars?
He went from stealing code from the Homebrewers to use in his BASIC for the PDP-10, he tried selling Traf-o-data (a miserable failure), he worked for TRW, Honeywell and he might have worked for one of the other 7 dwarves too.
But he didn't do any work with IBM until his mother who was on the board of the United way with IBM bigshot John Akers, got him a meeting.
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