21 Comments

1. Bruce W.:

G-d bless them.

To have such immense economic power and to actually use it for good?

It’s downright American (though not exclusively).

Jan 25, 2005 - 11:12 am 2. Patrick S Lasswell:

I’ve listened to people in the tech industry bitching and moaning about the hideous crimes of Bill Gates for years. Most of the bitching comes from people who never heard of Andrew Carnegie or who really know what actually ruthless people do. Bill Gates has hurt a lot of wealthy, intelligent, capable people, and noticeably diminished their income streams to the point where instead of becoming billionaires, they were only millionaires. Oh, the humanity!

Seriously, Bill Gates has looked at the incredible waste associated with disease, and chosen to counter it with effective treatment. He is also using multiple routes of approach and not committing all of his resources to any of them. Most important, he is demanding results, and that is going to be his biggest innovation to the aid industry. It’s entirely possible that saving the world is the most challenging competition he can find for the remainder of his life. A lot of aid agencies are going to look very stupid soon, even though they’ve been getting away with being stupid for a lot of years.

Jan 25, 2005 - 11:18 am 3. Ron Wrght:

Roger,

Great news as this is something the 1st World countries should do. Because we all inhabit this big spinning ball together. What goes around comes around.

However the DOD/NIH/ and Pharma industry may be putting at risk the world’s critical vaccines necessary to control the scourges of manking e.g. smallpox, in their quest for the “Golden Fleece” for fame and personal fortune.

This little game may have already infiltrated experimental clinical trials in childrens’ vaccine resulting in deaths in the Norfolk, Virgina Area.

Anyone have any info on that?

This is a case of leaving the fox to guard the henhouse. Read the recent stories of late how the NIH has been cross-compromised by the pharma industry.

See our forums section under “vaccine area” topic:

Link Here

Jan 25, 2005 - 11:24 am 4. Brown Line:

I’ve never cared for Microsoft’s products or business practices – ours is a Microsoft-free household – but it’s clear to me that Gates’ use of his fortune is in the best tradition of American philanthropy. In addition to his support of immunization, his foundation supports charter schools, to help poor kids get the education that their local public schools cannot give them; while the money he’s given to research for a vaccine against malaria could help save the lives of millions in years to come. Dubya could worse than consider Gates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Jan 25, 2005 - 12:33 pm 5. Terrye:

Maybe he should challenge the European Union to match it.

Jan 25, 2005 - 12:53 pm 6. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

As a businessman, Gates is a modern predator, and is detested in much of the industry for the business practices of microsoft – using monopoly power in unethical ways. Microsoft’s arrogance set back the industry at least 10 years and led to the plagues of viruses and other problems (Microsoft has improved in their technology area). They almost never innovated anything.

On the other hand, like Carnegie, he is doing a good job of spending it on humanitarian issues.

I don’t know Bill Gates. I do know fairly well another very rich predator, and his money goes into medical research on longevity (but he knows he won’t live long enough to benefit from it).

When you have enough bucks, if you aren’t just plain evil, it would be surprising if a lot didn’t go to charitable purposes. But Gates seems to do a good job of finding the leverage in his giving as did Carnegie.

Jan 25, 2005 - 12:54 pm 7. augolden:

As for his business practices, yes, perhaps they have been predatory, aggressive, and ruthless. But not unethical or immoral.

The idea that he set back the tech industry 10 years is ludicrous at best. There are better platforms, yes. But Windows allowed the average person to afford a computer, and this prolific growth of computers (and its affordability)around the world only speeded up advances in technology.

The alternative to a STANDARD platform would have been expensive computers and systems for rich and elite institutions. Perhaps there would be more advanced technologies, but what good would they do if one can’t afford them?

The free market knew best….and picked Windows…not the best platform, but overall a fine compromise.

Jan 25, 2005 - 1:29 pm 8. R C Dean:

Bill Gates understood what many others did not – that the business of computers is, first and foremost, business. Not cool toys for tech nerds.

There is no question that his business model was the best. And remember, there was a day when Apple was poised to own the world of home computing, and they pissed it away because of a bad case of ego and “not invented here.” A large part of the reason for Microsoft’s success was Bill’s willingness to create a platform that anyone could write code for, and to sell his OS to any maker. Apple took the other, more elitist route – they would not sell their OS to other makers, would not allow anyone to clone Apples, and kept their OS in-house so few independents wrote programs for it.

Gates whipped Apple, Sun, and the rest of them fair and square. Lets hope he can do for the NGO/aid industry what he did for home computing, but frankly, the world of nonprofits and NGOs is a piranha tank compared to the goldfish pond of business. Your average aid vampire has the ethics and morals of a moray eel, so don’t bet on Bill being able to do as much there as he did in the world of business.

Jan 25, 2005 - 1:45 pm 9. mcg:

Microsoft’s arrogance set back the industry at least 10 years

There is no way whatsoever you can say that with certainty. One could just as easily argue that without them it would have taken far longer for the personal computer to become a ubiquitous.

But it sounds like we’re all of one mind on the philanthropy side of things.

Jan 25, 2005 - 1:49 pm 10. mcg:

Duh, “a ubiquitous” –> “ubiquitous”

Jan 25, 2005 - 1:50 pm 11. Silicon valley Jim:

Bill Gates understood what many others did not – that the business of computers is, first and foremost, business. Not cool toys for tech nerds.

Amen. He also understood and understands the old IBM dictum that people don’t buy hardware or operating systems; they buy applications. They may write checks to acquire hardware and operating systems, but what they really want is the ability to run certain applications. Microsoft was literally years ahead of any other vendor for the PC or Mac market with a truly relational database. Microsoft is still, I believe the only vendor supplying (all of) a spreadsheet, relational database, word processor, and presentation package to run on a PC or on a Mac.

Jan 25, 2005 - 2:33 pm 12. Mark Poling:

I’ve never liked Microsoft products; compared to competitors, they always seem to be inelegant kludges. (And of course, Microsoft products have been the backbone of my professional life; go figure.) I’ve always despised Bill Gates as being the ugly face of predatory Capitalism.

And now he’s gone and done this.

Talk about a self-righteouness buzz killer.

Good on ya, Bill.

Jan 25, 2005 - 2:43 pm 13. Sandy P:

He’s been doing this awhile, just upping the ante, and he’s already gone toe-to-toe w/the UN – some of his money’s going thru them, he wanted higher standards/better record keeping and some were complaining that just wasn’t possible.

Add another $750 million to what America does for the world.

Drives them nuts.

Jan 25, 2005 - 3:12 pm 14. Paul Snively:

I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s business practices, which, incidentally, have been found to be illegal in certain instances. But I definitely choose to align myself with those who credit Mr. Gates for choosing results-oriented, broad-based, carefully-chosen philanthropic outlets for his personal wealth.

With respect to the competition between Microsoft and Apple, let me just say as a former Apple employee that while it’s certainly true that Apple has its fair share of ego and NIH, some of the more routine criticisms, such as Apple not licensing the Mac OS to clone manufacturers, are quite a bit more complex than they appear. Even as late as 1989-1991, the period of time that I was at Apple and during which we shipped System 7.0, the majority of Mac OS was still written in assembly language for the 680×0 processor family, and targeted very specific hardware such as the variable-speed floppy disk controller that was custom built for Apple by Sony. There wasn’t a hardware abstraction layer to speak of—such a thing made no sense at all in the context of the original Macintosh, whereas in a sense the original IBM PC couldn’t help but have one in the form of its BIOS, and in fact that was the problem IBM asked Microsoft to solve: “We have the hardware and Basic Input/Output System, but no OS on top of that. Help!”

The bottom line is that even though it’s true that Apple management didn’t want to license the OS out for a very long time, the engineering reality is also that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn’t license the OS without also licensing the motherboard design. There just wasn’t the kind of separation between them that would have made it feasible. So, fast forward a few years and you get a tough row for Apple to hoe as far as competing with the Wintel world’s economies of scale go, and a tough row for Microsoft to hoe with respect to the level of integration and quality that Apple is able to impose… and the market has indeed largely chosen the benefits of bandwagon effect over the benefits of end-to-end integration. C’est la vie.

So Steve Jobs had to be shrewd, and he is: he’s largely left the corporate world, including the take-your-work-home-with-you world, to Windows, and has focused the iPod and the Mac on the rest of life: music, pictures, movies, creating, organizing, sharing. You can still use Microsoft Office for OS X (little-known secret: it’s better than the Windows version), but that’s not a reason to use a Mac. Everything else is. Especially the lack of viri/worms/spyware, which, coupled with iPod “halo effect,” finally seems to be driving more folks to the Mac.

OK, end of O/T rant. Sorry for the length!

Jan 25, 2005 - 4:02 pm 15. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

augolden

Sorry, but I’ll hold to my statement. I never asserted that a standard platform wasn’t needed (operating systems are natural monopolies for that reason). The problem was that it was a Microsoft platform, dramatically inferior to others in key technical characteristics.

The free market had little to do with picking Microsoft. Rather, IBM picked Microsoft, and the free market picked the IBM computer for a number of reasons, including IBM’s monopoly on mainframes and their marketing power. To an IT manager, buying IBM was safe. Nothing else was. Furthermore, IBM did something unusual for them: they created a hardware platform with an open interface, so a third party market appeared to make boards for it. This meant that the PC could do all manner of things because adding third party hardware enabled it. Meanwhile Apple went from open to closed platform, and look where they are – a superior operating system and an inferior market share.

With IBM in their pocket, when the clone industry came along to knock PC prices to nothing, Microsoft was already the standard operating system and hence had a monopoly. By then, even IBM couldn’t dislodge Microsoft’s monopoly by switching to OS2.

Microsoft did not win based on the superiority of their solution. They won by cleverly exploiting the monopoly status that was created by IBM’s decision.

hey won because IBM crowned them the standard way before windows, and therefore the third party application vendors invested in MS-DOS software. By the time Windows came along, you would have been a fool to code for any other platform even though it was a pathetic pile of junk for years compared to Apple’s offerings or those of several innovative PC companies that died because they didn’t run the Microsoft operating system.

SV Jim – As for their office products, through unethical techniques (such as hidden APIs) they leveraged their monopoly into another area where they forced another monopoly: office software. And don’t forget Sybase, on which Microsoft foolishly based their first really useful relational database (later when they redid SQL Server they used a lot of Informix personnel – at least that’s what the SQL Server product owner told me).

Microsoft’s techniques were:

1) Use unethical and illegal marketing techniques to force their system onto mass market computers.

2) Constantly add features to their OS by copying the capabilities of third party software companies. Usually the copies were pretty lousy, but after enough money and version, they were good enough that the market destroyed the real innovator. Sometimes Microsoft actually bought the software.

3) Provide their applications software developers with hidden interfaces into their OS that other vendors could not find out about, giving Microsoft office applications a time advantage.

4) Tell everyone how innovative they were, as they introduced a feature that those of us who were old timers had been using years to decades before, or as they introduced an idea taken from a third party software vendor.

But… SV Jim – you are absolutely right about why Windows remained a monopoly – the applications positive feedback loop.

Microsoft is hated by many in the technology world because of its practices and by the low quality of its software – but then a monopoly doesn’t have to be good, they just have to be adequate. Microsoft in the last few years has tried to improve, and maybe they will.

Jan 25, 2005 - 4:19 pm 16. Harry:

Oh dear me.

Never heard of TRIPS have you? The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization?

“TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him a monopoly that the robber barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria andtuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices….

Gates knows darn well that the “intellectual property rights” laws such as TRIPS – which keep him and Melinda richer than Saddam and the Mafia combined — are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cheap drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus. Gate’s brilliant and self-serving solution: he’s spending anitsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates’foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire’s “philanthropic” organization is currently working paw-in-claw with the bigpharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments

Gates’ game is given away by the fact that his Foundation has invested$200 million in the very drug companies stopping the shipment oflow-cost AIDS drugs to Africa.

Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: he’s locking in a trade system that will block the delivery of cheap medicine to over 20 million.” G. Palast.

Jan 25, 2005 - 5:32 pm 17. Ron Wrght:

UUMMMMMMM

Lov my IBook – Lov my IBook – Lov my IBook

No lil buggies and worms plus it’s a breeze to connect to a wireless net.

Harry (at 5:32 pm) I detect a little animosity for the pharma industry, the robber/barrons of the 21st Century.

So right you are! They’ve run amuck. Someone left the fox guarding the henhouse.

Check out my challenge to the Blogos over at LGF on a related subject with vaccines just being the tip of the iceberg:

Here and Challenge Here

This is a real mystery thriller where everyone can get in on the act.

Jan 25, 2005 - 5:54 pm 18. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

The Constitution of the United States requires laws protecting patents and copyrights. That is how important the founders felt intellectual property (IP) protection to be to the functioning of economies.

These other treaties extend the protection internationally.

[Begin IP 101]

IP is protected in order to encourage people to invest their time and money in producing it.

In the case of pharmas, the incredible cost of developing new drugs means that if they lose IP protection, they will simply stop developing new drugs. If you had a billion dollars, would you invest it in a drug that cost hundreds of millions to develop but pennies to produce? A movie is the same sort of thing, at usually a lower cost.

There are, of course, imperfections in such systems. US Copyright law effectively extends protection forever, because whenever copyrights are about to expire, lobbyists get the period made longer. Hence Mickey Mouse is still a government enforced monopoly – for Disney’s benefit. This very long period is contradictory to the stated purpose.

Patents are better (and that’s what pharmas use) but in the software industry, a stupid Supreme Court ruling has allowed people to patent utterly unoriginal ideas – the reduction of any business process to software can be patented, even if the process has been around for millenia. There are other problems also.

But to call the Pharmas robber barons and try to destroy or get around their temporary government granted monopolies (patents) is to destroy a major part of medical progress. After all, who developed those drugs? What did it cost?

In anticipation of a response, no, they don’t just run off with the fruits of government sponsored R&D. They do a whole lot of it themselves, along with designing or discovering medicine, and running them through the horribly slow and expensive FDA process.

Jan 25, 2005 - 6:36 pm 19. Sandy P:

Harry, didn’t Gates once say each kid will get $10m, he and Melinda will keep 5% and the rest of his billions will go to charity?

He’s not giving it away all at once and at least he’s already giving some of it away, unlike a certain sage of Omaha who needs $43b(?) at age 85.

But once he dies, then most of his money will go to medical research. There’s your embryonic stem cell money.

Jan 25, 2005 - 7:29 pm 20. Ron Wrght:

John,

I don’t disagree with you. It’s just the control mechanisms to prevent market abuses are not functioning very well. I agree the FDA is “screwed up.” If you saw Boston Legal Sunday night this was a good example.

In times past medical ethics of the practioners limited “utilitarian” pursuits. The rules of the “guild” prevailed.

What we are seeing now is in pursuit of profits these controls are cast aside. In the normal market sense just who is the consumer is murky. Is it the employee/medical subscriber, the employer, and or the provider groups.

In this case the consumer (us) lacks the knowledge in which to make informed decisions in the market place. We must put our trust in the practioners and assume they will act in our best interest. At least we assume they will do not harm.

This is unlike purchasing a car where the consumer has some knowledge of the product and some understanding of the motivation of the salesperson. The consumer in the medical arena is at the mercy of the practioners, hospitals, and pharma industry.

In the “lil shoppe of horrors” (DOD USARIID, NIH, FDA, and pharma industry) the normal medical ethics have been completely abandoned in the pursuit of fame, glory, and personal financial gain. They are in search of the “Golden Fleece” a cure for HIV/AIDS. The watchers are out to lunch, looking the other way or are compromised.

The DOD et al has been pursuing a strategy of trying to ram a square peg into a round hole for the last 15 years. They collectively have been trying to perfect a vaccine adjuvant “squalene” in recombinant vaccine technology. The anthrax scare and the need for an anthrax vaccine could be just a facade to cover the squalene trials. See this month’s issue of Scientific American re immunity and “volume control.”

If what Gary Matsumoto reports in his book “Vaccine-A” is true then the DOD et al have been running experimental clinical trials on US service personnel to establish dosage ranges (min/max)of squalene. This is without their knowledge and informed consent. Also this was done involuntarily and if they refused they can be court martialed and jailed. Go figure.

Now for the kicker, there is direct forensic evidence (smoking gun)to show squalene is the causal agent of Gulf War Syndrome. Problem is if too much squalene it causes an autoimmune response resulting in a whole cluster of autoimmune disorders as seen wih GWS. The body’s immune system attacks “self” destroying vestigal molecular chains of squalene in cells walls where it is normally sequestered or “hidden.” The complication rate from GWI is as high as 25% to 30%. There are some 200K to 300K who suffer from GWS.

Now here’s the Catch-22. The pharma industry in order to play with the DOD says the liability is too great unless the gov’t grants them immunity from civil suit. The gov’t on the other hand can order the troops to take the vaccine however is also immune from suit re the Feres Doctrine. In short our brave men and women in uniform are “screwed” by this process run amuck.

Once perfected this new technology can be brought to the civilian market where there is a lot of money to be made.

For the good of the many we are willing to sacrifice a few.

Problem is they are playing with fire they don’t fully understand. There is info to suggest this has already infiltrated civilian vaccines. There is word an experimental clinical trial was done using a childrens’ vaccine in the Norfolk, VA Area that resulted in deaths, also perhaps the same in Nevada, and there is a new trial about to begin in Japan.

These pursuits could compromise or cause the public to lose confidence in critical vaccines necessary to control the real scrouges of mankind e.g. smallpox.

Jan 25, 2005 - 11:36 pm 21. Ron Wrght:

For those still interested in the vaccine issue, a discussion thread is underway over at LGF.

Gary Matsumoto the author of Vaccine-A just replied to a post by Nuclear Tinkerbell re a cite she made to an old article in the now defunct”STAT” at GMU.

It is an interesting read for those who are skeptical of what Matsumoto is reporting.

LGF Link Here

Jan 26, 2005 - 5:30 pm

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