The Decision - Why I think Bill Gates is the Bigger Man
I want to write to you about a decision I think is courageous. Note that I am biased. Even without Bill Gates’ NGO & vaccine stuff, I think Windows has done more to help society than Apple, way more. If it wasn’t for Microsoft, we wouldn’t have the world of PCs today. We wouldn’t have affordable PCs and we wouldn’t have the proliferation of the IT world as we have today. It’s like if there wasn’t Ford, the proliferation of cars would not have happened. Bill Gates is not sexy. He isn’t at all. I would even go out and say that without Bill Gates, there would be no Apple. People forget that in the late 90s, it was Microsoft that invested into Apple to keep them alive and going. Bill Gates didn’t need to do that. He could have let Apple die. I bet no one in the world would have done that at that time. Apple was months away from going into bankruptcy. But why did he do that? To make the world a better place. Bill knew Steve was great. Bill invested into Steve as a person. Bill Gates invested in a competitor that he knew potentially would come back to haunt him. He invested in a rival that taunted him in the 80s. Not only did he invest in Apple, they continued to do products for Apple. That’s why to me Bill Gates is the bigger man. He allowed and invested in Steve Jobs to succeed. Money is the life blood of any company and he gave an infusion to Apple when they needed it most. If Steve Jobs was given that choice, what would he have done? He would have done what benefited him the most. Bill Gates saw the end game. I respect Jobs a lot but I find him in many ways to be a petty asshole. I find it amazing that people drink up all the PR fed to us by the media. Bill Gates unimaginative? He created the software industry. He imagined what Jobs could do and still proceeded to invest in him. That’s courage and doing what’s right. That to me is a decision that went beyond himself and his company. He did it to make the world a better place.
