Pirates of Silicon Valley

I think I must be one of the few who remember when Bill Gates was seen as a hero, a young entrepreneur capable of bringing a giant like IBM to its knees.

Yes, back in the early 80s Bill Gates wasn’t the monster he is now. And in those days IBM were the bad guys.
Businessmen in collars, ties, fine suits and cufflinks. Bill Gates was a young nerd with bad breath who wore the same clothes every day, obsessed with taking his company to the top.

In those days he didn’t worry about image. His thing was building a business: a businessman, but also someone who understood the paradigm shift that was coming in computing. Back then personal computers were toys, hobbies. Nobody pictured them becoming so commonplace in our jobs.

Not even Steve Jobs noticed that shift, and Gates, barely sensing it, made his move in the right direction for his ambitions.

Because what matters is the Software, not the Hardware.

Apple has always been a Hardware company, whereas Microsoft planted itself as a Software company from the start.

That’s why Apple did badly, and Jobs had to come back, with help from Bill Gates.
Gates never gave up ownership of the software. That’s how he got rich; he created the software industry.

In those days software was given away. IBM, DEC and others included tapes with the software, which could be copied. It was when they realized that without the software these machines are good for nothing that they decided to close it.

It’s in that same era, when Bill Gates was selling Jobs a bill of goods, when Jobs was ripping off Xerox, that Richard Stallman rebelled against this new idea. Of course, nobody listened to him. The idea was to sell software. There was a lot of money in it, and there still is.

Time has passed. Bill Gates announces he will step down in 2008 to devote himself to charity. Steve Jobs keeps selling hardware, and is still the same exploiter as ever, except that now it isn’t fanatical nerds but poor Chinese workers.

IBM is still there, now backing free software, so that people buy its servers, and so that no other Bill Gates ever again comes along to show the world that software has value.

I don’t like Bill Gates, but I find he has more integrity than Jobs, and he knows the value of software.

One take on Bill Gates and Jobs is the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I recommend you watch it. Of course there’s a lot of caricature, but there’s a lot of reality behind it.

Anyway, I still admire the ones who are the real deal.

Instead of Bill Gates, Paul Allen.
Instead of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak.
Instead of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds.