Knight Commander Bill Gates

[Edric O]

Or maybe, just maybe, I really don't know how much Bill Gates donates to charity in comparison with other uber-billionaires of his type.

But I do know that it generally tends to be a tiny fraction of their vast wealth. Middle income earners typically donate a larger percentage of their wealth to charity than the super-rich do.

And finally, please notice that I never lashed out at Bill Gates for being "evil" or anything of that sort. I only pointed out he's not as good and innocent as some people make him out to be.

[SurlyPIG]

That's what makes it different.  I know he's donated at least 12 billion - hell, he donated five 5 billion at once - and of his total worth that's a lot more than most.  And the thing about him is that he plans to donate the rest of it over the course of his life.  I'm not sure how much he's worth right now.  35 billion was what I last heard so he sliced off a big piece of bread and he's slicing the rest.

[Caid Ivik]

Well, what gave Gates to the world? His main inventions are DOS and Windows. DOS was fully bought from one programmer in Seattle and then sold to IBM. Windows was spawned from one Xerox' program in Apple, in fact copied by Microsoft. Well, Gates was an agile trader, that's for sure. Catching right opportunity, that's hard too.

[nemafakei]

Hm. As a non-hereditary title, the Knighthoos does not make you a noble. And being able to write letters after your name is the perogative of anyone with a degree, for example. I think the US constitution intends that anyone can adress anyone else "Mr, Mrs, Miss", or appropriate - though I'm not sure how it sands on "Dr" - here, someone with a doctorate can demand to be addressed "Dr".

[Edric O]

Ace, where did you get your information from? If it were true, it would radically change my opinion on Bill Gates.

However, Caid also makes a few good points about Microsoft "innovation"...

[Caid Ivik]

Well, it is true Gates is charitatively very active. Not everything what he did in his life is to be adored, but he is a human as anyone else and he should know the sense of life in his age. Altough I don't dare to judge his intentions.

[Mahdi]

Edric:  Search the forum, you will find a thread revealing the top ten charity donaters in the world, and how much it is of their fortune.  It stated that last year Gates donated approximatly half of his entire fortune to various charities.

[ordos45]

Hm. As a non-hereditary title, the Knighthoos does not make you a noble. And being able to write letters after your name is the perogative of anyone with a degree, for example. I think the US constitution intends that anyone can adress anyone else "Mr, Mrs, Miss", or appropriate - though I'm not sure how it sands on "Dr" - here, someone with a doctorate can demand to be addressed "Dr".

Good point.  I'm not sure how it would stand then.

[Acriku]

Edric, I don't find Bill Gates innocent or an angel, but he's a great businessman and a great leader. He may have had some luck, but no one can ride on luck alone. In a capitalist view, he's the master at making profit.

[GUNWOUNDS]

Giving Mick Jagger a knighthood was stretching things a bit in my mind, but giving Gates one is ludicrous... sure he donates a little to libraries ( to hook more of the masses on his OS and SW of course.... alterior motives always!!! ) and this and that, but it is nothing compared to the $10 billion M$ raked in last financial quarter, breaking their own records...

Bill is a university dropout who seized an opportunity with his vision and business savvy - he discovered his college buddy was close to finishing an operating system that would run on small personal computers, remember there was no "real" competition in this area back then - IBM scoffed at the idea of personal computers originally, content that their "big iron" expensive mainframes would continue to dominate business computing forevermore.... Bill had the brass balls to march into a meeting with IBM, and sell them his "Disk Operating System - DOS" , sight unseen as it was not even finished yet, and also had the genius to demand that IBM pay his company M$ royalties on every single copy of his DOS sold with IBM PC's in the future. That single meeting and the royalties paved the way for him. His buddy finished and delivered the OS a short time thereafter, lucky for Bill!!!

M$ proceeded to grow by buying out other competing tech firms and killing them off, raping their technology and then dissolving the company or integrating it into their own.... everything in life has a price as Bill found out... so he used this fact to build his empire.

I admire the way he seized the opportunity way back then, and his business savvy and genius is unquestionable, however, the man is no saint, in fact quite the opposite. He killed off IBM OS/2, which was technically superior to Win95 when both were launched, and the number of companies he has bought out and disintegrated is nearly uncountable now. He killed off Netscape very effectively as we all know, and the list goes on... indeed he is so greedy he cannot allow Linux to have even a litle piece of the market , and counters them in every way possible. M$ does not subscrible to "Open Source" , in fact a recent source listed that the most profitable income for M$ is of course its operating systems at over 400% markup in price, now with $10 BILLION made last quarter, is it really necessary for them to still charge the outrageous prices for Windows XP they demand?? Yes it is good sw ( very unsecure, but still the best product they have ever launched to date... ), but why must they choke every last cent they can out of everyone for it, pure business greed at this point. I don't expect them to give it away of course, but the price could be lowered even 30% without really hurting the company that is ludicrously rich anyways... and don't give me crap that the money is put into Longhorn research.... it is greed and a monopoly , pure and simple.

So the qualities Bill Gates possesses include strong business sense, marketing smarts ( he hires people to do it very well for him ) , delegation skills, hiring only competent people to get the job done for him, a strong hatred of any and all competition revealed by his own personal internal company emails that were seized by the US Govt during the Netscape fiasco, the ONLY donations or "Breaks" he gives to schools or libraries etc. are to further his own interests and recruit more M$ slaves and turn them away from any competition in any area ... . He is now more a dictator than a "Capitalist" , he embodies all the wrong things about capitalism = crush the competition ( if your product is "Good Enough" then there is no need to worry about the competition as people will buy the best product every time, as long as it falls within their budget, no need to annihilate the competition out of fear .... ). He did save Apple, but only to rub it in Steve Jobs face ( Bill orginally approached Jobs with his idea of a "DOS" OS which Jobs snubbed him over, so Billy went to IBM with the idea and the rest is history... ) - this is the ultimate revenge for Bill, to own Apple , the company that snubbed him ( how dare they????), and of course being a majority shareholder M$ rakes in Apple profits too, so they are not losing a cent there either unless Apple finally does bankrupt someday...

So Bill deserves a knighthood eh??? I thought a knighthood was reserved for those who showed HONOUR, HONESTY, LOYALTY, STRENGTH OF CHARACTER, CONCERN FOR OTHERS , SELFLESSNESS, etc...

With this, England has completely thrown away the "worth" of a "knighthood" , they might as well hand them out to bums on the street now, every man for himself, no more honour left in the title...

[EWS]

Just thought I would correct you Gunwound, but in actual fact Bill Gates actually bought DOS from a small two-bit company for $50,000 (if my memory serves me well) and then made lots and lots from it.  He also stole WINDOWS from Steve Jobs, when Bill actually got ahold of the Apple Mac, and because it wasn't copyrighted yet, he modified it and released it as windows.

He is a brilliant man, and a damn good salesman.  He thoroughly deserves this "knighthood" for services to the world.  He is more deserving then what some people get awards for.  Without him, I do not believe that the internet, games and lots of other computer related items would be the same and we would probably be about 10 years further behind then what we actually are.

[GUNWOUNDS]

from the microsoft website biography section

http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/bio.asp

Philanthropy is also important to Gates. He and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $24 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we move into the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.2 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.

[mordusxxx]

so your trying to say that a man with billions of dollars deserves knight hood because he just knows things about computers, woopdy doo. i know alot of programers and etc. who most likely deserve it more than him shit even i should get the title, he has so much money i heard he could give eveyone in the united states one hundred dollars or or listen to this spend eight thousand dollars for every minute of his life and still have over six billion. now cmon if i had all that money i would give it to things that would show remembrance of me, not oh yeah i know bill gates he made dos or whatever wow, what a good man u did alot for us people who ar to lazy to look up a book, or do things the hard way, all he did was give more power to machines and take away another right we have as humans to function, personally i think bill gates should be kidnapped and forced to split up his wealth and buisness so that more people can work and more people can do what they deserve to do, he just is a tyrant of some sort that can just use his money over people and get what he wants isnt that what some of the scandals around are doing. being greedy and getting caught only reason he is still running a monopoly is because he has so much money just because they split up his buisness doesnt mean he doesnt really still control them think about it

[EWS]

If that rant was aimed at me, then you have got it wrong.  Not once did I say that he should be given the KCE for being good at computers.  What I did say was that he has provided the world with a damn good service.

He has made the world a better place, and because of what he has created we can now get things much cheaper because of computers.  He thoroughly deserves it.

[SurlyPIG]

He may be a business vermin, but he's the most generous business vermin of the 1000 richest guys in the world.  Most people like him are so detached and so arrogant that they sit on their money like it's a hunting trophy or something.  Like I said he gives his away, in the current amount of 24 billion.  So you can't say he's all bad...

[Sardauker-Kirov]

Maybe he is buying the 'compassion' of people?

Just because I hand a dollar to a hospital that doesn't make me a saint.

[Acriku]

You'd be considered a generous person, at the most. But there's quite a difference between your dollar and Bill Gates' billions of dollars. Dollars that buy aid supplies, food, and shelter. You can say he is just buying compassion, but he is using what he has the most and puts it to good use.

[mordusxxx]

all i was really getting at was that his money and wealth bought him the knight hood, sean connery got his knight hood for acting now do u see the diffrence, i think that he could do alot more, i am just sick of people thinking he is a saint, yes i am grateful that bill gates does what he does, but do u see me giving martha stewart a title for making wiccer baskets?

[Atomic Mitten]

Well I'm sorry Mordus,but I don't agree with you on this one.

The KBE is awarded to people for great achievement,if it wasn't for Bill Gates,we probably wouldn't even be able to use this forum,

he made it possible for everyone to play music on their PC'S and much more.

If Microsoft didn't exist,what would programmers write programs for ?

Just because he's made alot of money doing it,what about Henry Ford or Rockefellar,or Howard hues.

How much money have they given back to help anyone ?

Did you know that Microsoft make software available for universities at no cost ?

I think someone like Bill Gates deserves such an award far more than an actor or a singer.

How about us starting a poll on who deserves such an award ?

It would be quite a small list,I know I can't think of many.

[Dante]

On the other hand; if he hadn't, chances are very high than someone else would have done. If not windows then a similar opperating system that might have been better, worse, or exactly the same.

[GUNWOUNDS]

i heard he could give eveyone in the united states one hundred dollars

thats nothing.............

[mordusxxx]

well, put it this way amtomic all the people u named there  are all old people and the charity back then wasnt really things people could do with there money there were problably like hundred millionares back then and they didnt think they needed to give money to people. also dust scout it right i think someone else would of founded a program similiar or the same as windows, i am just saying and listen closley, why give someone such a title because they are wealthy and made a computer program. people nowadays are so concerned with what others do with there riches that they dont see the simple fact of life, who the hell cares that he gives software out for free or who cares if he gives a couple milions here and there it dont even hurt his pocket book one bit, now if he gave countless dollars to charitys all over and was committed to seeing that there foundation was moving along and solving the problem that they are looking for maybe then he would deserve something like that but as far as i am concerned is that he made an invetions so to speak and he is praised far beyond many others were or are present day, he gets way to much credit for what he does, he most likely hasnt done one thing since he sold his software at the beginning maybe come in the office and check out what is going on but other people are making his billions, mabye i should get the title because i buy his software i give him the money that he gets. so i dont think a man that creates a computer program should be so well known.

[Acriku]

now if he gave countless dollars to charitys all over and was committed to seeing that there foundation was moving along and solving the problem that they are looking for maybe then he would deserve something like that

Isn't that what he is doing already? Last time I checked, billions of dollars = countless dollars.

[Dante]

Not quite. Numbers do not equal infinity.

also dust scout it right i think someone else would of founded a program similiar or the same as windows, i am just saying and listen closley, why give someone such a title because they are wealthy and made a computer program.

[Acriku]

Not quite. Numbers do not equal infinity.

Wow Dust Scout, thanks for the math instruction for today. I really learned a lot - unfortunately it had nothing to do with what I was saying. Countless dollars = an amount of dollars too large to fathom, and a couple billion is such an amount. I'm not taking countless to mean infinite ::)