Bill Gates returns to Harvard
Harvard University has announced that Bill Gates, the co-founder and chairman of Microsoft and not coincidentally the world’s richest man, will be the principal speaker at this year’s commencement ceremony on June 7. Microsoft makes over $44 billion in revenue a year (never mind those bothersome antitrust charges). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity he and his wife started, donates more than $3.6 billion to global health organizations and $2 billion to educational programs worldwide. While Gates will remain Microsoft chairman, he plans to step down in 2008 to devote himself full-time to his charity work.
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 (his junior year) to concentrate on developing Microsoft, the company he founded with Paul Allen. Still, the university considers Gates “a member of the Harvard College Class of 1977,” and this spring that class will celebrate its 30th reunion. Among Gates’ fellow Harvard alums is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whom Gates met as an undergraduate. Full message from Harvard’s Gazette available here. Well, it must be really easy to study at university when everyone knows your name…
Comments(13)
HarDvard ?
Good time to step down bill 2008 thats when windows xp support expires and the useless vista takes over.Of course bill you want to leave on a good note and leave your poor employees to face the music when people have no option but to upgrade to that inept operating system.
XP support has been extended to until 2014.
no option but to upgrade?
what’ll stop you from installing xp anyways?
people are still using windows 98 without problems
not even tech news, who cares.
haha @ #1
Bill Gates didn´t donate the money just for charity. It is also a clever tax-evasion-scam. He still controls the money and spends some now and then, but substantially less than he would pay tax. Also, the funds for school etc. are often used to buy software from Microsoft.
Donations are always a tax evasion trick. But the fact is that Bill Gates is among the biggest (if not THE biggest) contributor to charities in the world.
His foundation is certainly the biggest private charity foundation in the world. Of course other people donate money to his foundation as well.
I’m not a fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that Gates has done a lot of good with his money.
“I am sure you all use MS Windows…”
I don’t, so you can SUCK IT.
Both nebula and BillGatesis are correct. Generous donations to charities provides double benefits for the donater.
(1) Its a form of legal tax evasion. Save $$$,$$$,$$$.
(2) It makes them look good from the public’s perspective. (And people fall for this so easily).
In all essence, you shouldn’t care about that. What you should be caring about is how Bill got and continues to get his money.
He did it by putting out half arsed solutions that do “just enough and no more”, and cornering OEM’s to bundle HIS solutions into systems. (Those who try to do otherwise, will be punished with higher software license fees). This is one of the reasons why you will NEVER see another OS with a desktop system provided by well known companies like Lenovo, Acer, Dell, Compaq, HP, etc.
If you think Bill does good, think about the next time you need to install third-party anti-malware solutions, while other OSs don’t need such things. Think about the problems you encounter, and you can’t do crap about it.
And finally, think about, with every release of Windows, you need new hardware!
Even John Carmack (Id Software), knows that the point of Windows and other MS solutions like MS Office, DirectX, etc is to get people to keep spending money on software and hardware. If you’re a gamer, this is especially profitable for them! Because all they do is keep upping the DirectX version with newer features. New features mean new hardware, new hardware means the consumer keeps spending.
That’s how MS works. They find reasons (artificial limitations), to get you to spend money even when you don’t need to. This becomes very obvious with Vista and Office 2007. Think about this: What’s the fundamental difference for the desktop user if they stick to Win2k and MS Office 97?
There isn’t any.
Only gulliable clueless morons can’t see all this. But then again, people are smartening up to this. The poor consumer response to Vista is an indicator.
Oh its so very convenient to selectively say that some dropouts are still their students of class whatever, while those who are not billionaires are simply illiterate losers…
Of course some of the money go to charity, but considering that al lot more would be used for government-purposes (healthcare f.x) had he payed it in tax it´s not really so admirable after all. Gates is uncle scrooge on steroids. Kudos for the enlightening input feww3!
Why is it that every time somebody successfully builds a company out of nothing they get all this negative publicity?
Same can be said for Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett and the list goes on and on.
These guys all have a nack for making oodles of money, something which I always thought is what it’s all about in the great US of A, the richest fu%$ing country in the world.
ALL, and I mean ALL successful business men got to the top of the heap not because they were nice guys, but because they beat the competition at their game and provided a product/service a large group of consumers preferred over another.
Bill and his guys just did a much better bringing their OS to the masses. Steve and his group certainly had and still have their chance to bring their OS to the masses, but they rather have tight control over what goes in every Apple product. MS really took off when PC architecture became an open standard and IBM competitors joined the fray offering cheaper and cheaper PC systems, which only benefited MS. That’s how they became what they are today.
ANY large company is going to do anything they can to protect their market share, including shady tactics.
So unless any of you have billions of dollars amassed using clear cut and 100% honest methods, get of your high horses and stop bitching, you fu%&ing jealous loosers!
Windows sucks and has always been the worst OS to come out. All Gates did was steal The Apple Lisa from Steve Jobs, rewrite the OS, and call it his own. He is a scam artist.