After hard work and soft luck, it takes talent to make money. It takes a certain kind of talent to get rid of it too. Rarely do you find someone who can do both well. The man who has little money knows how to spend it. He buys trifles and gets some pleasure out of it. A man like Warren Buffett, on the other hand, has spent so much time making money, he lacks the time and training to part with it. Often, a man that wealthy pays vast sums to lawyers in order to try to protect his fortune for as long as possible. And then, he starts a foundation.
Recently, Bill Gates announced his retirement from Microsoft; he will devote himself full-time to doing good, he said. Then his friend, Warren Buffett, coincidentally the second richest man in the world, said he was giving $31 billion to the project. And what could anyone say? The papers were universal in their praise of the two men. After all, it was their own money. They offered to ease the suffering of the poor, to cure diseases, to bring technology to bear on the problems of poverty and disease. Here were rich men headed for heaven, said the press reports.
Then, on Wednesday, came a full page ad in the Financial Times, with photos. There was Bill Clinton, looking little different than he did in his high school yearbook. And there were Laura Bush, Jacques Chirac, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair and, of course, Buffett and Gates. All of them had pledged to “identify immediate, practical solutions to the world’s most challenging issues”. But if these people could come up with such solutions, why have they been holding out on us? Couldn’t they spare a day or two for such important work last year?
Whenever we hear about so many of the world’s great and good gathering in one place – in this case the Clinton Global Initiative, a confab organised by the William J. Clinton Foundation – we shudder. What if a giant meteor should strike that very spot? Would all those practical solutions disappear like the mammoths? Or would we merely be spared another high-minded wind-fest?
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Elsewhere in the FT, we discover that “Gates and Clinton link on African health”. And here we pause to draw breath. The two are travelling around the Dark Continent, figuring out how to spend Buffett’s money, brightening it up with health and development programmes. They might as well be Thomas of Aquinas and Mahatma Gandhi installing Christmas lights; smart men, perhaps, but neither has any idea what he is doing.
And what will come of it? If only Buffett had not made so much! A lesser fortune could have been squandered in the usual ways: women, houses, boats, art. Yes, art. Buffett might have acquired the most expensive collection of contemporary art in the world. Then, he could have opened it to the public, who would admire him, thank him – or take him for a fool.
At least the people in whose pockets the money ended up could decide for themselves what to do with it. It is wealth, honestly earned by sweat and saving, that lifts people out of poverty. Acts of grand benevolence, on the other hand, usually make things worse.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Bill Gates: Xbox 360
Microsoft head Bill Gates, who recently made what could be his last CES keynote as he prepares to semi-retire from the company, sat down with the BBC to answer a variety of questions from BBC News readers.
In the video interview, BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones, referring to the widespread hardware failures and infamous "red ring of death" issues, tells Gates that he's received "a lot of questions from people who aren't happy with the service they've been getting from Xbox." Gates is asked what he's going to do to ensure that Xbox 360 is more reliable.
In July of last year, Microsoft finally addressed the problem and issued a new three-year warranty after an "unacceptable number" of repairs. The move cost the company over a billion dollars.
Gates feels the move has adequately addressed the situation and that customer satisfaction is much higher now. In fact, he believes Microsoft is now making the Xbox 360 the "most reliable" video game system today.
"We certainly had to apologize to our users about a number of boxes that had to be replaced. We did that for free for all those people. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the way we've handled it. We've got incredible reliability on the new work that we've done," Gates said.
He continued, "Our commitment is that it'll be the most reliable video game box out there. People really love the Xbox because of the content, but we have to make sure the hardware never stands in the way of that."
In the video interview, BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones, referring to the widespread hardware failures and infamous "red ring of death" issues, tells Gates that he's received "a lot of questions from people who aren't happy with the service they've been getting from Xbox." Gates is asked what he's going to do to ensure that Xbox 360 is more reliable.
In July of last year, Microsoft finally addressed the problem and issued a new three-year warranty after an "unacceptable number" of repairs. The move cost the company over a billion dollars.
Gates feels the move has adequately addressed the situation and that customer satisfaction is much higher now. In fact, he believes Microsoft is now making the Xbox 360 the "most reliable" video game system today.
"We certainly had to apologize to our users about a number of boxes that had to be replaced. We did that for free for all those people. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the way we've handled it. We've got incredible reliability on the new work that we've done," Gates said.
He continued, "Our commitment is that it'll be the most reliable video game box out there. People really love the Xbox because of the content, but we have to make sure the hardware never stands in the way of that."
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) (SEHK: 4338) is an American multinational computer technology corporation. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices.[9][8] Microsoft's best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. These products have prominent positions in their respective markets, with market share estimates as high as 90% or more for Microsoft Windows as of 2006 and for Microsoft Office as of 2003.[citation needed] One of Bill Gates' key visions for the company is "to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home".[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
Founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s. The company released an initial public offering (IPO) in the stock market, which, due to the ensuing rise of the stock price, has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.[18][19][20] Throughout its history the company has been the target of criticism for various reasons, including monopoly status and anti-competitive business practices including refusal to deal and tying. The U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission, among others, have ruled against Microsoft for various antitrust violations.[21][22]
Microsoft has footholds in other markets besides operating systems and office suites, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse and home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and MSN TV.[9] Known for what is generally described as a developer-centric business culture, Microsoft has historically given customer support over Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web, and awards Microsoft MVP status to volunteers who are deemed helpful in assisting the company's customers.[23][20] The company's official website is one of the most visited on the Internet, receiving more than 2.4 million unique page views per day according to Alexa.com, which ranked the site 18th amongst all websites for traffic rank on September 12, 2007.[24]
Founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s. The company released an initial public offering (IPO) in the stock market, which, due to the ensuing rise of the stock price, has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.[18][19][20] Throughout its history the company has been the target of criticism for various reasons, including monopoly status and anti-competitive business practices including refusal to deal and tying. The U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission, among others, have ruled against Microsoft for various antitrust violations.[21][22]
Microsoft has footholds in other markets besides operating systems and office suites, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse and home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and MSN TV.[9] Known for what is generally described as a developer-centric business culture, Microsoft has historically given customer support over Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web, and awards Microsoft MVP status to volunteers who are deemed helpful in assisting the company's customers.[23][20] The company's official website is one of the most visited on the Internet, receiving more than 2.4 million unique page views per day according to Alexa.com, which ranked the site 18th amongst all websites for traffic rank on September 12, 2007.[24]
Microsoft
Gates, who is chairman of Microsoft, is the wealthiest person in the world. He founded (1994) the William H. Gates Foundation (focusing on health issues in developing countries) and the Gates Learning Foundation (1997), renamed the Gates Library Foundation (providing education assistance). In 1999 he merged the foundations into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that was worth more than $32 billion by 2003, making it the world's wealthiest foundation. It emphasizes grants for projects relating to global health care, education and libraries, and the Pacific Northwest.
William Henry Gates
1955–, American business executive, b. Seattle, Wash. At the age of 19, Gates founded (1974) the Microsoft Corp., a computer software firm, with Paul Allen. They began by purchasing the rights to convert an existing software package. In 1980 they agreed to produce the operating system for the personal computer being developed by International Business Machines (IBM). That system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), and subsequent programs (including the Windows operating systems) made Microsoft the world's largest producer of software for microcomputers.
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