I'm confused at how Gates set back computing by taking the PC from a geeky hobby item to perhaps the go to standard appliance in the modern home. Could you explain this a little better?
That was Apple. Microsoft mostly copied things after they got proven elsewhere first.
How many hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost to security issues in Windows? The design is fundamentally flawed and entrenched in our society for the foreseeable future (ATMs running 20 year old versions of Windows, etc).
How many other promising computer futures could we have had without abusive monopoly power? Plan9? Be?
How many millions of programmer hours have been lost to supporting broken Microsoft practices? IE, anybody? It didn't just "happen," it was their entire business model: destroy competition by abusing a position of power, become the only solution provider going forward, then stop developing the solution for highest ROI (just duplicate those bits for government contract money, baby. no need to maintain anything since we're the only game in town).
That was Apple. Microsoft mostly copied things after they got proven elsewhere first.
...and made it mainstream enough that every home could afford one. No, Apple did not do that.
how many millions of hours...
...that would never existed anyway because no other company had the vision and desire to penetrate the mass market like MS did. Pretty sure a hell of a lot of money was made maintaining MS software. It was hardly 'lost'.
I'm not sure if Gates slapped your mom or something, but you seem to be blaming MS for not being the best thing possible when the whole idea of mass market computing was nothing more than theory. Were you using the Internet when IE 5 came out? Because if you were you surely remember it was miles and miles ahead of Netscape. It was the best thing in the market. I can't fault them for the millions of dollars of development they invested simply because it hurt Netscape's non existent business case.
Do you reap the same scorn on google and Apple for their actions? Because they are doing exactly the same things as MS did, even worse, Google is just pumping what are often best in class products out to the masses for free!
Don't get me wrong, MS did a lot of shady stuff that hurt competition and served no other interest but their own, but they aren't unique in this regard at all; they just happened to be in a better position than most companies are.
