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Perhaps your company got stomped on.
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Sure it did. But not by MSFT. And it was done the "American way" with a better product and better marketing. (By Caere Omnipage --And I still have a poster of their product on my wall. I'm not sore about it in any way as I had plenty of time to move over to other projects)
There was a time in MSFT history when they passed the voice that they were interested in buying other software companies with interesting products. Lots of people I know very well beat a path to Seattle to showcase their wares. There they were told that they were interested but they had to be sure that these products could be added easily to Windows, and they got the technical people to spill the beans of how things were constructed.
MSFT never bought a single company at that time but the next version of Windows (95 or 98, my memory is not what it used to be) incorporated many of these "gadgets" Many of my friends' companies were quickly out of business.
We never went to Seattle, (mainly because it was a long trip from Miami) and that is why OCR was never a part of Windows. <g>
I have thousands of similar stories. Maybe the worse is what they did to the Mosaic people. Basically MSFT negotiated the non-exclusive rights to Internet Explorer in exchange for a % of sales. Great deal for Mosaic? Not if MSFT gives it away for free. Mosaic gets $0 from the deal, and on top of that has to compete against its own product that MSFT is giving away for free. Blame it on a poor contract? Probably, but all negotiations in the end have to be made on good faith...
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we don't consider US immoral
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Countries are amoral.
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In my mind, Microsoft has contributed to the advancement of a very important technology in a very important manner.
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Well. I'm just trying to give you a different perspective in the *unlikely* case you have been brainwashed...
After answering the original message I took to thinking who (as opposed to Gates) I would consider to be a "moral, successful" businessman. My first impulse was Warren Buffett, but then I realized that all info I have about him is third-hand or worse, and I might be falling in the same position you are with respect to Gates.
That leaved me with Steve Jobs. (Not that the guy is a saint, mind you)
Somehow Gates has hijacked from Jobs the titles of trend-setter, and innovator. (What a joke!)
While in Apple, Jobs pushed for innovation with a better human interface in the Lisa, and later in the Mac. Created out of thin air the ill-fated Newton, later made useful by other company in the form of the Palm.
Next (his next company) was a failure. But then he moved to Pixar and changed the way people does animation. (Being widely imitated now)
He came back to AAPL, and now has the definitive portable music system (iPod)
While doing all this things he always pushed for quality. You might not like macs, but you cannot question their designs. Same with iPods, and same with the story lines of the cartoons Pixar released. Gates would have stopped with the graphic delivery. Jobs was aiming at the total package.
I'm not a Jobs biographer, and everything above was from the top of my head, so I apologize for any mistake or omission, but I think you get the general idea.
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When we settled in US, the natives were pretty much screwed
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Yep. But I still consider giving them booze as immoral. (Not to say anything about the smallpox infected blankets. --Those guys sure thought of themselves as smart!)
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It doesn't really matter whether they did it immorally. History will judge it well
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Sure. History is written by the winners.
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you on the other hand won't be remembered
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I stated that myself in the original post.
Being remembered by history have never been my goal. Collective memory can only hold about 10000 people. If you got to be remembered you have to compete for a place with a lot of weird people: Hitler, Stalin, Manson... the demonized: Saddam, Noriega, Kadafi... the bleached-tombed: Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gates, Joe Kennedy... the sainted: Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Mandela(!?)... the mediocre: Bush, Kerry, Eminem, Britney...
Have I offended enough people already? <g>
Regards,
H.
