Comment by slimshady94
9 years ago
Would Bill Gates have worked so hard (presumably) if he didn't have that specific understanding of ownership and casuality? Isn't that type of motivation and incentive necessary, to grind through the obstacles?
9 years ago
Would Bill Gates have worked so hard (presumably) if he didn't have that specific understanding of ownership and casuality? Isn't that type of motivation and incentive necessary, to grind through the obstacles?
I expect this is intended to be a rhetorical question, but there's a lot of hidden premises here.
First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", since I'm not sure there's an obvious thing that he could have done more of, even if he were so inclined.
Second, it assumes there exists some direct relationship between Bill Gates's personal work ethic and Microsoft's outsized success. Maybe all Microsoft needed was a good idea at the right time and would have succeeded about equally well with any minimally competent execution. Maybe they would have done even better had Bill Gates founded the company and then retired at 30.
Finally, it assumes that Bill Gates work ethic had some direct relationship with his financial compensation level. It is quite possible that he would have been more than happy to still give his best possible effort in return for being, say, a mere hundred millionaire. Moreover, plenty of people do hard work for all sorts of other reasons, from duty to boredom to artistic vision. Why do we assume that Bill Gates's internal motivation is predominantly financial in the first place?
None of those premises appear obviously and indisputably true to me. Maybe they are, but it'd be nice to see the case actually made (and made about real humans in the real world, not about perfectly rational actors in an idealized market).
People like Gates don't get rich because they work hard (though most of them do). They get rich because they're willing to risk what they have build something more.
Gates could have sold out to IBM or Apple or whoever and retired as a multimillionaire without taking the chance Microsoft would end up like Wang or Altair or hundreds of other companies.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, worked hard, and yet he still gave his hard work to the public.
Did he? I thought he was working for CERN at the time, meaning the public (or the European public, anyway) already owned the protocol he produced.
According to this [1], it was never an official CERN project, but rather a side project of his.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
[1]https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
You always make lesser profits on the tools, than the profits you make by building products using the tools.
The guy who sells tables and chairs is likely to make more money than the guy who sells nails and hammers.
A lot of people work very hard without even the remotest possibility of getting rich. Scientists or aid workers would be an example. Money is not the only motivator for people.
I would argue that it was his understanding of ownership and causality that landed him an OS sans building one.