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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures …

… But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture. I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange". …

Original discussionThe teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)875 source comments · at import
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WA

> No he didn't. His employees did. Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.) > The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.) Story time! I know of a very successful salesman at BigCorp. He generated vast quantities of sales for them, and was paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to jo…

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WA

Thanks for the kind words. I'll provide a decent reply tomorrow. Right now I'm about to turn in, and learned a long time ago that I should not write or program when I'm tired :-/

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WA

Gates attended Lakeside school, a private school that had a computer. Gates and Allen took advantage of that to learn how to program. None of the other students did. Then they went to Harvard, which also had a computer available to students. I expect most universities at the time did. They took advantage of it to develop a Basic interpreter. Nobody else at Harvard did, nor did any other students in the country who had access. Basics were developed for other processors by other people. IBM came to Gates to get a DOS for their PC. Gates didn't have one, and sent them to Gary Kildall. Kildall failed to recognize the opportunity, and sent them back to Gates. Gates didn't have to be presented with opportunity twice. He still didn't have a DOS, but figured he could get one. He bought one from Tim Patterson for $50,000. Patterson also failed to notice the opportunity. And the rest, as they say,…

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