I understand that perhaps he didn’t make the most PR-saavy comment, but it’s pretty horrible to begin taking pot-shots at the charity work he is doing. Unless you have that much wealth you can’t even comprehend the factors that play into managing that much wealth. For example, alex dante remarks that he’d be impressed if Gates’ donations cost him something that he “felt.” This is irrelevant for three reasons:

1) He needs to donate an particular amount of money, optimizing to continue making money so that in the future he can donate more. It’s not a simple X% of his total worth at any one moment. There is nothing keeping him from donating 50% of his worth, but if he did that, he’d had far less money to make more money to donate in the future. Again, you cannot apply a simplistic financial model to a complex financial system.

2) Bill Gates is not short on money, but he is very very very short on time. If you can possibly imagine how much of his time is spent merely maintaining his role at Microsoft, and then add his time maintaining and monitoring his charities (of course there are people to help him with all of this, but it still takes some time and cognitive load), you have to realize that the real cost to Bill Gates’ for charities is time and attention, which he has far less of than money.

3) Ultimately, I feel that it is petty and small-minded to judge someone’s philanthropic work by how much it makes them “feel.” The important part is how effective it is and how many people it is helping. None of us has any idea of what his life is like and what counts to him as a large or small sacrifice, and frankly, it’s no one’s business. Again, the way to judge his charity work is by whether it’s actually making the world a better place.

I think it’s laughable that a bunch of random people with little to no experience in large-scale charity work or large-scale financial management feel entitled to write their opinions on such a great charity effort.

In the future I would recommend MySpace, I think they are more accustomed to this caliber of blogging and comments.

To then go on to cite that it’s _software cost_ that renders technology expensive – something that, one would think, should be mitigated by the decision to go with open & free alternatives – just makes the whole outburst seem petty & self-serving.

Incidentally, does anyone know what Gates’ charitable donations are as a percentage of his overall value, or where I could find something like this out? I’d be more impressed by all of these claims of Gates being a great philanthropist if I believed it actually cost him _something_ that he felt.

You also have to separate Bill Gates the person and Microsoft the company. Microsoft has done much the garner criticism in the tech world, but Bill Gates the human being has done quite a lot through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to advance certain humanitarian causes. One could ask, in comparison, what has Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Google boys done with all their millions?

As a company, Microsoft’s stance on systems running non-Microsoft hardware has softened considerably from 10 years ago.

How well the $100 device works has yet to be seen or demonstrated; the entire mesh-network thing sounds all well and good in theory, but theory is easy and application is hard. I hope the project succeeds, but I can’t dismiss Gates’ criticism out of hand because some of his points may turn out to be valid.