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Open your wallet, Bill, and atone for those clueless remarks against the $100 MIT laptop project
March 17, 2006 | 5:23 am
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By David Rothman
Can’t Bill Gates ever get this Social Responsiblity thing right?
So far, among leading Net-related companies, Microsoft scores a shameful four percent in replies to this question in a TeleRead Poll: “Which company is most socially responsible–or at least less obnoxious than the others?” By contrast, depite a problematic policy toward the public domain, the rival Google Boys have won 56 percent of the 48 replies. A huge sample? Of course not, and I’d encourage people to keep on voting. Just the same, it’s clear that despite all the BILLions lavished on philanthropy, especially some laudable medical projects, billg’s PR is lacking.
Bill Gates’ snarky comments against the $100 MIT laptop, shown via a recent unveiling of a prototype in November, did not help either his image or Microsoft’s. I don’t think I could say it better than Alexander Wolfe did in his Hardware Blog:
Billionaires who live in humongous mansions shouldn’t thrown stones across the digital divide.
That’s what Bill Gates did on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., when he pooh-poohed MIT’s $100 laptop project. The effort, begun by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT’s Media Lab, seeks to put a cheap, hand-cranked computer into the hands of children in developing countries.
But Gates, perhaps shooting from the hip, said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum: “The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk and with a tiny little screen.”
As a number of stories on Gates’s comments noted, before his remarks Gates showed off Microsoft’s new Origami handheld, which is expected to sell for between $500 and $999.
The thing is, I see a place for both the Origami and the MIT machine. The Origami is considerably more upscale, expected to cost $500-$600 in the next six months, whereas the $100 laptops will come in at a fraction of the cost, even if in reality they end up being $125 or $150 machines. By the time the Gates-blessed machine costs $150, the MIT-envisoned alternatives may go for $50. This could make a major difference in how many people get hooked into the Internet and the world of e-books.
Yes, like Gates, I know that support costs and connectivity also enter into the equation, but if MIT does things right, the results could be most gratifying in those areas. Already the MIT people have worked miracles with displays.
Simply put, if I were Bill Gates, I would not diss the MIT project. In fact, I would send a stray $100 million or so in its direction–without the slightest restrictions, so it was clear that the money was not a disguised Microsoft marketing effort. A longshot? Yes. But if Bill wants to be an electronic Carnegie for real, maybe he needs to think outside the box and even be supportive of nonMicrosoft boxes.
Related: Gates loves the poor (but Windows more?), in Ars Technia.
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Comments:
David, you are a good writer. Use that talent to promote the good people are doing instead of the negative on everything. If you can do so much better, instead of writing this blog, you should get a real job, You are full of blith and blather, but does anything productive, or any real worth come of all your complaining, blithering and blathering and harsh criticism of others?
So billionaires get to be negative toward Third World laptop projects, but I can’t be negative about billg’s need for corporate responsiblity? Besides, I’ve put forth a constructive suggestion–that he atone for his laptop remarks with a rather affordable donation of a stray $100 million, a speck of his holdings. While billg has done much good in health-related areas, he is far, far short of the electronic Carnegie he was supposed to be. As shown by my rather open enthusiasm toward Microsoft’s Origami, I am not on a jihad against Microsoft or Bill. I’m just calling ‘em as I see ‘em. Besides, if billg is so virtuous, why does Microsoft score at just four percent in TeleRead’s corporate responsibilty poll compared to Google’s getting the majority of the votes?
Microsoft is going to score poorly because of a bad pr image that has grown disproportionate to their crimes. The poll is also very unscientific, given that the answers are all self-selecting.
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.
Thanks for your different perspective, Richard. Yes, it’ll be interesting to see which hardware does the job in real life. As for Gates the philanthropist, I still would like to see a little more separation between the company and the charities. MHO. Thanks. David
The most irritating thing about these recent remarks from Gates on the OLPC is that he _didn’t_ make them when he was eager to offload WinCE onto the project. If the concept was so clearly destined to failure, why try to have the Windows brand attached to it?
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.
[...] It’s the sort of thing that you’d figure a philanthropic guy like Bill Gates would be on top of, but alas, he seems not to understand. Gizmodo, ArsTechnica, TeleRead, and others are all reporting the world’s richest man went critical over the MIT project. [...]
I’m really not sure how what Bill Gates said about the MIT project has anything to do with his personal philanthropy. I believe that they used to call this style of journalism “yellow.” I cannot believe that this blogger is trying to judge Bill Gates’ charity by popular opinion, instead of researching the facts about his philanthropic work. If you are going to write something judgemental about a public figure, you should at least have a full range facts to balance and justify your statements other than “48 people like Google better.”
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.