Quote Originally Posted by Van View Post
Gates seems to have matured out of that and has been very generous with medical research and supporting education.
(momentary rant...)

Let's not kid ourselves. One of the reasons Gates has been so "supportive" of education was that it was one of the last markets where Apple was beating MS on market share. Gates' plunge in education was crafted by MS as a philanthropic gesture in the wake of the Netscape trial, but the ulterior motive was to push out a competitor in a space not yet dominated by MS.

MS's hegemony over government computers is pretty remarkable, given that the DOD walked away from Apple in '85 b/c they were a single-source vendor, and the DoD wanted to be able to buy (hardware) from multiple sources, not realizing they were hitching themselves to MS's (software) wagon for the next 25+ years.

The fact that Apple's devices are a closed ecosystem and yet still insanely popular is a testament to the fact that most consumers are willing to give up that customization for not having to spend 30 hrs/wk tinkering under the hood. Just like more people by Fords than Jaguars

(rant off... now back to our regularly-scheduled comic-book-movie adoration)