Startup One Stop

There’s no doubt that Bill Gates is considered something of a hero. With his wealth, power and influence, he has never shrunk from addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. And he certainly has the wealth, power, influence – and hubris – to do just that.

The Microsoft Days

Back in the olden days of tech, there was a company called Microsoft, which is still around, but in the olden days, the CEO was the company’s founder – a Harvard drop out named Bill Gates, who stole his operating system from Xerox Parc (as did Steve Jobs). Back in the Bill Gates days of MSFT (before he turned the CEO spot over to Steve Ballmer no doubt due in no small part to the government’s antitrust case against the company), MSFT was known for basically three overarching things: products that didn’t work/were buggy/caused the air-sucking blue screen of death, as they were often released before their time; their predatory habits (in those days MSFT was referred to as the Evil Empire); and their desire to crush all competitors. Their charge was basically to win at all costs and if you believe that Gates has changed, here’s a must read: Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Giving Is a Racket.

Here are some of the verticals on which Gates is focused:

Education: Notes The Federalist (Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure), “Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better.” Despite the fact that, according to The New York Times (The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students), “It was a rush job, and the final product ignored the needs of children with disabilities, English-language learners and those in the early grades… There is nothing to show for it… Last year, (2015) average math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined for the first time since 1990; reading scores were flat or decreased compared with a decade earlier.” Read More...