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The Art of the Deal

When: September 20th, 2005
Location: Shepherds Bar, Shepherds Building/Charecroft Way, London, W14 0DA
Price: £50.00 Reduced to £40.00 if you are eligible for a discount.

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The Gift of Giving

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In this article, 'Bob the Deconstructionist' examines the history and motivation for giving in the digital economy.

The Gift of Giving

robert_elf AT hotmail.com

It’s uncharitable to question people’s motives for giving to charity, especially when the recipients are some of the poorest people in the world. But when the (formerly) richest man in the universe stumps up $21 billion for a vaccination programme to eradicate TB in the developing world, you can be forgiven for asking: why exactly is he doing it? And from then it follows: How did he get to be that rich anyway?

Let’s deal with the 'Why?' first. Bill Gates (for it is he) has endowed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the above-mentioned sum making it the largest charity in the world. "I used to have the notion that I would wait until my 50s and 60s to put substantial resources into the foundation. I wondered if there was really something where I could make an impact. Then I saw a cause I believed in. Seeing how urgent the needs are changed my line." Who could argue with that?

If we wanted to be really churlish we could see the gift as part of a damage-limitation exercise to save an image battered by the anti-trust trials against Microsoft. And even if it is, Gates is in good company – along with the Carnegies and Rockefellers who were similarly harried by the Federal government, but whose reputations as 'robber barons' have been softened by philanthropy and time into something far more respectable.

Indeed, the great American monopolists of the past form a convenient precedent when we come to the second question – 'How did he get to be that rich?' Of course, that’s the whole point of the legal actions against Microsoft. Did the company deliberately use its dominance in the market to disadvantage the competition? A landmark ruling in June 2000 found Microsoft guilty of violating anti-trust law (with Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson famously comparing the company to a drugs gang, and describing Gates himself as 'Napoleonic'). Although Microsoft avoided being broken up (as Judge Jackson recommended), a US court of appeal in June of this year upheld the ruling that MS illegally maintained its monopoly. At the time of writing, MS faces further legal challenges, most notably those connected with its new XP operating system.

The company and its celebrated co-founder have fought back, arguing that Microsoft’s enemies are simply attacking it for being successful, and meeting the needs of its customers better than its rivals can. This is an argument that, at first sight, might seem reasonable. Nobody forces you to buy Windows – there are other systems and products available (most notably the Mac). This line of defence might hold if the PC , the OS and the browser were just your ordinary, everyday kind of product – a TV or a car for example. Where the argument breaks down is in Microsoft’s iconic status – Microsoft is the PC; the idiom of computing is Windows – from the layout of the screen to the very fonts and menus faithfully imported into all Windows-compatible software; and the way most people access the internet from their computer – the browser – is literally their Window on the world.

Along with other symbols of the global consumer culture – the Big Mac, Coke and VHS – Microsoft have achieved their dominance by reading the market better than their competitors, and responding with solutions that meet the twin criteria of price and ease of use. Not quality alone. Just as people tended to prefer Pepsi in its famous blindfold 'Challenge' and Betamax was a superior system, so the Apple Mac is a far more versatile machine. But considering the majority of the world’s population are not web designers, is it then surprising that a reliable, relatively inexpensive device has come to dominate the market by meeting the world’s software and surfing needs?

The uplifting, utopian vision of the Net as a tool for achieving a global discourse on freedom, values and the imagination – the vision that fuelled the development of the early networks - was an extension of the liberal ideals of the university, the hippy era and the counterculture. Key to the development of digital technology was the 'hacker' – the dedicated, questing programmer with a taste for experimentation and subversion. (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple is the archetype: his 'H=F3' philosophy – Happiness = food, fun and friends – typifies the hacker’s utopian outlook.)

Bill Gates himself once belonged to this band of nerds and hippies, at a time when developing programming languages for the PC was an extremely hackerish thing to do. Central to the whole enterprise was sharing information, innovations and codes – just as knowledge is shared in the academic scientific community. What happened then, to lead Bill astray from the path of self-righteousness? In a word – profit. The desire to grow the company meant abandoning the collective ideals of the early days. The desire to be the best was overtaken by the desire to be the biggest. Hackers charge Gates with flooding the world with inferior proprietary software and blocking the development of shared open-source programs.

Bill Gates may be the world’s biggest philanthropist, but he has chosen to give away his money rather his source code. Unlike Netscape – the first major company to ally itself with the open-source movement – Gates himself rejected the suggestion that he should hand over Explorer’s code as ‘communism’. He might be giving away the golden eggs, but the man who gave the world the animated paper-clip is retaining control of the goose.

However the courts or the markets decide, history tells us that the only thing which is constant is change itself – just as those earlier philanthropists once considered themselves untouchable, so their monopolies were broken up and their companies proved mortal. Perhaps Bill Gates’s generosity means he has finally realised that after all, money is just a means rather than an end in itself.