Even if we take an uncharitable view of Bill's time at Microsoft, the harm is fairly limited. Some companies went out of business, computers are slightly more expensive, things crashed quite a bit, IE6 is still mucking things up, and really old bugs in Microsoft Office occasionally make life miserable. You know, first world problems.
On the flip side, thanks to Bill's philanthropy, there are now billions of dollars flowing towards vaccines, mosquito nets, life-saving research, and other undeniably Good Things.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but if you could quantify and compare the impact of old Bill and new Bill, I'd say he's a net positive.
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. Gates, Allen, Myhrvold and others at MS in that era were some of the most powerful influences on intellectual property expansion, in particular software patents and business method patents. That's having a lasting impact. And many of the Gates Foundation's activities re-enforce the same boundaries in the area of drug patents.
If you want to net it out into a number, the game is far from over.
Edit: lest my comment seem one sided: Gates could just be all scrooge mcduck with his treasure and there's not much anyone else could do to stop him, so I do give him a great deal of credit. I don't put much attention into casting people as good guys or bad guys; but the world is complex, and consequences matter.
The relationship between Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures, and the relationship between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Intellectual Ventures has me slightly concerned.
That's too simplistic. If Gates had not done what he did at Microsoft, hundreds of billions in revenue could have been distributed differently, and we don't know, or have a realistic way of knowing, how much of that would have ended up channeled into equally positive endeavours down the line.
We also don't know how it would have altered the technology landscape - whether positively or negatively. Thing could be far better, or far worse or anything in between.
I think it is a meaningless thing to try to evaluate, and can be debated endlessly. What we can do is judge the up against the standards we hold/held others too. By that standard, Microsoft was judged to have unfairly and illegally engaged in anti-competitive practices, almost putting them at risk of being broken up; and multiple competitors got substantial amounts out of Microsoft in separate cases, based on damages incurred.
That he is redeeming himself personally through charity now is great, but I've also seen little indication that he accepts that the way he illegally stomped on a number of competitors in the 80's and 90's was wrong, which tempers my excitement somewhat.
You don't judge moral actors actions by outcome, you look at their (the actors) expected outcome.
>One thing we have got to change in our strategy—allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples [sic] browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends [sic] on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
On the flip side, thanks to Bill's philanthropy, there are now billions of dollars flowing towards vaccines, mosquito nets, life-saving research, and other undeniably Good Things.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but if you could quantify and compare the impact of old Bill and new Bill, I'd say he's a net positive.