Gates (Premium)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has weighed in on the antitrust scrutiny facing Big Tech. His take: They all “deserve rude, unfair, and tough questions.” He’s right.

Unfortunately, Gates’s comments come via a somewhat insipid podcast called Armchair Expert. In the latest episode, the hosts pepper Gates with important questions related to his favorite color, his favorite movie, the musician Prince, Diet Coke, and other trivialities. But if you can get through the meandering 90 minutes---I did so only with great difficulty---Gates is finally able to weigh in on some more relevant topics in personal computing today.

I won’t make you listen to it. Instead, here’s a rundown of what he said about personal computing.
Big Tech
The conversation finally turns to Big Tech about halfway through the podcast, but I’ve moved this to the top because it’s so timely.

“Anything that dramatically changes society is going to be used for bad things,” Gates says when asked about social media. “Henry Ford used to say, ‘yeah, [our cars are] running over a few people … is this good? … It’s tricky. For car safety, the U.S. government had to figure out seatbelts … they really regulated [that business] … There will be some things about how these tools are used politically. Should you be able to do microtargeting [of ads, like Google and Facebook do]? I don’t think so.”

With regards to the recent U.S. congressional committee hearings with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the host criticizes a representative of an inefficient organization (the government) criticizing those who run highly efficient organizations. Jeff Bezos, he claims, could have solved COVID in two weeks.

As someone with experience in both Big Tech and vaccinations, Gates disagreed strongly.

“If you’re as successful as I am, or as any of those people you are, you deserve rude, unfair, tough questions," Gates responded. "The government deserves to [take] shots at you. I testified in front of the Senate, and I attempted to do this sarcastic thing where they were being tough on me, and I was going to say, ‘Senator, Senator, I have discovered that 43 capitalists work at Microsoft, and it’s really awful, they’ve infested my company.’ Anyway, I was told by adults not to do that particular joke. But when you’ve got so much [market/usage] share, should you be able to have in-house products in that market? Should your logistics overwhelm everyone else? Or should you have to unbundle that? You know, what should Mark Zuckerberg have to do about these titillating things and even really bad things like attacks on his surface? These are hard questions.”

“Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they have done a phenomenal job. But that type of grilling comes with the super successful territory. It's fine. Congress has to think, are the laws up to date with respect to these companies … these tech developments? The competition laws, how we d...