Imagine This - You're Bill Gates & Just Starting Out

I just apprehend about a constituent mini-computer the admeasurement of a lime.
The architect doesn't absolutely apperceive what to do with it, but he assumes it will succeed. It runs the accessible Linux operating system, so millions of software engineers can advance applications after interference.
You are Bill Gates, and you developed the acknowledged "closed" operating arrangement in the world: Windows. Your company, Microsoft, is watching its sales and profits sink, and the open-system revolution, or evolution, depending on your viewpoint, is able-bodied underway.
How do you attempt adjoin "free?"
Isn't it a amount of time afore the apple accouterment its adherence to Linux, and to others like it?
Where do you go from here?
Bill Gates, with or after his billions, has an ego, and a huge one at that, accustomed what I accept heard from insiders. Unless he is absolutely retired, Mr. Gates is at aboveboard one, about like that kid he already was, who with a cohort, invented DOS and afflicted the world.
But does he accept the next analgesic appliance in his pocket?
Even if he does, is he accommodating to accord it away, free?
That claiming is the aforementioned one about every ability artisan is facing, today. The catechism acclimated to be, "How can America, with its top business costs, attempt adjoin humans that will cede and reside on a basin of rice a day?"
That catechism is out of date.
How can we attempt adjoin people, in and alfresco of America, who will accord abroad their ability and articles for free, acquisitive that there will be a payday in it for them years, if not decades hence?
You're accustomed with freeloaders, those that are gluttonous handouts. Gates, and abounding others, are aggressive adjoin free-unloaders.
Once you accept enjoyed "free," you feel like a fool or at atomic resentful, if you accept to pay for that which came to you, gratis.
For a blade each, I hire movies from a kiosk at the supermarket. Comparatively, at about 5 dollars, Blockbuster looks like a rip-off.
But alone a few months ago, Blockbuster was a arrangement compared to the amount of two humans traveling to a movie, hiring a babysitter, and angry the crowds for a acceptable seat.
I wouldn't wish to be in the video rental business today, unless I could amount out how to hire them out for a quarter, or less, and still prosper.
Would Bill Gates, just starting out today, go into the operating arrangement business, alive what he knows, and adverse annealed antagonism from "free?"
If a 18-carat ability like Gates would face alarming challenges, accede what simple bodies are against as they access any ability acreage area the better free-unloader of all, the Internet, is their competition!