# Bill Gates For President In 2008. Yes/No. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 14, 2006, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396 "2006-11-14T16:46:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/41 "2006-11-15T18:35:01Z")
I’d say no. His skills, while prodigious, are not those required of the president of a great republic. His election would also, IMHO, concentrate too much power - both economic and political - in the hands of one man, which would be dangerous. A somewhat related thread: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=328605&highlight="bill+gates"+president](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=328605&highlight=%22bill+gates%22+president) ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/42 "2006-11-15T21:42:35Z")
[QUOTE=xtisme] Most computer professionals I know would definitely identify with the guy. Oh, we may not like most of the products (I can’t stand Windows or most other MS products), but the man? He’s pure geek…one of the guys who made it. [/quote] I have seen no evidence that Bill Gates actually knows how to write code. He’s very good at the business negotiation and “vision” thing (which largely consists of dominating markets with proprietary ad hoc standards), but I wouldn’t trust Gates to find the right flags to pass to a compiler. Now, Steve Wozniak – _there’s_ a geek who’s “made it.” 😃 ---
**Author:** ![MacTech](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c0e974/32.png) [@MacTech](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacTech)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/43 "2006-11-15T22:38:59Z")
NO, NO, NO!!! a THOUSAND times NO!!! there is no way in hell i’d vote for that evil little troll, i spit on the ground he walks on, he’s evil incarnate, i’d vote Bush in for a _Third_ 4 year term before i’d give billy-boy the reins to the U.S., and i’m a republican (old school pubbie) who _HATES_ dubya with a passion (i voted for Kerry in the last election, and i’m a republican for Og’s sake) ---
**Author:** ![rockyroad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/82dd89/32.png) [@rockyroad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rockyroad)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/44 "2006-11-15T22:44:42Z")
I’ve an idea. Cryogenic Technology can give me the Bill Gates that I want. Cryogenically freeze his head, you can discard the body. INstall the head on the hood of my car with an air horn in the throat. ---
**Author:** ![MacTech](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c0e974/32.png) [@MacTech](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacTech)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/45 "2006-11-15T22:45:53Z")
And Billy-Boy gate$ stole all my punctuation and capitilazation in my previous post, so you _KNOW_ he’s evil! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/46 "2006-11-15T22:56:50Z")
[QUOTE=Kimstu] Bush a Washington outsider? How ya figure? Yeah, he never held a national elected office before 2000, but for Pete’s sake, he’s the son of George H. W. Bush, the ultimate Washington insider, the man who was VPOTUS from 1980-88 and POTUS from 88-92. [/quote] And with whom he’s never been particularly close. > [@](#): > > Bush even lived in DC in 1988 working on his father’s Presidential campaign. That’s pretty brief; it doesn’t exactly make you a Washington insider. > [@](#): > > He’s been surrounded by Washington political contacts for most of his life. Not really, AFAICT. He’s been governor of Texas, of course. He’s been helped out by his daddy’s rich friends while losing money in the oil bidness. He’s had a productive political alliance with Karl Rove. But his Texas cronies, his daddy’s rich friends, and Rove were none of them creatures of Washington. Ditto for the vast majority of the Pioneers who financed his 2000 campaign. He was never a Washington insider, never hung around for long with people who were. He was a _money_ insider and he was close up with power, too. But he was never a Washington insider. Before 1999, this town [I’m typing this from inside the Beltway, thanks] hardly knew him. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/47 "2006-11-15T22:58:56Z")
[QUOTE=rjung] I have seen no evidence that Bill Gates actually knows how to write code. He’s very good at the business negotiation and “vision” thing (which largely consists of dominating markets with proprietary ad hoc standards), but I wouldn’t trust Gates to find the right flags to pass to a compiler. [/QUOTE] Well, he probably wouldn’t be able to do much these days programming wise…but then, I have my doubts that The Woz would be much good either these days down in the trenches. But I get the impression you think someone handed Billy boy Microsoft pre-built and ready to go. Here is a [Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates) article on good old Gate’s early life: > [@](#): > > William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Jr. (now Sr.) and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or “Trey” because his father had dropped his own “III” suffix.[9] According to the 1993 biography Hard Drive, Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born.[10] Gates vehemently denied this in a 1994 interview with Playboy,[11] and the 1993 biography Gates calls the trust fund claim one of the “fictions” surrounding Gates’ fortune.[9] > > Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, Seattle’s most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). When he was in the eighth grade, Lakeside obtained an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a donation of computer time on a General Electric computer from a “Mothers Club” rummage sale.[9] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted he and other students sought time on other systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation, which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time. > At the end of the ban, the Lakeside students (Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans) offered to fix the bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, not only in BASIC but FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language as well. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalties as well. Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[12][13][14] > > According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates stated that he scored 1590 on his SATs.[15] He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 without a definite study plan,[16] but he spent most of his time in the computer center on campus [2]. While at Harvard he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer. So…you learned something new today, ehe rjung? 😛 I’d say he had at least as much to do with the early formation of Microsoft was Jobs and the Woz’ster did in forming Apple. He wasn’t ALWAYS a big business tycoon ya know… -XT ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2006, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/48 "2006-11-15T23:09:27Z")
Still doesn’t mean he’d make a good president of course…in fact, he probably would be pretty miserable at it to be honest. But I have no idea what his politics are, so still no idea if I’d vote for the man. I certainly wouldn’t vote for him BECAUSE of Microsoft…but then again, I wouldn’t knee jerk vote against him for the same reason either. Luckily we’ll never know…I seriously doubt the man would WANT to be president of the US. Why the hell would he want to put up with all that shit? -XT ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2006, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/49 "2006-11-16T23:56:48Z")
[QUOTE=xtisme] So…you learned something new today, ehe rjung? 😛 [/quote] Yeah – **xtisme** still tends to believe the first thing that reaffirms his beliefs. 😉 If I were really snarky, I’d point out that programming in BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL are hardly bragging points – hell, I learned BASIC programming in one evening at the tender age of eight. But I’ll simply offer [this rebuttal](http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=640) instead: > [@](#): > > Beyond that, what we know is that the other people involved from the earliest projects on, including [Paul] Allen and [Monte] Davidoff among many others, have amply demonstrated the needed skills in other contexts - but Gates has not. Indeed most of the photos from the period show Allen at work with Gates looking on, and **even the Gates publicity machine has backed off claims about his post 1975 programming expertise and personal contributions to MS-DOS** since the truth about its origins in QDOS and CP/M has become widely established. There’s no doubt in my mind that Gates was instrumental in the early growth of Microsoft, but as a marketeer and business negotiator, not a programmer. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/50 "2006-11-17T02:46:45Z")
[QUOTE=rjung] If I were really snarky, I’d point out that programming in BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL are hardly bragging points – hell, I learned BASIC programming in one evening at the tender age of eight. But I’ll simply offer this rebuttal instead: [/QUOTE] You learned them in the early 70’s? Well, bravo to you rjung…you must know then that at that time COBOL and FORTRAN WERE a big deal, ehe? At a guess though, you learned programming at the tender age of eight sometime after the 80’s…maybe in the 90’s. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said such a stupid thing… [QUOTE=rjung] There’s no doubt in my mind that Gates was instrumental in the early growth of Microsoft, but as a marketeer and business negotiator, not a programmer. [/QUOTE] Perhaps he did, perhaps not. I recall he did work on some of the early software…you don’t build a business by simply marketting or negotiating. But even if not, so what? You said the man couldn’t program at all…something that on the first hit I got on google was pretty well blown out of the water. I take it, however, that you didn’t learn anything from that piece of data. Imagine that… 😛 -XT ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/51 "2006-11-17T05:40:35Z")
[QUOTE=rjung] hell, I learned BASIC programming in one evening at the tender age of eight. [/QUOTE] You’re very impressive, **rjung**. In the late 70s, I taught a full semester college-level class called “Advanced BASIC,” and it was difficult to cram all of the material into the allotted time. A few years ago, I taught a highly-compressed 8-week college course in beginning BASIC (Visual BASIC), and once again I was hard-pressed to cover a fraction of what the language did in that time. Yet you, a mere 8-year-old, could absorb all of this material in only one evening, even though it took months for my college students. Yes, you’re an amazing programmer. I bow before you. ---
**Author:** ![bdgr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a87d85/32.png) [@bdgr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bdgr)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/52 "2006-11-17T17:16:05Z")
Microsoft became rich selling operating systems and basic interpreters for small computers…They were NOT writtne in COBOL or BSAIC or FORTRAN…Probably most of it was assembly. And most of microsofts biggest products were not originally written by microsoft at all. Microsoft became powerfull by selling a OS that they got from someone else to IBM and by buying up other peoples products and marketing them better. Gates was a brilliant and somewhat unethical businessman, but I doubt he wrote much or any of the code they sold. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/53 "2006-11-17T19:56:28Z")
[QUOTE=bdgr] Gates was a brilliant and somewhat unethical businessman, but I doubt he wrote much or any of the code they sold. [/QUOTE] I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of this sentence. As to the second, Gates did most of the coding on Microsoft’s first product: a BASIC interpreter. He has done a _lot_ of code critique since then, and I certainly believe he knows _how_ to code, but I don’t know how much actual coding he’s done in the last 20 years. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/54 "2006-11-17T21:11:56Z")
[QUOTE=xtisme] Maybe of the wannabe variety. Most computer professionals I know would definitely identify with the guy. Oh, we may not like most of the products (I can’t stand Windows or most other MS products), but the man? He’s pure geek…one of the guys who made it. [/QUOTE] Speaking as a computer professional, if I’ve ever met a computer professional that admired or related to Gates, they didn’t admit it where I could hear. Generally he is considered an amoral businessman whose interests lie in dominating the market at the _expense_ of quality coding; he represents the antithesis of any good programmer. (All this applies even if he can nominally code; it’s actually worse because then he’s robbed of the excuse of ignorance. And yes, a person can teach themselves enough of QBasic to code with it in just a few hours; I certainly did, around age 12. There were probably bits that I missed, but it’s basically a simple language, like most of them.) Are these professionals you met actual, real, versatile coders, or more like server maintenance and script kiddies? In the few Computer Information Systems classes I slummed in at college they seemed married to MS…but I would never call them programmers or software designers in any realistic sense of the term. ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2006, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/55 "2006-11-17T21:42:02Z")
[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat] You’re very impressive, **rjung**. In the late 70s, I taught a full semester college-level class called “Advanced BASIC,” and it was difficult to cram all of the material into the allotted time. A few years ago, I taught a highly-compressed 8-week college course in beginning BASIC (Visual BASIC), and once again I was hard-pressed to cover a fraction of what the language did in that time. Yet you, a mere 8-year-old, could absorb all of this material in only one evening, even though it took months for my college students. [/quote] Don’t blame me if you had dim students. 🙂 Easiest academic course I ever took – while the other kids were wrapping their heads around loops and arrays and conditional statements, I was writing multimedia demonstrations for Back-to-School night and arcade games. > [@bdgr](#): > > Gates was a brilliant and somewhat unethical businessman, but I doubt he wrote much or any of the code they sold. But he must have! **xtisme** said so! 😃 (Though IMO the matter of Bill Gates’ coding L337ness should be a topic for another thread) ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2006, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396/56 "2006-11-18T04:08:39Z")
[QUOTE=rjung] I have seen no evidence that Bill Gates actually knows how to write code. He’s very good at the business negotiation and “vision” thing (which largely consists of dominating markets with proprietary ad hoc standards), but I wouldn’t trust Gates to find the right flags to pass to a compiler. Now, Steve Wozniak – _there’s_ a geek who’s “made it.” 😃 [/QUOTE] [Could Bill Gates Write Code?](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/) > [@](#): > > Reuben Harris has been disassembling a binary with some help from Monte Davidoff, the third author of Altair BASIC (along with Gates and Paul Allen) and who we interviewed here last week. He has the same question in mind:- > > “‘Could Bill Gates Write Code?’ Or was he merely the luckiest man alive,” before concluding… “Yes He Bloody Could!” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-gates-for-president-in-2008-yes-no/380396.md?page=2)