Brief thoughts on Bill Gates

Microsoft boss Bill Gates bans his children from using Apple products

Excerpt:

Microsoft founder head Bill Gates has banned the use of products made by arch-rival Apple from his house, his wife has revealed.

But the blockade could backfire on Gates, 53, after Melinda admitted there are times she feels envious of her friends' iPhones.

She told Vogue magazine that the couple's three children Jennifer, 13, Rory, 10 and Phoebe, seven, are not allowed Apple products.

Brief Thoughts:

1. Wow Bill Gates is the head of his home! That's a nice Biblical pattern.
   
2. Melinda Gates respects the authority of her husband and while she would love to have an Apple IPhone she eschews (she probably has a credit card or two with a $ 10,000 limit or so (do ya think!)) buying an IPhone or an IPod when she is out and about shopping without her husband! That's nice too!
   
3. The Gates children are young enough that they probably can't get away with having an IPod, IPhone, or Mac. But wait until they have their rebellious teen years or worse yet, go away to college. I suspect their may be an Apple product or two tucked away in their dorm room!
   
4. It might help Bill if he loosened up a little bit. Buy a MacBook Pro Lite. Enjoy Mac OS X. See how much fun you can have with that cool graphical user interface.
   
5. Build a little lab in one of the rooms of your 100,000 square foot mansion. Let the kids play there with Macs, and Linux. Their "toying around" will be like your rebellious years when you goofed off with a PDP-10*
   
6. How Bill handles his family is his business, but my advice is - Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
   
7. I get the idea that if Bill were a monopolistic titan of business (oh never mind) that he would limit peoples' computer choices.
   
8. Well Sic semper tyrannis (I mean this in a non-violent, non-threatening way!) to computing choice dictators! I'm for the free market. I will by the best devices possible. Even if they have the Apple logo affixed to them!
   

Note, "After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time." (Oh those rebellious years!)