my cousin created microsoft!
haha kursat, america’s economy is by FAR the biggest in the world. And sorry, Europe isn’t a country, it’s a continent so of course an entire continents wealth MIGHT be bigger than America’s.
also, as of the most recent forbes report to this day, Bill Gates’ wealth has gone up considerably to $59 Billion . . Carlos Slim has beat him just recently with $67.9 billion but that looks temporary while Mexico’s stocks soared in the last year.
and by the way: there’s no way that any single person has more wealth than that, claimed or unclaimed. A net worth of 59 billion is almost infinite. several oil companies aren’t even worth that. sure, saudis have more power (maybe), but only about a fifth of the money.
Nice to see this has rowled up an economic debate. 
Just thought I’d point out that, yes the United States has the biggest economy of every country in the world and, yes, Europe has the biggest of any continent in the world, but these mean little next to economic power. By measure of economic power, Japan is more powerful than both Europe and the United States combined.
Hopefully someone will get some perspective from this.
Cheers,
Rob.
I must agree with the Micro$oft haters. Linux is older than windows, Micro$oft did nothing but steal code and ideas from the already established open source projects in the world. Check out these sites before you say Micro$soft did anything good for us:
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-513089.html?legacy=zdnn
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/10/60673
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Sued_for_Xbox_360_Problems/1133811369
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/310004_msftsued03.html
And if that wasn’t enough, even their products are crap too. For example windows XP Pro sp2 has the LM hash for storing user passwords enabled by default. This hash has been used since windows 95 or something and its still enabled by default in XP!
Read more about the security flaws that made Micro$ofts implementation of the hash so weak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LM_hash
It is possible to crack an LM hash in less than a minute on a laptop!
For example, i cracked the password to the education department i was attending at the time in 85.6 seconds on a laptop with a 2Ghz processor. I shit you not. The password was ‘SCHOOLadmin’. I can crack passwords on my friends computers too, in mere minutes - thanks Micro$oft.
By comparison LINUX has been using a far more secure method of storing passwords for years. It involves appending a ‘salt’ to the password before it is hashed:
http://www.linux.com/articles/19621
That and shadowing of the password file makes it VERY hard to crack.
In short:
LINUX Windows
GNU and Open Source Software Micro$oft
Micro$oft are a shit company founded by the lowest scum on earth and i am glad that i have never ‘bought’ any of their software.
who cares if hes the richest or the second richest person in the world? the point is hes rich… because he went out and did something that helped a lot of people help a lot of other people instead of going on some website and bitching about wether some other person hes never going to meet was correct on a trivial subject!! im gonna yell at the person who sent me the link to this retardedness
Linux saving the computer world? Depends on whether your goal is to control your computer, or use it to do something.
Microsoft’s (and Apple’s) accumulated wealth (Bill and Paul didn’t keep all of it) did one thing: It provided the resources to move computing forward more in 30 years than the auto industry did in 90. They still have the wealth, but not the vision. We have Vista as evidence.
All of u, who made comments,…just take a chill-pill. Go take a break and stop wasting ur time.
To clear a few things up, people switched from apple to pc because they needed to run more software… Apple to this day has the upper hand involving writing for most newspapers, also it is popular in science labs… now the tides are starting to roll back… as a few million visual basic programmers pick up a new hobby… because microsoft migrates vb.net… due to security flaws people can decompile source code in vb.net… besides vb.net being a different language the programming language isnt basic code… Many hobbist that wrote free programs for pc… now write programs for mostly mac and linux with the option of compiling for pc… if vista is today whats next a skinned version of windows95
i worked for them 99-02 …all I can say is BillG Rocks!!! He treated even the lowest of employees not only fairly, but gave us terrific salaries including 100% medical coverage, etc. I have tremendous respect for Bill and the way he has conducted himself through the years…what a guy! BillG for President!!!
Read Bob Wallace…he looked like he should be an advocate…what did he die from? OD? -Peace
Lol, Al i need to say is Just Bill Gates ROCKS!!!
His Innovative thinking with Paul Allen made the Software Industry far more popular like today…
Else, if there were no Microsoft, The Computer will be a Box, unknown to common, and people gaves a loook to it with a fear!
The computer will then only be found in Labs of scientists and researchers…
Bill Gates and Paul Allen togther with their Microsoft made the Computers Personal!..
In Old days, there were nothing in Idea like OS Market… as, every machines of the time are sold with pre-installed OS like Dos…
The coming of MS-DOS and its GUI Variant made a revolution in the Compuer World…
The Popularity of Windows is a proof that, how much the World had accepted them…
And, Linux kiddies, just PISS OFF… they just copied concepts of Windows, and made a crap outta old UNIX…
Still, Microsoft OS is popular in both Home, Professional, Office and Server uses… it marks an 80% market share in OS market with other competetors…
Worldwide crappists are crying Linux… but, a software from Redmond, still Rocks alone… leaving them far beyond!!!
its one and only one name - Micosoft and, mark the names - Bill Gates and Paul Allen…
I think the main thing you should consider in the disparity is that most of those people left the company before it became as wildly successful as it is now. The major outlier in this respect is O’Rear who is worth 100 million and left in 1983.
Still, a group of (m/b)illionaires can’t complain too much 
“What are the acheivement or invention of Microsoft from 1985 to 2005 and who acheived it or did it ??”
these are some of the microsoft products i’ve used during that timeframe:
applications: word, excel, powerpoint, access, outlook, outlook express, internet explorer, frontpage
backoffice: SQL server
programming: basic, VB6, VBA, VBScript, VB.NET
hardware: xbox, mice, keyboards
20 years ago software was largely fragmented, didn’t interoperate at all, and did a smidgen of what it does today. microsoft was the primary driving force from the lower end toward the upper end…early versions of all of their software sucked compared to competitors and they iteratively improve it until they’ve equalled or surpassed them and then completely dominate: DOS vs OS2 etc., office vs wordperfect etc., NT vs novell etc., IE vs netscape etc., SQL server vs nothing on the low-end oracle DB2 on the high end, etc.
open source may eat their lunch in the future, but i’m sure damn glad microsoft was around these past couple of decades bundling software and releasing new, more functional versions of windows and everything else.
All of this talk of Microsoft doing great things makes my head hurt.
You all should read up on ITRON.
hey Kursat you retard, Bill donated over 40 Billion USD in the past five years, so that loss of net worth isn’t because microsoft stock has fallen by that much.