October 3, 1999
ON THE CONTRARY
Charity
Begins in the
Home PC
By DANIEL AKST
emember the Boston Tea Party? If
my high school history teacher is to
be believed, the colonists' complaint
was about taxation without representation.
That very phrase stuck in my mind when
I read the announcement by the chairman of
Microsoft, William H. Gates, that his foundation would provide $1 billion in college
scholarships for minority students.
Surely the move is well intended, and
surely it will warm the hearts of Windows
users everywhere. Maybe it will even melt
away some of the fear and loathing that Microsoft seems to inspire from Silicon Valley
to the Justice Department.
Yet it is difficult not to view this outburst
of altruism in the light of Microsoft's extraordinary grip on the personal computer
revolution. Microsoft owes its great success,
after all, to Windows, the operating system
that people love to hate but are more or less
forced to use. It is difficult to buy a PC without Windows, and Microsoft's huge power in
this respect is handy when it comes to pricing the program. The company profits further by selling application programs that
coincidentally work extremely well in the
Windows environment.
From a certain perspective, then, some
part of the price of Windows amounts to a
tax on personal computers -- a regressive
one, since a struggling inner-city high school
student pays the same as a multimedia tycoon. Mr. Gates has aggregated some of the
proceeds from these and millions of other
computer users to create what is now, at $17
billion, the largest philanthropic foundation
in America.
I like donating money to charity, and if
my computer cost less (and was easier to
use, so I could spend more time making
money), I might give even more. Unfortunately, Mr. Gates puts users of Windows in
the position of financing his philanthropic
enterprises whether we like them or not.
Personally, I do not favor race-based initiatives like the foundation's scholarship
plan, so I direct my giving elsewhere. Others who disagree, of course, are free to give
accordingly. But as the father of boys, I am
more concerned that there are only 6.4 million men enrolled in college versus 8.5 million women; the Education Department
projects that this extraordinary gender gap
will grow.
Neither the Gates Foundation
nor anyone else seems much perturbed by
it, so right now the only scholarships I intend to provide are for my sons.
When the Government does something I
don't like, I can complain to my elected officials, give money in the cause of their defeat
and vote against those whose policies I oppose. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on the other hand, doesn't care what I
think. So I find myself in the same position
as those early colonists who turned Boston
Harbor into a giant teapot.
Of course, Gates is not the first tycoon to don the mantle of charity after amassing a fortune. Carnegie,
Rockefeller, Ford and others did likewise.
But by now, the roots of their wealth are
well buried. The Gates Foundation is undertaking a wholesale redistribution among the
living. (I can't complain about being left
out; I was a consultant on a Microsoft Web
venture, and I write occasionally for Slate,
Microsoft's on-line magazine.)
Fortunately, there is a compromise that
could satisfy the Gates family's charitable
urges while doing more for society than any
of the foundation's current initiatives. It
would work like this: Mr. Gates, give away
that software. Set Windows free. It would be
the simplest way to use the wealth of Microsoft for the public good.
Just consider the consequences: computer prices would fall, making the machines
more accessible to the poorest users; other
software companies, heartened by Microsoft's ritual slaughter of its cash cow, would
be emboldened to resume innovating, and
PC sales would grow, giving Microsoft more
chances to sell applications software. The
public relations value of such a gift cannot
even be calculated.
And I'd gladly pledge the cost of my next
copy of Windows to some worthy cause. I
can think of several. Funny thing is, I won't
need any help from the Gates family in
making up my mind.
Daniel Akst is a novelist and financial
journalist. His column tilting at
conventional business wisdom appears the
first Sunday of each month. E-mail:
culmoney@nytimes.com.
