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Timmy Elsewhere

At the GI.

Bill Gates might be a very good capitalist in practice but he\’s missed some of the theory.

3 thoughts on “Timmy Elsewhere”

  1. “Bill Gates might be a very good capitalist in practice but he’s missed some of the theory.”

    Exactly, but hardly an original thought. As Disraeli wrote, “read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”

    The trouble is that some think that is also a good precept for professional advice for personal healthcare problems or appointing the CEOs of some banks.

    The outcome is that with healthcare, we find homeopathy, alternative medicine, quacks and voodoo flourishing in places.

    Whatever happened with Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy? As someone posted, for a while it became a veritable epidemic in Britain.

    As for banking, just look what happened with a prominent example in the news where the CEO had no banking qualifications.

    Bill was canny – he bought in good professional advice on how to create and make the most of a monopoly position in a burgeoning market. Has anyone kept track of how many hundreds of millions Microsoft has paid out in fines for breaches of anti-trust laws and regulations?

  2. Btw does anyone know where I can train for an A-Level in Dog walking, providing there’s not too much theory involved?

  3. Check out the part in: The Road Ahead, by Bill Gates, where he relates what he did as an undergraduate at Harvard before he took indefinite leave of absence to manage Microsoft.

    By the account in the book, in the time he was at Harvard, he and Steve Ballmer attended a graduate-level course in advanced economics 2010.

    So much for Gates knowing nothing about economic theory.

    To make the point that some successful entrepreneurs knew nothing about formal economics but went on to create hugely profitable business empires, why not finger Alfred Nobel, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, or even Alfred P Sloane? I say “even” because Sloane was savvy enough to say: “It is the business of the automobile industry to make money not cars.”

    Unfortunately, the American multinational automobile manufacturers seem to have subsequently forgotten how to do that.

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