Yes. I purchased several of their products, thereby increasing the capitalization of Microsoft.
I expect you intended the answer to be "No," implying that Bill Gates (and a few others) built Microsoft. However, that rests on a specific understanding of ownership and causality that not everyone shares.
But you did not do so out of the goodness your heart. They provided a product which provided enough utility to justify the cost. Producing such a product is where the value is created, not in the purchase of said product.
But the purchase provided capital, which enabled further production. Banks don't lend money out of the goodness of their hearts, either.
And, really, have you never bought something in small part because you liked the seller? That's the sentiment behind the exhortation to "buy local" or to buy Girl Scout cookies or from a local school's fundraiser. I suppose you could say a purchase is a contribution to the extent that the price exceeds the cost of production.
Would Bill Gates have worked so hard (presumably) if he didn't have that specific understanding of ownership and casuality? Isn't that type of motivation and incentive necessary, to grind through the obstacles?
I expect this is intended to be a rhetorical question, but there's a lot of hidden premises here.
First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", since I'm not sure there's an obvious thing that he could have done more of, even if he were so inclined.
Second, it assumes there exists some direct relationship between Bill Gates's personal work ethic and Microsoft's outsized success. Maybe all Microsoft needed was a good idea at the right time and would have succeeded about equally well with any minimally competent execution. Maybe they would have done even better had Bill Gates founded the company and then retired at 30.
Finally, it assumes that Bill Gates work ethic had some direct relationship with his financial compensation level. It is quite possible that he would have been more than happy to still give his best possible effort in return for being, say, a mere hundred millionaire. Moreover, plenty of people do hard work for all sorts of other reasons, from duty to boredom to artistic vision. Why do we assume that Bill Gates's internal motivation is predominantly financial in the first place?
None of those premises appear obviously and indisputably true to me. Maybe they are, but it'd be nice to see the case actually made (and made about real humans in the real world, not about perfectly rational actors in an idealized market).
People like Gates don't get rich because they work hard (though most of them do). They get rich because they're willing to risk what they have build something more.
Gates could have sold out to IBM or Apple or whoever and retired as a multimillionaire without taking the chance Microsoft would end up like Wang or Altair or hundreds of other companies.
According to this [1], it was never an official CERN project, but rather a side project of his.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
A lot of people work very hard without even the remotest possibility of getting rich. Scientists or aid workers would be an example. Money is not the only motivator for people.
Consider the way Kickstarter projects describe their "backers". On the "Why Kickstarter?" page they say backers are "helping to create something new". Yet, one could easily consider Kickstarter simply a website for pre-orders, no different from buying in any other method.
The line between a buyer and a backer/builder isn't so clear.
> The line between a buyer and a backer/builder isn't so clear.
It is pretty clear, if you are funding someone'e kickstart project then you did help them build it but if you pay for a product which was built using the creator's(or some other investor's) money then you did not build it.
Some Kickstarter projects are posted after the product is essentially built and just needs some finishing details. The line gets fuzzy there.
It's even more fuzzy when you consider beta customers for a software company. Heck, how about when I contribute information to Google Maps? Or give feedback and make feature requests for my accounting software?
Yes. I purchased several of their products, thereby increasing the capitalization of Microsoft.
I expect you intended the answer to be "No," implying that Bill Gates (and a few others) built Microsoft. However, that rests on a specific understanding of ownership and causality that not everyone shares.