Halloween again and a time for ghouls, spooks and things that go bump in the night. Skip related content: There are celebrations as old as mankind to mark the end of summer and the beginning of the long cold winter season. quite how this evolved into carved pumpkins, public nudity or parentally monitored begging by children Ill never know.
As this is San Francisco then things are even more unsettling. the Bay Area seems to get dressed up en-masse for the holiday and the streets are full of (occasionally) costumes of various levels of effectiveness.
Add in the fact that the local Giants team are playing the finals of the World Series (stop laughing the rest of the world) and the city is a madhouse at the moment.
So in the spirit of the season heres a round-up of the people in the industry who scare us, for a variety of reasons.
Honourable Mention: Bill Gates
Iain Thomson: Bill Gates used to be one of the most hated men in the computing world and we just felt he had to go on somewhere. That hes so low down the totem is down almost entirely to his post-Microsoft career.
In the early days he was hated and feared because he drove his company forward with the sort of fanatical zeal of Genghis Khan, using every dirty trick in the book and making up new ones as he went. with Netscape Gates took a simple solution in giving browsers away for free, and threats of similar action price wars were behind many a software company purchase.
Gates went through his buy all the toys phase of being mega-rich fairly quickly, although his legendary house in Seattle was a money pit of epic proportions. But increasingly in middle age he turned his money and riches to charitable works. he and Warren Buffett are also slowly persuading the rich that you cant take it with you, very much in the traditional of the potlatch ceremonies of the Native American lands Microsoft now sprawls across.
Hes now funding some of the most important aid initiatives on the planet, helping to save millions of lives and studying the problem with the same manic intensity of his early computer days. Scary he may well have been, but hes well up the road to redemption.
Shaun Nichols: It's hard to classify the man who has committed nearly all of the world's largest fortune to wiping disease and poverty from the earth as evil or scary, but there was a time when Bill Gates was super-villain number one in the tech world.
More than a few companies, including Netscape, Apple and IBM were nearly driven to bankruptcy by Gates' ruthless tactics. he operated with little regard to the fortunes of other people and made Microsoft Windows the backbone of nearly every personal computer on the planet.
Perhaps the worst part of it was that Microsoft didn't seem to care whether their product was the best in the market as long as it was the best-selling. Offerings such as Internet Explorer succeeded more on their ubiquity than superior features.
Fortunately, Gates eventually decided that charity was a more important calling than selling software, and he has gone into it with as much zeal as any business venture. In the process, he has gone from a feared businessman to one of the most beloved philanthropists on the planet.
Read More: Top 10 scariest characters in technology
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