Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

>>1
It's not to do with good people or bad people, or even good engineering/design or bad. It's the fact that they're not actually related - how well things do in the market is only tangentially related to how actually good it is. Technical people, the people who actually care deeply about the elegance of their designs and quality of their engineering, are generally loath to admit this for a number of reasons, chief among them being that they often prefer to solve (relatively) more simple problems that are more in their domain relating to the actual design of things rather than the substantially more complicated and fuzzier problem of succeeding in the marketplace. And who can blame them? It not only involves a completely different set of skills, which are deeply married to a specific time and place (knowing what people want in one time and place won't necessarily help you sell things in another), it also reveals uncomfortable and profoundly depressing truths about the world we live in - success in the ``real world'' isn't much related to any of the things they care about. Any piece of absolute garbage can succeed just as well as their best effort, if the people marketing it can get better deals with OEMs and proprietary software producers.

It reflects a fundamental unfairness about the system we live in and further by going to work every day and spending money - it's not a democracy, people get locked into buying things (``voting with your wallet'' as they say) that they don't even really want for any number of reasons - using Windows as an example, they range from that the choice is already made for you (you go buy a new brand name computer, it comes with Windows on it) to disincentives for switching (your hardware manufacturer doesn't release specs, so you can't use it with other systems, but they release drivers for Windows, because everyone else uses it, partially because it supports pretty much all hardware, because everyone uses it, ... - this is less of a problem than it used to be, but only because a herculean effort on the part of FOSS developers), to downright malicious behavior (intentional incompatibilities with Word and other systems, intentionally breaking Java's cross-platform portability for the sole purpose of marrying programs to Windows, lots of things involving browsers, etc).

I can only imagine that this is not what people who just want to solve interesting problems want to think about, that they are close to useless without someone to make shady backroom deals and impress idiots for them.