Bill Gates seems determined to give away all of his wealth.
Perhaps he could start by reimbursing some of the billion-plus people who have taken an unwitting and uncompensated turn at working for Microsoft.
Anyone who has encountered a Microsoft product is an unpaid beta tester, a self-trained user, and a trove of data sold to advertisers.
These practices are not exclusive to Microsoft. The tech sector is littered with examples of donated work and abused consumers. But if Bill Gates has a philanthropic urge, he could expand that largess to repay his customers for work they have provided over decades for free.
When Did We Work for Microsoft?
Most Americans have been used or affected by the actions and products of Microsoft since its founding by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975.
One could argue, that we don’t need to interact with Microsoft or with any company. As consumers, we should always exercise choice in where we spend our money and time.
But realistically speaking, some of us don’t have much choice of what software our shared organizations use. Tech is one of those areas where footprint matters. If everyone is using Microsoft products, then that is what IT professionals and users are trained in, and that is what companies buy and maintain. The whole ecosystem shape shifts to enable a Microsoft environment, and choice becomes limited or nonexistent.
When over a billion of the world’s population uses one company’s products, it’s possible for that company to use and abuse its consumer base with few consequences. Such is the case with Microsoft.
Data collection of a user’s actions and identifiers is bundled up and sold to advertisers. People may justify this as quid pro quo for free usage, even though the practice extends far beyond the industry’s so-called free products and services.
Less talked about is how we all function as unpaid beta testers. We don’t need to click on a bug report to log findings. Our actions and experiences are automatically recorded on Windows OS, Xbox, Edge, Bing, Skype, and all the other Microsoft products, whether we believe we are volunteering them or not.
Some of these findings go to Microsoft AI Labs to train robots in activities that will eventually replace human jobs. Perhaps it is not your job the robot is replacing. Nevertheless all of us are affected, as society, in dealing with the consequences of under-employment.
Also unquantified are the unpaid hours spent overcoming the limitations of AI or technology. We have all wasted time navigating bugs or poor design, but even well-designed systems cost us time and effort. Technology does not conform to human learning, error or bug navigating. It simply is; we figure out how to make it work. Therefore, we are always self-training on how to use new systems just to engage with a company’s offering, from buying food to navigating scheduling, booking activities, banking, commuting, paying taxes, communicating, exercising… Nearly every process has radically shifted in recent decades; each of us is continually relearning how to exist in the modern world.
If more of us trust a system and contribute to its development, our quality of life would improve in line with our involvement.
Navigating change is not something we should be fighting against. We should embrace it. We should also be compensated for our efforts and esprit.
No One Forced Us to Work for Microsoft
There’s a choice, of course. We don’t need to use any Microsoft products. We could all just refuse.
But the right answer cannot be that every one of us isolates and lives off the grid. If more of us trust a system and contribute to its development, our quality of life would improve in line with our involvement.
There are plenty of examples of how the tech sector benefits us.
Technology and automation frees us from rote or dangerous work; it provides convenience, improves productivity, extends human abilities, and brings us video games, information access, and countless other quality of life benefits.
Technology advancements can result in job loss, but the tech sector also creates jobs. Someone has to build, administer and maintain systems and hardware, in addition to all the ancillary dependencies that surround the tech industry. Indeed some people will not adjust to the learning curve involved in a radical skill shift; but arguably with more automation, we shouldn’t need such a large workforce anyway. Ideally, tech should be serving us. (For those chuckling ruefully, I did add “ideally.”)
Crowd sourcing content or mass user testing on a consumer base has many advantages. Collecting feedback across multiple user groups at rapid speed allows for real-time fixes and improvements.
As to the user’s endless input, multi-source asynchronous content production democratizes information and leads to diversity of thought and discussion.
So this is not to argue against the tech sector, innovation or the modern world. It is instead a recommendation for compensating users for their very real contributions.
The Thank You
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently reported that it would increase grant making to $9 billion annually by 2026. That’s a $3 billion increase from pre-pandemic total awards. The original $6 billion is presumably already ear-marked to the foundation’s stated topics of global health, economic development, gender equality and education. Let’s leave that money wherever it is at the moment and focus on the added $3 billion.
Ideally we’d reward everyone on the planet with a cut of the money. That only would be around $0.37 per person. If, instead, TBMGF took this extra $3 billion and awarded it to every human in the US—Microsoft’s origin country, it would amount to around $10.00 per person. A family of four would receive $40 annually.
That’s not a lot relative to American cost-of-living levels. So until the pot is larger, let’s limit awards to those who use Microsoft products or services. Since Microsoft tracks users and usage rates, it could issue payment amounts similar to how musician royalties are calculated based on downloads from Apple Music or Bandcamp. Metered usage would mean heavy-use Microsoft consumers would receive a higher pay out than light-use consumers.
Is It Enough?
Gates could dig deeper into his big pockets and contribute more. According to Wikipedia, his net worth is $117 bn, and he did say that he would like to get rid of all of it. Distributing his entire fortune would be enough to give every human in the US roughly $350.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would have no say in who gets the money or how it is spent. A recipient could use the money for ice cream, buy fishing tackle, go to a concert, make a donation, or blow it on more Microsoft products. It’s entirely up to the individual. In return TBMGF can point to recipients’ use case stories to overcome criticism of influence, of setting and dictating priorities, and of philanthropic imperialism.
It could also be argued that the award should extend beyond US borders, since over a billion people worldwide engage with Microsoft products. If one billion global Microsoft users were all to share in relieving Bill Gates’ of his enormous fortune, that would result in $117 per person. In some parts of the world that is a month’s income.
Aggrieved users will say this is not enough to compensate for the loss of productivity while battling shoddy product design; not enough to repay years of involuntary, uncontracted beta testing; and not enough to repair the scarring effects of interacting with Clippy.
If we wanted to increase award amounts, there are several other tech platforms that thrive off the backs of unpaid consumers. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, for instance, could pool money with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for similar dollar awards to all the unpaid content providers, beta testers and consumers of advertising who engage with Meta products.
If these organizations truly wish to distribute their fortunes made in part from the free contributions of their users, they can start with these payments of gratitude.
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
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Robin Rusch
