This is for immigrant visas, not non-immigrant ones. H1B is a non-immigrant visa which is mostly used for work. So I think this is a click bait culture affecting all media houses from top to bottom.
The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
They had vertical integration and made bank. Then each layer got more complex as computing became mainstream, and IBM got out-competed on everyone of them by specialized companies. And then they sold them off. The only layer that remains is the most strategic: the customer relationship.
In some areas IBM still holds if not a technological advantage at least the first among equals position, they just aren't areas that are flashy or generally known outside of folks like us - Mainframes and related technologies for example, the IBM Z series is still a huge player there.
Sometime in the 90s they decided that becoming a services and consultancy provider was more important than being involved in large-scale commodity hardware or really anything else.
Over three decades they've exited commodity hardware (x-series and thinkpads), retreated from a lot of software stuff and generally gone as hard as they can for large-scale business contracts. They seem to keep a decent amount of cutting-edge hardware research going, Power is still broadly competitive with x86 AFAICT, but the volumes have got to be pretty low these days and I half suspect that some of it is just a "Hey look at us we're still here" play rather than actually feeding into products, because services are the profit-centre.
They're still huge and have a lot of money, and they own Redhat. But IMHO it's in a long, slow decline, and it has stepped back from the public eye and most public-facing markets.
Context - I've worked for them in a few places. Obvs my opinons are my own, especially as I've been 'out' for over a decade at this point.
They royally screwed up by signing an exclusive deal with the back-then no-name Microsoft company. IBM created the 3 trillion behemoth that Microsoft is while killing themselves in the process.
It's really sad but also infuriating: had IBM not fucked up and not signed Microsoft, that mediocre company that Microsoft is would have gone nowhere and we wouldn't have to suffer their turds since decades.
P.S: in their dying breath (and I know IBM still exists), they did commit one billion dollar to Linux early on (which back then was a big deal). When we see the tens of billions of devices that now run Linux, IBM at least partially participated in Linux taking over the world. So there's that.
Back in the 90's, there was a game called "Midtown Madness" by Microsft. They simulated SF and London very well. This game now takes it to another level.
Came here to say this - I have fond memories of playing Midtown Madness 2 as a kid (IIRC it came bundled with our new Windows ME family PC). I remember when I had the chance to visit SF in 2005 and I would recognize so many of the streets from playing the game. Good times.
There is hardly any invention-based moat a startup can have these days, in this fully connected world. The only moat is laziness of people sticking to known products and solutions, real world assets that others can't replicate easily and ability to do some real world work.
I guess Moore's law analogy is weak. CPU speed has hit a limit in that case. What has hit a limit in AI case? Newer versions of the models are still flowing with more and more capability.
For the users, I feel it is more like "free lunch started", with all these awesome open-weight models being thrown around, breaking the monopoly of a few biggies.
It's never about money. It's a life style, belief system, social group or community that drives that kind of passion. It happens everywhere, all the time with everyone. It's about how they feel about what they do. When they were successful in moving the furnace out, they get a feeling that is 1000 times more precious than the value of that piece.
There is no mystery. Imagine a huge radius of rotation. Then a small rotation is almost like a linear shift due to the large radius. Two reflections around a small angle would mean two "half roll-overs" making it a full roll-over. That means you just shifted (rotated) the thing.
