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Monday, January 28, 2008 12:00 AM

The C.S. Lewis take on Gates and Wal-Mart

Fake it 'til you make it: Can posturing by the titans of commerce signify true change?

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  • Monday, January 28, 2008 03:33 PM

    Significant differences

    There's a significant difference between Gates and the CEO of WalMart: Gates WAS Microsoft in the beginning. He is not a Harvard-educated MBA who joined a company he has a marginal personal stake in. He built the damn thing from the ground up and learned to be an enterpreneur by, I suppose, faking it till he made it. He was one of the starters of the computer boom, after all, they all flew by the seat of their pants at first.

    Take this with a grain of salt, but there's a likelihood that Gates means what he says because he's an individual doing his own thing, a human being who thinks like a human being and has a human being's concerns. Whoever speaks for WalMart does just that: speaks for WalMart. WalMart is a corporate entity, interested only in making moolah, the more the better, never mind how. If it means giving a pep-talk on helping people, well, that's what they will do.

    I'm a lot more inclined to believe the human Gates rather than the corporation WalMart.

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