Time has made their choice, and it is Bono and Melinda and Bill Gates:
For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME’s Persons of the Year.
I do not have access to the full story. Suffice it to say, Bono’s work with debt relief and other issues and the Gates’ giving away, literally, boatloads of cash to needy causes secured their choice.
ppGaz
So, their Thing of the Year is Charity.
Good for them. Very good for them.
Ancient Purple
Kudos to Time for this selection. Love or hate Bono, Bill and Melinda, the amount of work they do for charity is inspiring.
Pb
Damn. And here I thought Cheney had a lock on it for being the hero of Iraq!
shark
Kudos to Time for this selection. Love or hate Bono, Bill and Melinda, the amount of work they do for charity is inspiring
Yeah, woopee, Bono accomplioshed squat with his Live-8 posturing, and the Gates have been giving away money for YEARS (I guess Gates isn’t the monopolistic evil money sucking devil after all, eh?)
Must’ve been a boring year in the universe Time occupies.
simon
Mmm… Here, taste this. Does this shark soup taste a little bitter to you? Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
srv
I think Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani should have gotten it.
Paul Wartenberg
It’s not so much a boring year as it was a controversial year. If TIME had gone with any of the other Big Names/Big Events for Person of the Year (Hurricane Katrina, Fitz, Scooter, Rove, BushCheney, any number of scandal makers, etc.) they would have caught flak for it.
This felt like a reach pick, that the editors were looking for any kind of positive role model that wouldn’t cause rioting in the streets. Although having Bill Gates on the cover would get the LINUX crowd to trash the local CompUSAs…
Steve S
Well Bono I can understand.
Actually as far as Gates goes… Yeah, he’s doing a lot with his money in terms of charity but that’s because he has the money. And frankly, it’s his father who is the man responsible for most of that as the head of the Gates foundation.
I don’t know if it’s Bill’s doing, or Steve, or someone else, but I think the most spectacular thing to happen has been the complete turnaround of Microsoft since 1998. At the time I think we were all convinced they were going to be split up, and their death knell was being sounded by Linux. Yet despite supposed threats from Linux, Apple, sun, etc. Microsoft has emerged stronger than ever. They just released a slew of products which are going to dramatically reshape the industry(SQL 2005, .NET 2.0, VS.NET 2005, etc.) and next year is going to bring even more.
I credit that to the fighting nature of Bill Gates, who seems to get motivated only when the barbarians are howling at the gates. The thing they have learned from the ’98 debacle, is to work harder keeping those competitors around, knowing full well that the competition drives them to exceed.
So yes, I’d say Gates is a man worthy of time of the year, but perhaps not for the reason Time magazine tagged him.
Steve S
I wonder how many of such people are out there any more? I’ve been reading slashdot.org since 1997 and it used to be bad like that. Today, however, /. has been posting a lot of favorable MS news, especially with regards to .NET development.
susan
Maybe they let the office junior pick the award by mistake?