Team4_Exam1_Q1

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Question 1: State as many reasons supported with arguments as to why the movie name is Pirates of the Silicon Valley.

First of all, the movie is located in Silicon Valley, which is the place where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs established their Microsoft and Apple companies and the place where many other important ones have started. Silicon Valley is "the house of the tecnology" mostly The 'pirate' may come from the fact that both Gates and Jobs went through some very questionable practices to found and develop their companies. For example:


 * Steve Jobs, after founding the Apple Inc. started a 'competition' within the same company. The Mac team was developing a personal computer which caused some conflicts inside Apple; Jobs even stated they were the 'pirate' team, and that it was better to be a pirate than to join the navy (the 'navy' also referring to IBM, the biggest computer's company in the 1980's).
 * Bill Gates was not the 'original' designer of the software used in his computers, he bought it from a guy for 50,000 dollars, and he didn't mentioned to the man that that software would be one of Microsoft's top selling products. This could be an example of 'piracy'.
 * Bill Gates also took some software and GUI ideas from the Apple Company (another example of piracy), which, along with Jobs problems, made Microsoft the most successful and important computer company of the late 1980's and 1990's. Almost at the end he mentioned Jobs what he had said before, when he realises Gates had stolen from him.
 * In those times, technology was growing and evolving very fast, so in order to still be succesful in this area of work, you had to be very aware of the competition's work; and basically try to do something even better. The "pirate" aspect may also reflect the idea of this continuous conflict between Apple and Microsoft, which ended in 1985 with the resignation of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
 * As pirates normally do, they will //coup d'etat// anyone for their own profit, even their own boss. Bill Gates took every chance he had (For example, selling things that he didnt even had, like 'Windows' to IBM before he really invented Windows), even if he had to trick/cheat people to make a profit out of it, just like Pirates do. This shows how almost all the top selling of this companies were actually stolen from others instead of created by the.

'Pirates of the Silicon Valley' is a very good title if you think about these reasons, they acted like pirates in a way (stealing other's ideas and thinking on themselves) and making a profit out of it, and obviously, most of it happened in Silicon Valley.

"Good artists do; great artists steal"-//Picasso [quoted by Steve Jobs]//