Science Quote by Bob Metcalfe

“Grove giveth and Gates taketh away” lands like a tech-industry proverb because it steals the cadence of scripture and swaps in two 1990s deities: Intel’s Andy Grove and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Bob Metcalfe, a network pioneer with skin in the platform wars, isn’t just being cute. He’s compressing an entire era’s power dynamics into a single balanced line: the hardware guys expand possibility; the software monopolist captures it.

The intent is pointed and tactical. Grove “giveth” evokes Intel’s virtuous cycle of faster chips, falling prices, and the sense that computing progress is a kind of public good. It flatters the engineering narrative: build better primitives and everyone wins. Gates “taketh away” flips that optimism into a critique of control. Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems and applications let it tax the ecosystem, bundle competitors into oblivion, and turn openness into dependency. Metcalfe’s subtext is that innovation isn’t only about invention; it’s about who gets to set the rules after invention becomes infrastructure.

The line also works because it’s a neat piece of rhetorical symmetry with a cynical wink. “Giveth/taketh away” implies inevitability, as if market structure is fate, not strategy. That’s the hidden punch: these outcomes weren’t accidents. They were engineered through standards, contracts, developer lock-in, and antitrust brinkmanship.

Contextually, it reads as a dispatch from the Wintel age, when Intel’s roadmap and Microsoft’s platform defined personal computing. Metcalfe’s quip doubles as warning: the same system that accelerates progress can quietly centralize power, and the bill comes due after the breakthrough.