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Bill Gates On Linux
King-of-darkness writes "USA Today had an interview with Bill Gates on june the 30th. Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing thru competition just like OS/2., and That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies."
Gates on Linux
.Net; Longhorn Web services go along with that. You always have to do something very dramatic to move things up to the next level. Who has the guts and the willingness to do risk-taking to get ink into the standard user interface? Who else is going to push that forward? Who else has the guts to get speech, get the recognition levels up, get the learning levels up in the standard interface? We've chosen to do that. If we didn't believe in those things we wouldn't be increasing the R&D budget the way that we are.
USA TODAY:There seems to be some worry at Microsoft about Linux and some of these Web-based things like Sim Desk that have popped up. Houston, Munich, and Beijing have all been considering using Linux-based products rather than going through Microsoft. How much of this is a concern?
Linux is the current OS competition, but it's no more threatening than OS/2. Remember OS/2?
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY
Bill Gates: Well those are our current competitors. I mean, it's no different than in the past people used [IBM's operating system] OS/2.
USA TODAY: Nobody used OS/2.
BG: Are you kidding? I mean, let's be serious. That was IBM, a company 15 times our size. Name a bank that didn't use OS/2. OS/2 was IBM's product, and the IBM army marched behind that product. People always think today's competition is somehow different and unique in some way. Let's be serious. I mean, we've had to bet the company many times on big technological advances. We bet on the 16-bit PC. We bet on graphical user interface. We bet on the NT technology base. Now we're in the process of betting on a combination of technologies called
USA TODAY: There has been some criticism of the way in which you're been competing against Linux, and in The New York Times, assuming it was accurate, reporting that the e-mails in Europe talked about undercutting Linux at any cost, per se. How do you react to that, and where do you cross the line of that going back to some of the behaviors that surfaced in the Justice Department case?
BG: Well I'm not sure what you mean by undercutting. We will never have a price lower than Linux, in terms of just what you charge for the software. We compete on the basis of, if you look at the value you get out of the system and the overall cost that the system has that apply in our software. For any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project. And so the question is can that 3% [compensate], in terms of how quickly you get the system set up? How much value you get out of that system, can it justify itself in that way? And that's the business that we're in every day.
USA TODAY: On May 14th, Orlando Ayala [Microsoft's senior VP for the Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partner Group, which aims to introduce Microsoft products to smaller companies and purchasers] in his e-mails authorizing him to draw from a special fund to offer the software set discounts or even free if necessary, under no circumstances lose against Linux. Has Microsoft changed its behavior patterns?
BG: The idea is that we're in a competitive situation, that we're willing to provide a better price. This is not a general problem. This is about education situations, and educational bids are very, very price sensitive, and we've always provided super low pricing for education. We're actually providing even lower pricing now for education then we ever have, but it's been unique pricing for us, literally since the company was founded. And yeah, we, on educational bids, we will meet competition. That's considered healthy pro-competitive behavior.
USA TODAY: Is there a scenario by which you would at some point consider porting Microsoft applications into Linux?
BG: There's no consideration of that at this point.
In the OS2/Windows battle they were both retail packages, and one crashed much more than the other.
With the Linux/Windows battle you have an open source, cheap, stable, varied and fully customizeable system vs. a repeat of the same old win2k base... no matter what crappy name you throw on it. Also, Linux ditros don't have crappy software licences which i'm sure nobody likes.
Microsoft is blind to view this as the same battle as OS/2. They are underestimating their opponent and it will be their eventual downfall.
Let me assure you, lots of banks STILL use OS/2 and they will do so for the foreseable future. The fact that you don't use os/2 does not mean it is dead. It is as dead as Fortran and Cobol.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
"Your license has expired - please contact your IBM representative to discuss renewing this or any other license you may have"
So, yes, banks still 'use' it, though sparingly. Most of the OS/2 machines had notices on them from 2000 saying "We'll turn this off in 3 years time if no-one uses them in the meantime"
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Help fight continental drift.
There were not one, but TWO versions of this book. IF you manage to find a copy at a bookshop, you're more likely to come across the second edition, which is basically an entire rewrite that includes the Internet. Most of it was about how Microsoft software would run your refrigerator, dish washer, TV, change the pictures on your walls etc. It was kind of a description based on his own house, which is a technology showcase in its own right, in Redmond, Washington.
My journal has hot
BG: We bet on the 16-bit PC.
.Net
So did many other companies. M$ was not first. Plus, there was not much "company" to bet, at that time. Microsoft's only innovation, at this time, was in getting PC manufacturers to agree to an illegal licensing scheme.
BG: We bet on graphical user interface.
After Apple showed the way, and proved the market.
BG: We bet on the NT technology base.
Just adding features long present in Unix and other operating systems.
BG: Now we're in the process of betting on a combination of technologies called
Following Java's lead.
Microsoft: we innovate by marketing technologies invented by others.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
nobody used OS/2?
I briefly worked for 'fortis' a huge international company, did insurance and investing. thousands, if not tens of thousands of OS/2 seats.
and just the other day i pulled up to a wells fargo atm, and it was out of order... OS/2 in a reboot loop....
OS/2 was a major player, if not for very long...
Gates is right though. OS/2 was huge - just not in the desktop home-user circles. Hell, my bank still uses OS/2. They're one of the largest banks in Canada, and they're an IBM shop through-and-through. They run on IBM's big iron mainframes, they use IBM's WebSphere (JSP and the whole shebang), and they use OS/2 on their desktops (with Netscape 4).
People nowadays just seem to think that nothing happened, but while it might have been as big a phenomenon as Windows, it sure isn't dead.
--Dan
Yeah, just like no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM!
PSA: This is an urban legend.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
If you've ever checked in at a United Airline ticket counter or one of the gates at one of thier hubs, your information was being run on Win3.1 with TCP/IP and Netbeui run off of an OS/2 backend over token ring. The advantage back then was the mainframe connectivity and protocols OS/2 provided (now they have a Linux machines to convert the protocols when needed). They are slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) moving away from this but it is still running fine and has been for over 10 years. Almost all of the smaller stations have been converted to straight TCP/IP without the OS/2.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
And clearly you have no idea how many machines ran OS/2. Linux is on thousands of web servers now, but OS/2 ran tens of thousands of ATM's, which have only recently been converted. OS/2 was on many more desktops than Linux is now.
Actually, J2EE is built using RMI-IIOP (or Internet-InterORB Protocol, or the CORBA protocol), not the original RMI-JRMP (Java Remote Message Protocol). J2EE transactions are CORBA transactions. J2EE security is CORBA security. JNDI naming is CORBA naming. That is how all of the cross-app-server compatability works (or rather, will work, in the future, hopefully, but thats an entirely different topic)
You should read the J2EE specifications, its all in there. J2EE hides all of that CORBA stuff, but its in there.
CORBA is quite alive and well, with new specifications arriving all the time, especially in the telco arena (for network management, etc, there is still lots of active work).
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
And then proceeded to realize his oversight, turn is company around on a dime, and now has a large slice of that internet pie.
If by that you mean "buy a browser, bundle it with the OS to kill the competition, take a BSD TCP/IP stack and kludge that into the OS, buy up dozens of popular Internet sites".
Microsoft never contributed anything to the Internet in the way of innovation. What they have they bought from other companies.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It wasn't even really competing with MS, because the people who used apps on os/2 ran them in windows (which was conveniently bundled with it out of the box)
I fail to see mr. Gate's analogy here.
Speak for yourself.
As great of a quote as this is to bash on Bill.. it is simply not true, but is in fact an urban legend of sorts that has been widely circulated on the internet.
Here is an interview with him clarifying the fact.
There is also a good interview in the New York Review of Books that also attempts to shed a better light on the matter.
Ok...it seems a bit silly to say "Well Windows beat out all the other OSes around" when you think about the computing scene then and the computing scene now.
Back then, we had MS already deeply entrenched because of the licensing deal with MS-DOS. Windows was an obvious upgrade. So you buy a PC with MS-DOS, perhaps Windows, or a Mac. This is what the consumers bought. Large institutions were still working on UNIX, mainframes with COBOL, etc.
Now...now you have a computer as common an appliance as a telephone and a toaster. MS is still deeply entrenched, no doubt about it. But this ignorance of "we beat other OSes before" won't last this time. Now we've got 8 year old kids beating the crap out of me with their *NIX coding, with these kids networking their house for their parents, playing with other operating systems. The kids see other alternatives to servers and OSes more suited to programming. So what if Linux isn't on the desktop yet. If it's got THIS much popularity without a pretty desktop face, just wait until it DOES get one. And do you really think...after the Internet bubble burst, companies would be blindly embracing something without a viable reason? IBM, HP going with Linux. Apple with a UNIX core...
The point is, more people are actually willing to try other OSes right now, not just the select few that could afford a $3,000 286 Leading Edge Model D.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Don't forget POSIX! Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem, but it was effectively useless.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
I remembered during the recent M$ anti-trust trial, one of the witnesses called to the stand is an IBMer (Garry Norris Story One and Story Two). He mentioned that IBM was given license to ship Win95 on the eve of it's launch on Aug 95.. I mean, M$ holding back on giving IBM license to ship Win95 until a couple of days before it's official launch!
Imagine the black-mail by M$ to IBM
Anyway, according to the testimony, IBM and M$ finally reach a deal for the Win95 licensing and one of the conditions was a gradual abandonment of OS/2..
I remembered whenever Bill Gates was giving interview, post-launch of Win95, when asked about competition from a more superior OS - OS/2, he kept saying that he's wondering why IBM is still supporting a 'dead' OS..
All the time!
Is he saying it again about Linux because he reached a deal with someone who'll ensure the death of Linux too?
SCO ? Darl McBride? Hello hello?
Signed in blood by a former Team OS/2 member, now Team Tux
Will sys-admin for food
Tell this guy. I was replying to him sarcastically.
"Derp de derp."
When I was there till recently, I asked for and got read-only access to the NT codebase. I was dicking around with Bochs, reading the Intel arch. manual. To kind of see what was going on, I found and read the code for the NT boot sector that bootstraps from real-mode to protected mode, and then continues in the "real OS"
That file is dated 1987, OS/2 1.0 joint code with Microsoft and IBM. It must be the last OS/2 code still in there. I dunno, it just struck me as funny as hell to find code from 1987 OS/2 driving the WinXP/Server2003 boot sector!
Make some jokes or something. That sure is what we in the south call a "Shit-Eatin' Grin" ol' Billy is wearing. He'll give you the HEEBIE JEEBIES.
If you look off to the side, you'll see links to the other parts of this interview. There were a few questions on each of ten subjects. I was acutally thinking they'd scored a pretty long interview.
Many publications won't let authors publicly claim credit for the bigger stories. There's a tendency for guys being assigned the hot stories to become stars in their own right and leave the paper, letting the name create an asset for the competition. There's also a standard of not crediting interviews where the questions were put together by a full staff and only one person was actually delivering the questions.
Get it right. IBM chopped 384K off the top. There were several other manufacturers (Victor, Zenith, Tandy) who had MS-DOS implementations with 900K usable memory.
Microsoft didn't spec the IBM PC, and IBM didn't spec MS-DOS.
Furthermore, since MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator, it's stupid to say that MS-DOS can't address non-contiguous memory.
I sat in a room with a few hundred people way back when and heard Bill say that OS/2 was the future. I wonder if he will be proven right once again :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Umm. To my knowledge, windoze still does not have speach enabled UI or apps. OS/2 Warp 4 had it as part of the OS. The speech-enabled netscape was quite nice.
...is as bright as Bill says, why are he and Steve divesting a billion dollars in the past month?
Although the rest of your comment is accurate, I wanted to point out that the number of bits the processor is capable of wasn't the problem. In fact, to the external world, the 8088 processor only handled 8 bits, although internally it processed data in 16 bit chunks. The important fact was the number of address lines. There were 20, but due to the way the system was implemented, the upper four were rendered unavailable. I think someone else pointed out that there were other 8088-based systems that had 900+KB of memory available.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Dragon Naturally Speaking by Scansoft has been winning awards since 1997. I first saw a demo of the product at the 1997 Comdex in Las Vegas and was suitably impressed. Microsoft, on the other hand, debued it's first speech recognition software in 2000 with the MiPad. And that was merely a prototype, not a working product.
Without arguing the merits of either technology, it does look like another case of MS jumping on the bandwagon long after it had gathered steam.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Dear Cabal,
There have been numerous OS's that didn't and don't require you to have "esoteric" knowledge to install software. Should we do a little run through?:
MacOS (The original), Amiga, Atari, OS/2 for instance, right up to the morder day with Mac OSX, Linux (there are many distros and applications that require nothing more than double cklicking) right up and including my Nokia phone running Symbian.
Here's my own personal list.
I could keep going, I guess. I have much to bitch about, and yet people insist that even their shit is golden. Gag me with a spoon.
Oh, last but not least: "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Bill Gates never said that! It was the CEO of IBM who said that quote!
Saying this you must also believe that McDonalds has the best food in the world. Over 13 bln sold :-)
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I agree that it's wrong to say that MS-DOS can't address non-continuous memory. It clearly can, otherwise why go to the trouble of creating all those memory holes in the top 384k?
However, you are wrong to state that MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator. It certainly did, otherwise how would it load programs? If you don't believe me, look up INT 21 AH=0x48, 0x49 and 0x4A.
-Graham
Bush, with every speech, pushes the American people into further misery where he pretends to be the sole relief to that misery. He acts like we need him to fight terrorism when all he's really doing is creating endless fear. He uses this fear to justify everything and anything he does. How many times were we on high terror alert? How many times were we attacked? See my point?
Bush is a nationalist masquerading as a patriot. It is "un-american" to disagree even though, oddly enough, that is what founded this country. The first ammendment gaurantees us that right, yet we are made to fear exercising that right.
He is merely someone who presents the facts
I guess you're going to tell me that WMD were facts. I guess the CIA was wrong when they told the president that the evidence was not verified. I guess it wasn't a lie when the president told us he found WMD even though the "mobile weapons lab" he pointed to were really stations for filling up hot air balloons. The only thing that is undeniable now is that Bush is a liar and he can't say the word nuclear.
If the CLR was a "C# language runtime", wouldn't you think that I would be able to exercise all the functionality of that runtime through C#? There are handfuls of functionality put into the CLR that C# the language DOES NOT SUPPORT, but other languages such as VB.NET, JScript, and J++ do support. On top of that, there's functionality that as far as I can tell none of them support.
Contrast that with the JVM which foremost only supported Java. Every other language has had to conform itself onto the JVM. There is some conformity required by the CLR, but not as much.
Going forward Microsoft has atleast put forward the intent (both in words and Microsoft research projects) to keep moving the CLR in the direction of "Common Language". Sun and the JCP have no such intent with the JVM.
If the upper four bits of a 20-bit address are unavailable then you only have a 16-bit address. The 8088 did provide a full 20-bit address to the bus, otherwise it wouldn't have a one megabyte address space. IBM reserved the upper memory for video cards and IO. The processor had nothing to do with memory limitations, aside from a 20-bit address which was a very small jump up from 16-bits. Heck, the 68000 already had a 24-bit bus (Early 68000's may not have brought out all address lines, I can't recall for sure)
Why do ppl keep saying he didnt say that.
;-)
He is quoted in the Peter Norton book: Inside the IBM PC
We are talkin 1981 and the 8088 days....
I still have that damn book
You obviously never users Mandrake's package manager. OpenOffice is preinstalled with Mandrake 9.x, but let's assume that it wasn't.
Click on start->Configuratioo->install software
Type in "openoffice" and click on search
Click on "openoffice" in the search results window
Click on install
Wait until it says installation is completed.
Now use OpenOffice. When you are done, go have dinner at an expensive restaurant with all the money you just saved by not buying MS Office XP. Heck, bring your family too, the saving will cover all of them.
I can't afford a sig!
For the record, the 8088 had an 8-bit bus, 16-bit registers, and 20-bits of address space. The 8088 is to the 8086 as the 80386SX was to the 80386DX, and few people claim that the 80386SX was a 16-bit chip, otherwise we'd be claiming that current consumer CPUs are anywhere from 64-bit to 512-bit.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Here's another:
If he announced that the sky was blue, that would be enough of a reason for me to head to the nearest window to see what colour it had changed to...MS-DOS 2.0 and above had a memory allocator. MS-DOS 1.0 didn't. It made writing TSR programs (particularly TSRs that did disk access) rather interesting.
As someone who was actually around for MS-DOS 1.0, it wasn't at all clear for 2-3 years that:
(a) The IBM PC would be a big seller, or that
(b) MS-DOS (as opposed to, say, CP/M 86, UCSD Pascal, or bare-metal programming) would be the winning programming environment.
The best-selling IBM PC word processor for the first couple of years had no OS at all - it ran on the bare metal.