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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."
"passing through" technologies don't last as long as Linux has already.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
This is the guy that managed to overlook the internet when he wrote The Road Ahead in 1995.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Silly Bill, did he forget that Microsoft and IBM partnered on OS/2?
Off to RTFA to find out....
He is right. Windows is pusing the technologies. Pushing them in the way they desire. nevertheless, they are. Linux has a long way to go for smooth MultiMedia usage.
Nevertheless, he is only right for now. Linux is a locomotive, and its only picking up steam.
OS/2 was once a joint product between IBM and Microsoft. In fact, I have an old OS/2 book with a foreword by Bill Gates himself where he refers to OS/2 as "the future of computing". That is why NT originally had an OS/2 subsystem and supported the HPFS filesystem from OS/2.
With Linux, Microsoft has never had its hand in the pie. They have never had any control over its development. Linux bears no similarity to OS/2 as a competing technology. To suggest it is just wishful thinking on Bill Gates part.
The magazine with the widest readership in the nation. It probably has the lowest reader-IQ-average as a direct result. The last thing Mr. G wants to happen is for your PHB to read USA Today and think, "Huh. This Linux thing is a big deal."
So, here he says it isn't a big deal. I'm sure that in real life, he cares a great deal about it.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
> Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing
> thru competition just like OS/2.
Well, what would you expect him to say? That Linux may (if people get their act together) start threatening Windows on the desktop, and that people are really not fond of Microsoft's draconian licensing schemes and forced inclusion of DRM in their products?
A newspaper interview with a businessman is nothing more than an opportunity for free advertising. You don't think Bill knows that?
We bet on graphical user interface.
Funny, I seem to remember that someone else had already proven the GUI in the market when MS "bet" on it.
I gotta agree with Bill's reaction on that one. The interviewer lost all credibility when he said that. He's one of those people that thinks he knows the technology market because he uses technology, which at best only tells you about consumer technology.
None of his friends used OS/2 so nobody used it. I guess nobody uses mainframes either, and the Internet was invented 10 years ago.
In the article, he basically says that few companies have the guts to innovate, and that Microsoft does this constantly...
Surprise: Xerox did that way before Microsoft ever thought about it. And Bill himself only thought about it when he saw one of the first demo model of the Apple Lisa (if I remember well). And that's just one example among many.
Microsoft never innovated: it just latched on all the good ideas. GUIs, ACLs, www browsers, spreadsheet, heck, even the mouse was invented by somebody else.
So, what kind of "innovations" has been created by Microsoft? Maybe Clippy. But that's it, and we all know how helpful that is...
And for those who may believe that Microsoft improved on all of these, I have just four words for you: Blue... Screen... Of... Death.
Whew! Enough ranting. You can start modding me down, now.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
> They keep bring us new stuff like MS-Bob.... and Clippy...
Of all the stuff they've released in multiple markets over the past two decades, all you can find to troll with are Microsoft Bob (an application from 1995) and Clippy. Seems to me they might not be doing so bad after all. Why not compare modern versions of MS apps to versions of Mac OS or Linux from 1995 then?
I love Linux, but the Microsoft Bob troll is so crusty, like no mistakes were made with Linux or OS X over the years...
The big difference between other Microsoft competitors and Linux is that the others have to be lucrative for the companies developing them. IBM had no reason to develop OS/2 if it was not going to be a profitable project.
The development of open source alternatives is typically not for the purpose of selling the software at a profit. Therefore, unlike commercial alternatives, they will not be cancelled if they cannot make a profit. I think that gives the open source competitors a huge advantage.
I don't know about you, but that interview told me a lot more than BG wanted to. In the first answer he seems to get really angered about the claim that "nobody used OS/2" and ends up sumarizing why Microsoft is the best company in town.
... USA Today is interviewing one of the richest and more powerful man on earth and the main topic is Linux.
Linux is here to stay, and they know it. This is _not_ like the OS/2 days. OS/2 was IBM's, GNU/Linux is a comunity, they can't sweep linux out of the market because most linux users uset it because they won't run anything from Microsoft. I know I do.
Even if RedHat, Mandrake and all commercial distros dissapear and SCO's FUD manages to kill Linux (highly unlikely) the mentality, press coverage and community that has gathered around GNU/Linux will live on in the *BSDs and even in OSX.
All the people and companies spreading FUD and satanizing Linux have, in some way or another, gained a lot from the GNU/Linux movement. SCO has lasted a little longer than it should have because of OpenLinux, OSX and Windows have incorporated software and ideas that were born in the GNU/Linux/*BSD world.
Even if Linux is to dissapear the "damage" is already done
Some would say that the "world domination" thingie has already started.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Several somebodies had actually.
Microsoft was the LAST person to the party when it came to the GUI. The same thing goes for "NT" technology. Billy is still trying to effectively replicate both MacOS and OS/2.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There years in desktops, maybe, but it's been a important player in servers longer than that.
Now, turn around, pull your thumb out of your ass, and read something educational.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
"People always think today's competition is somehow different and unique in some way."
And the roadside is littered with companies that believed they were "somehow different and unique" from everything that had gone before - where are they now?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
... but still didn't find it that gratifying. A couple of things that I would like to note though:
Windows does seem to be a platform that does a lot of innovation. I've seen the betas of Longhorn, they're really doing some awesome architectural change to the OS. I don't think Linux users can deny that the most popular window managers out there aim to imitate Windows' look-and-feel so as to be familiar with those users. What does this result in? A clone machine. Nothing risky and new is done very often and really pushed out (I'm talking about KDE or Gnome doing something major and pushing it out) for fear it'll push potential new users away due to its dissimilarity with Windows.
Don't get me wrong. Linux is very stable and the kernel is getting so rock-hard and that is very impressive, but until there's really a reason to make people's heads turn, people will remain on Windows. They need to see something that turns their head and they say "Wow, that's something that makes my computing life easier that's not available on Windows." Only then will desktop users really consider switching. But as long as the advertising scheme for Linux is "Just like Windows!", there won't be a super compelling reason for people to switch. Oh yeah, the lack of software hurts, but we've beat that catch 22 into the ground.
Of course, another problem is that once it's done on Linux, Windows will probably embrace-and-extend it. That's a slight downside of the cost arrangement of Linux. If someone was to get some new innovative thing into Linux, nobody can afford to get protection for it such as patents. Sure, most of you may not like software patents, but face it, it's the way it is and you have to protect yourself whether you like the system or not. I'm not saying MS will steal the code, but they have a whole slew of programmers that can tinker with something until they figure it out.
This is all stuff easier said than done. Since MS is the 900lb gorilla, they have a lot more freedom to do the pushing than the following. These are just my opinions, though.
-Shippy
"No computer will ever need more then 640kb of system memory" -- Bill Gates.
"Yah, and Linux isn't competition either."
Yeah and Bill definitely said that.
"Derp de derp."
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 .Net; Longhorn Web services go along with that.
.NET and C#)
Let see:
- IBM bet on the 16-bit PC.
- Apple bet on the graphical user interface
- Netscape bet on the web.
- The NT technology base (thats "new technology" technology for those don't know) was forced down user's throats.
- Sun bet on the internet and Java (MS calls this stuff
Yeah, MS took some big risks there
Gates: Who has the guts and the willingness to do risk-taking to get ink into the standard user interface?
Me: Apple
Gates: Who else has the guts to get speech, get the recognition levels up, get the learning levels up in the standard interface?
Me: Apple
t'nera semordnilap
Yeah, but it does make me really curious about a few things.
I think the mere fact they talk about Linux in a USA Today interview with Gates says a lot. Besides, in the interview itself he isn't completely dismissive about Linux or OS/2. He said that OS/2 was serious competition because it had the weight of IBM behind it. If he's publicly saying the same thing about Linux then they are saying in public that it's a major threat.
Personally, I hope they misunderestimate Linux right until it kills them. I stand by my belief that once non-windows home computers have around 20% of the market share, MS is doomed. At that point, hardware manufacturers will be losing serious sales if they release products with only Windows drivers. Software manufacturers will either release only for Windows, or make the software multi-platform and increase their potential market by 20%. Game manufacturers will be in an even better situation. If they release for PC only, they hit a small market, if they make the game multi-platform, not only do they get the additional computers (Linux, OS X, etc.) but additional consoles as well. If MS loses the monopoly on Windows machines as game computers, and Apple decides to break their monopoly on Office by doing what they did with Safari... at that point MS is dead. Let's just hope they don't know it yet.
Who cares how long it's managed to be around? How could it be called the passing fad? It hasn't passed yet and is obviously doing very successful so.... where's the interesting point here? So what. UNIX has been around for 40 years and Linux for about 12 to 13 compared to 32-bit Windows' 8. Neither Linux or Windows has died out yet so none of them are passing fads. One's merely younger than the other *shrug*
-Shippy
OK, before you mod me to -1000, think about this for a second. This is precisely the way the mainstream users look at the PC market. (Actually, they're an even tougher crowd than this, and I could have added a few more requirements to the list above. But that will suffice for a first approximation.)
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Linux suffers from some of these problems, but incompetency and bad marketing are hopefully not amongst them. The one thing Linux absolutely has to do however is start loading up with consumer features. This means making stuff easy, be it installing new drivers, supporting graphics and sound properly, playing games. At the moment Linux sucks unless you're prepared to put a lot of effort into it or never intend to change your hardware ever. At present I'd say that the big boys have just about mastered producing a reasonable desktop, but there is a long way to go yet.
I wonder how long it took Billy G to find a journalist that didn't know how to ask questions about the answers. seriously though, I'd like to see a real interview with someone objective (someone who doesn't hate one side completely) and who has a full awareness about the subjects of the questions so that we can hear more than just media hype layer.
my sig --(GPLed, use it, but make the source available)
New is not the issue. The issue is how many jobs are out there for asp, .Net MSsql vs opensource jobs? I VERY rarely see a job in our market(BC Vancouver) for even the most popular of opensource coding, PHP. So how in the hell is open source going to win like that? Even if it is true that many of these companies that are publicly MS are using Linux and BSD in the background, how is that going to help the movement progress?
Eric
By definition, CEOs are cheerleaders to the general masses. The article was written for USA Today, bought mostly for its 4 colour weather map.
Of course his answers are going to be biased. Of course they are going to be "MS NUMBER ONE!" in tone. It would be irresponsible if he didn't.
A CEO is a part sales person. He is selling MS. He and all sales people will streach the truth.
Move along, nothing to see here.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
He's trying to change history.
Remember, reality means nothing these days. It's all about making the public think they know something. See it in public relations, politics, product advertising...
Salt is NOT bad for you.
Tomatoes are NOT vegitables.
The USA is NOT a democracy.
Microsoft did NOT revolutionize the PC.
Yet people believe.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
Sounds an awful lot like the Iraqi Minister of Information: "Linux has been beat, destroyed, and will never compete! Ever! It is passing on..."
(From the article)
> 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.
Wow. Not my experience, to say the least.
To me, this is indicative of exactly where Linux does and will continue to shine. The above statement is probably true for Chase Manhattan, and I doubt we'll see Chase switching to Linux anytime soon (although I don't doubt that their big iron is still a commercial UNIX).
Most of the people I deal with, though, are either small research groups or small businesses: Five guys with three computers and a world to conquer. This is where Linux is already excelling, and I think this is where it will excel for the immediate future.
That is why Gates is wrong. OS/2 had some advantages over Windows (such as the 'IBM army' as he puts it), but it was competing with Windows for the same goal. Where I see Linux being really successful is in places where the Microsoft Barrier-to-Entry(tm) is just too high. Unlike OS/2, Linux isn't going to be driven from these places. Linux is not going away, although it may not be going to the foreground, either.
And as more and more small businesses and contractors and researchers use Linux to do cool and interesting things on the cheap, bigger businesses will start to notice.
Kinda makes your point moot doesn't it?
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies.
This is quite consistent with what Bill Gates has said many times before, that "freedom to innovate" was endangered by any action against Microsoft, despite it being officially judged a monopoly.
Alongside this use of doublespeak is the recent lobbying by the "Institute for Software Choice" in Australia for government organizations there to avoid free and open source because of the economic harm it would cause to MSFT, a corporation based in the United States.
As a U.S. citizen, I've already enjoyed the benefits of free and open source software developed in Australia and look forward to seeing more of it. Likewise, a lot of free and open source software has been developed in the United States that could be of great benefit to Australian users in government, industry and at home. I don't see why the Australian government should be especially restricted from making the kinds of command decisions on IT infrastructure that companies all over the world make every day - you know the kind - the corporate standard is to run Windows and to use Word, etc.
The hue and cry about freedom of choice and innovation is only raised when there is a palpable danger that the choice might be other than one designed to further bolster the financial interests of Microsoft, or that innovation might result in a potentially lucrative new technology being developed outside Microsoft.
People like Bill Gates who, with his money and fame, enjoys instant access to government officials and the media across the world to promote his point of view (aligned to increase shareholder value at MSFT) is able to get an audience that common people, or even average knowledgeable IT people, simply cannot hope to get.
The fact that free and open source software is making inroads through grass-roots word of mouth based on its own merits, devoid of such a heavily funded marketing organization, and despite this lopsided point of view being propagated by Gates at the highest levels and in most public venues, is a remarkable testament to Lincoln's adage that "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".
It gives me hope.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
People are dumb, panicky animals that will follow anyone willing to arouse them. Bill is just real damn good at getting the herd to put their collective nose in his crotch.
Clinton said he didn't have sex with that woman, either.
I'm not saying that Bill did say that; thing is, *him denying* that he said it doesn't make that fact, either.
I wonder if the real truth will ever come out. When I went to college in the mid80s I remember hearing that 640k joke quite often; and this was before the real media hype surrounding Gates and MS started. So...I wonder.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
yes, they've been 1 apart.
and That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies
does the article submitter think that Linux is the one pushing new technologies? yeah, that'll be the day...
I have an old friend (and linux fan, like lot's of people there) working there at the development and, despite it's just talk among the employees he told me: 1) MS is very, very aware of free software in general and gnu/linux specialy as a treat, probably the biggest they ever faced. 2) Despite the aparences (see Balmer's shows), they are very smart people and they have labs running all there is under the sun and even real internal applications running on several different platforms for evaluation on real life situaions. The upper managemment knows everything about it. 3) This is pure speculation. He thinks they will continue the FUD trying to slow down teh free software movement and at the same time, trying to bring in the best ideias to compete technologicaly. So, in my mind, this interview is just what was told here already: pure PR.
Faith can move mountains. I prefer dynamite.
Show us an operating system besides Windows that doesn't require you to hold esoteric knowledge to install an easy-to-use word processor and email app.
Yes.
Get a Mandrake 9.0 ISO.
Serisously. It goes somthing like this:
Insert CD.
Partition things. Install things. Add a password. Reboot.
Congrats, you now have Linux with a pretty desktop, OpenOffice, Kmail and Mozilla.
Compair with XP:
Insert CD. Partion things. Format. Reboot. Install. Type in long setrial number. Reboot. Install more things. Install Office XP. Reboot. Register XP. Install SP 1-3. Reboot.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Linux, on the other hand, still IS, and is a extremely large competetor to Microsoft, at least in the server arena.
Overall, the opinions of Billy Gates on this issue are rather baseless, comparing Linux to OS/2 and the like. Two key differences are that Microsoft actually participated in the creation of OS/2, and it was not open source.
Bill's view of the world is predictably MS centric.
Who cares what some corporate director thinks of Linux? Linux and OSS do not have to compete in the market as they are not of the market. They cannot be bought or sold, or controlled, driven out of business.
OSS is not another Pepsi for the masses, its for coders, and people that want an OS that was created to be useful, not filled with stupid sh*t thought up by a focus group.
Bill goes on about all of the hot new "technologies" that MS is creating, all with suitably meaningless code names, "longhorn", "lance", "infinity", "big sleek cat like thing". Who knows if any of these things will be useful. Most MS technologies seem to be focused on locking their customers in to their platform rather than providing any useful functionity. Paladium, Doc scripting, passport, the paperclip, need I say more?
Commercial software is increasingly becoming a platform to get you to buy other stuff. Personally, I get enough advertising stuffed through my eyeballs already. Its like movie theatres, remember when you used to go to a movie pay your $2.50 and NOT be showen 30m of commercials before the movie started?
In a nut shell, commercial software producers think a great enhancement is a talking paperclip whereas OSS producers think a popup blocker is a good feature.
Just be happy, and grateful to OSS developers, that you have a choice.
I'm no fan of Bill Gates, or his buggy software... but one has to realize that at the time, 16bits was all you had to work with. That gives you 65,536 byte addresses. It took some time for "cost effective" 32 bit processors to hit the mainstream. I think they did a fairly good job considering the hardware they had to work with as well as considering they had to make it affordable. The big problem was with all of the backwards compatibility Bill insisted on for his stupid 16bit Visual Basic programs when designing the successor of Win 3.11. Add in the monopolistic business practices, and you have someone that most people can hate and loathe... lol ;)
Ah, the ol' "largest target" falacy.
/home directory structure instead of something like /usr/home or who cares/knows.
IIS enjoys only one half the market share of Apache for web servers. Meanwhile IIS enjoys the majority of actual hacking events.
Why? Monocultured soft target. Look at Nimda and Code Red they're working on the hopes that you have your files located in C:\winnt\system32\...
Easy target. Pushover even. But NOT the largest target.
Your Linux scenario neglects a few things about priviledges needed to open up ports and the like. You also need to give that program execute priviledges and hope that (in your scenario) they are using the
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
...for the moment. MS needs to stop worrying about innovation and concentrate on making a product that works better. Once they accomplish that, then start innovating again. Same can be said for cell phone companies. They come up with all these stupid and useless features like camera phones, but you still can't get a signal half the time. I bought a cell phone for making phone calls, not taking pictures. Sheeeze!
You're implying Bill Gates actually wrote MS-DOS -- he didn't. He bought the short-sighted OS from someone else.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I think Bill's interview is typical PR material; anyone from MS's marketing group could probably give the same interview. But what scares me, is that every time Microsoft "innovates", all they really do is make stuff that is incompatible with anything non-Microsoft (and sometimes their own products aren't compatible!)
That in mind, it seems more important to me to promote open standards than Linux itself. Of course I would love to see Linux have a respectable desktop market share for better OEM support. But what good is my Linux machine if I can't even surf the web because too many web pages are written only for IE? How much of a pain is it if I have to tell everyone to resend their MS Office documents in a format I can read (OOo won't always cut it)?
And now we're seeing some cases where the US and/or state governments' are officially blessing Microsoft's otherwise incompatible data formats---this should be criminal! Public information that is avaialable electronically (either through the web or some other means) should not dictate which software is used to view, edit, modify or interact with that data.
If you go to a "IE only" government website, you're effectively seeing a tax funded advertisement for Microsoft. Your taxes paid for the software purchase, for the staff to setup and maintain that system, and now you're effectively taxed again by being forced into purchasing some (very expensive) software. And people call open source communist?!
I think we need to put some effort into a strong "inform the masses" campaign. An easy first step is to write editorials to your local paper brining to light the dangers of proprietary data formats and vendor lock-in. I was thinking about pre-scripting a lot of these letters and posting them on my website for all to use/borrow/steal/whatever. These letters also need to be sent to government representatives.
The article should contain proposed solutions. As much as we love Linux and friends, we can't beat it down peoples' throats. Some other viable thoughts:
Finally, I think it's important to have some good, strong analogies or metaphores to illustrate the negative impact of the Microsoft monopoly (and their use of proprietray, non-compatible data formats). The most obvious analogy, to me, is as follows:
What if Ford Motor Co. owned all the roads in the U.S.? Surely they would design the roads such that only Ford vehicles worked on them. And furthermore, they would hide behind IP laws to make it illegal for anyone to make a car for their roads. What if Ford only offered one or two models of cars that actually worked on these roads? And those cars were their most expensive?
If the above scenario were true, public outrage would be rampant. Most people simply don't realize that this contrived situation is the case with Microsoft. Worse, people don't understand the implications of Microsoft literally owning your data.
Welcome to the United States of Microsoft, comrade.
This is as meaningless and irrelevant as the analogus statements made about Gates. "Earning money" is not a character reference unless the money was earned honorably. Where Gates falls on that scale is a subject for debate, but citing his wealth out of that context is meaningless as far as I'm concerned.
Ho hum, another "MS is so successful only because they're a monopoly" post. Did you ever consider that it takes something to actually become a monopoly in the first place, one that fostered an unprecedented (PC software) industry expansion over the last 20 or so years?
MS does actually provide value to a huge customer base - there's a reason that their monopoly has thrived. Like it or not, MS has played a large role in the progress of desktop systems over the last two decades.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Actually, that's a very good summary of why MS has been a good business. They let other people shoulder the venture risk, often with MS' funding, then they take the (prospected and analyzed) risk of a full deployment of that technology. If their product is often inferior, it's inconsiquential to the Gee-Wiz factor and the confidence people have[/had] that the company would improve it. In the past, MS was usually the first one to show people new tech.
...which brings us to today (and reality). You'll be hard pressed to find anyone in the tech sector that has confidence in MS' responsibility to deliver good code. MS has to rely on managing bureaucracy's confidence in MS, which still exists because MS is a successful business. Thanks to the Internet, and MS' demonstrated incompetence at using it as a tech showroom, MS is no longer the first company to show tech to most people. Now the companies that actually shouldered the initial risk can show the tech off. MS can still offload initial risk, minimizing their liabilities, but it's harder to yank the rug out from their "partners" now. Recently, they've tried patenting ideas their partners are developing that they're funding. Half the time, they've got a contract that permits it, and the other half of the time it's illegal but the patent department thinks they have the right contract.
Anyhow, MS can still fund innovation, but the other two leverages are gone. That leaves us with the business practice of funding innovative and/or useful projects and selling the results with a service plan. Oddly enough, that's what OSS-interest companies are learning how to do.
Segueing back to the first paragraph, I've some political speculation. In the USA there's a tendancy to try to team up and pick a winner, which is why people tend to try to stick with the popular choice, even if it's inferior. This is probably because of the mindset of strategic voting required for multi-candidate plurality voting to function in a reasonable way. That is, everyone decides to buy MS because that'll give MS more money (resource) to work with to improve their product, as opposed to giving a lot of candidate companies a little money. This may explain why countries with wiser voting systems (like Borda Count, Instant Runnoff, or {my favorite} Condorcet's Method) more readily adopt Linux, BSD, or adopted BeOS.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
"Neither has Linux. It's had, what, 3 years of being slightly important so far? OS/2 had many more."
I'd put it at more like five years. Some of us have been using it for even longer than that. It might have had hobbyist roots, but once we started selling masquerading firewalls to people with dialup and early Cablemodem/DSL, inroads were made. Then, we started selling file servers, and then servers to replace Windows NT Server as a PDC, and so on, and so on...
This isn't to say that it was immediate, or that it was in chunks, but grassroots movements, which Linux started out as, don't jump out immediately. It is rare that I find anyone at all who hasn't at least heard of Linux. They may not know anything about it at all, but simply hearing the name has some recognition.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Bill underestimates the open source community as whole. Mr. Gates asserts that the social intertia behind the open source movement does not have enough MONEY to mount a challange to Micro$oft. The problem is that the economic value of the open source community is found in leverage mindshare. The economic force behind open source and Linux is in the abillity and intelligence of it's contributors. This is the vision and reality of R. Stallman in drafting the GPL. Micro$oft will never match the intelligence and creativity of the open source community.
Number 2: Compare time-to-market performance for Linux versus Micro$oft over the past few years and the eveidence is clear that Linux design cycles easily out-performs the lumbering monolith of the Micro$oft development process. Whatever Micro$oft throws at the market will be copied or improved much faster in the open source community than Micro$oft's developers. They have already lost due to their cumbersome internal organizational structure.
"It's the CONTENT stupid!"
JP
"If Microsoft built cars, the Linux community would make a car that was powered
by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, and
available freely - but only 5 percent of the people would use it."
The car would have to be assembled at the home. There would be a steering wheel which is only used to navigate the car some of the time. There would be 47 pedals that each respond to varying levels of pressure. The manual would contain no illustrations and only cover half the functionality. A passenger seat is available to add to the Linux car, but the installation procedure requires new tools that you'll have to research how to use. The headlights and blinkers work, but the windshield wipers are still in development. (Nobody thought to copy that functionality until MS did it 4 years ago.) The Linux Community would bash MS for their wiper addition, claiming that one of their modes work only intermittently. However they'll cheer on the Linux team when they finally figure out how to copy that function they thought was useless and would make the users stupider. You'll be able to get a moon roof for free, but once you install it you'll find that you have to replace a component in the engine because suddenly the tires won't turn anymore. There's no automatic transmission, only manual, and it's got 19 gears plus 3 seperate modes.
Despite the well known fact that consumers want easy to use products that do what they need them to without much fuss, the Linux Community will act stunned and surprised at every turn that only the few people with the interest and the time will want anything to do with this car. Meanwhile, the Microsoft car still sells quite well and people drive quite happily with it. They've even got a large selection of games to play.
"Derp de derp."
Of all the stuff they've released in multiple markets over the past two decades,
All of it has been bought, borrowed, or stolen EXCEPT Bob and Clippy. Show us something else they've done that actually demonstrates anything resembling innovation, and maybe we'll stop poking fun at Bob and Clippy.
In other words, we're not poking fun at Bob and Clippy because they were mistakes (MS has made plenty of other mistakes, i.e. the autoexecution features in outlook). So, saying that "mistakes were made with Linux or OS X [too]" is missing the point completely.
Now, I'll grant you that there isn't a whole lot of innovation in Linux either. But the flip side of that is that Linux advocates don't go around bragging about their "commitment to innovation" either.
If the linux community used half the time it spent slamming and trying to discredit Bill Gates and Microsoft in general towards improving linux, MS would probably not be able to compete and be out of business by now.
Yeah, I can't find it either. The earliest I found definate refference to it was in 1986.
Note what the quote you're reading in 1986 actually says, though... "Bill Gates couldn't imagine why anyone would need more than 640k with MS-Dos", which is pretty much true. I doubt he even said that, but if he did, it wasn't such a dumb thing to say - and may have even been said in the context of promoting a next-generation graphical interface that would require more memory.
On the other hand, all this does is illustrate that you can't prove a negative. Lots of people around here saying things like "he can claim he didn't say it, doesn't mean it's true!" Well, I can say your claim to have not killed JFK isn't true either, but I would probably look pretty ridiculous doing it. Of course, you probably couldn't prove you didn't kill JFK, but that doesn't give me the right to say you did.
Statements like the one you found in 1986 are how rumors get started, and rumors turn to urban legends simply based on the fact that it's often impossible to prove a negative, to prove something didn't happen. If nobody here can provide proof (and not the "I heard it was on some Apple CD in 1981" nonsense), then it fits the definition of folklore.