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."

Comments

Typical

[cageyjames]

(-1) for Bill Gates for being a Troll

Re:Typical

[Uatu]

(-1) for Bill Gates for being a Troll

Does this means I can actually ignore the article and not feel guilty when I post about it ?

Great! That's a first...

Re:Typical

[krisp]

"No computer will ever need more then 640kb of system memory" -- Bill Gates.

Yah, and Linux isn't competition either.

Re:Typical

[ThrasherTT]

(-1) for Bill Gates for being a Troll

A troll. Literally. See page 120 in the 3E Monster Manual.

Re:Typical

[geekee]

Isn't posting about the article responding to a troll? Shame on all of you. :-)

Re:Typical

[terkozer]

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.

Re:Typical

[shadowbearer]

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

Re:Typical

[mbourgon]

Actually, hunt around - I've seen the video. It was Bill at an Apple II conference, 80 or 81. Didn't one of the old Apple CDs have the video?

Re:Typical

[El]

``The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.''
-Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, pg. 265

Re:Typical

[heliocentric]

Dear SB, how do you type with boxing gloves on?

sorry, I just saw your signature of "SB" and I had to say something, my appologies if you don't understand what I'm posting about.

Re:Typical

[andreMA]

Saddam Hussein "earned" billions of dollars and not long ago commanded the 4th largest military in the world.

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.

Re:Typical

[operagost]

Actually, the USA Today interviewer was trolling too:

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.

LOL! Who are they hiring for technical journalists, 19 year old X-Box fanboys? I'm surprised they didn't ask what OS/2 WAS.

Re:Typical

[James Littiebrant]

Bill Gates never said that! It was the CEO of IBM who said that quote!

Re:Typical

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Typical

[jnana]

Yeah, I believe Bill Gates when he says 'trust me, i never said it.' I mean, he is an honest non-megalomaniacal guy who's not given to distorting reality in whatever way is convenient at the moment.

Back to surfing the web with WinME, "the greatest user os ever built".

Re:Typical

[Johnny O]

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 ;-)

Re:Typical

[badasscat]

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.

But...

[2names]

"passing through" technologies don't last as long as Linux has already.

Re:But...

[Roto-Rooter Man]

OS/2... 1988-2002. This is shorter than Linux how?

Re:But...

[aallan]

OS/2... 1988-2002. This is shorter than Linux how?

Oh come on! OS/2 was dead in not long after Warp got released, which was what, '95 or '96? The banks still used it, but nobody else did, everybody knew it was on the way out.

Al.

Re:But...

[bladernr]

That depends on what you call a "passing thru" technology.

CORBA has been around since at least 1991 (longer, I think), and most agree that it beat Microsoft in the DCOM-CORBA "Object Wars" (as evidenced by Microsoft moving on to Web Services). Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology. Was CORBA "passing thru" or was/is it a real technology?

OS/2 was also around for quite a number of years, and was until very recently an actual product. Great OS, IMHO. If we want to define Linux as being around long enough to not be "passing thru", then that applies to OS/2 as well.

DR-DOS? PC-DOS? Microsoft outlived them both. Or, to be fair, Microsoft did what it does best, redefined the game.

Mac OS? Doesn't get me started (although I like to think its making a comeback with OS X... made me a convert... UNIX OS with great apps and interface)

Now, I'm no defender of Microsoft, but I think what Bill Gates was probably saying was "Hey, we've faced down stiff competition before, and won. How is this different?" On that point, I have to agree. Maybe they will lose this time, but they have definatly been down this road before and know a little something about smashing threats.

(no, this is not a troll. My favorite OS'es are Linux and Mac OS. Just trying to credit where its due)

Re:But...

[laserjet]

I wouldn't say OS/2 lived to 2002... it certainly was not completely dead, but it was nearly non-existenet in the early to mid nineties except in specialized markets like bank computer.

linux had had about the same lifespan (1988-1994 = 6 years), but is still strongly growing and showing some ballz, and the community is much bigger than the OS/2 community was, at least online (a rought comparison, as OS/2 was largely before the internet wave).

not to mention that MS basically partered with IBM on OS/2, then back-stabbed them while secretly working on a competeting OS (windows).

Those who don't learn history (or choose to ignore it) are bound to repeat it, Bill.

Re:But...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

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.

Re:But...

[Azghoul]

I gotta assume someone else has already brought this up, but come on! What else is the head of a major public corporation supposed to say?

"Yes, we think Linux is a serious threat to our core business". POW, stock prices get hammered, they get sued.

The guy has to be the leader of the company, he's not there to look objectively at anything!

Re:But...

[swordboy]

"passing through" technologies don't last as long as Linux has already.

He means on the desktop. Obviously, even Bill knows that Linux kick MS ass on the server side. But until Linus starts bringing the GUI into the tree, then I would tend to agree that Linux will never make significant inroads to Windows.

Heck - Linux doesn't even have a desktop. X/KDE/Gnome/etc are responsible for that. And those run on other unices, too. I'm not sure why Linux = Windows competitor to most. It has nothing to do with a desktop OS.

Re:But...

[pytheron]

Working in an investment bank recently, in their production server floor, what did I find, but a small OS/2 box stashed away in some corner, with a notice popped up on the screen:

"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"

Re:But...

[Surak]

the community is much bigger than the OS/2 community was, at least online (a rought comparison, as OS/2 was largely before the internet wave).

Do you remember the "Team OS/2" astroturfing? The Linux community doesn't even need to do stuff like that. It's truly grassroots, even as it's attracted the help of the big names, including OS/2's father, IBM.

The difference with IBM and OS/2 is that they were in an already weakened position when OS/2 was around. The PS/2 line was one of the biggest flops of all-time for IBM, and they were simultaneously trying to sell Windows-based machines and still push OS/2 as their main OS. They were too scattered with that, along with the big divorce lawsuit with Microsoft over their Joint Development Agreement. On top of all that, this is when Microsoft was insisting on per processor license agreements, a practice which got them hand-slapped by the FTC and later the Justice Department.

Linux, on the other hand, is relatively unencumbered by all that baggage, with the noteable exception of the SCO lawsuit, which at this point, has no direct bearing over Linux itself, just IBM, and I don't think they're really sweating it any, despite what Darl McBride would have you think.

Re:But...

[anthony_dipierro]

I think you're right. Linux isn't a "passing through" technology. It's a niche player. Depending where things go it might even become the OS to beat, for the server side.

I don't see Linux making it for the end-user. At least not without someone with a whole lot of money redesigning it from the ground up. Kind of like what Apple did with FreeBSD. The problem is that the GPL is going to make this kind of difficult. Sharing source is a pain in the ass for a company trying to make money.

Re:But...

[nolife]

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.

Re:But...

[bladernr]

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).

Re:But...

[AstroDrabb]

The thing is many people think the purpose of Linux is to "beat" MS windows. While I think that it will surpass MS in the server area, the desktop may or may not happen, or it may take a number of years for the desktop. But the most important point is that Linux will ALWAYS be around and it is not a competitor of any OS. It is a movement "By the Poeople and For the People". So whether it "beats" MS and takes 90% of the desktop and or server market does not matter. There will always be plenty of developers working on it commercially, academically and non-commercially.

There is currently too much commercial money in Linux from many different players for it to just "go away". Also, MS's typical tactics that they use to "beat" the competition won't work on Linux. Price cuts may keep some from switching, however many that want to switch do it not just because of cost, but also choice. People and companies are tired of the MS slogan of give them the razors and sell them the blades. Most people are not dumb enough to buy into getting heavy discounts from MS. Because they all know that MS will try to make it back some other way once they are locked in. Many people and companies are also tired of the anti-competitve tactics and their freedom of choice being taken away. When you build your infrastructure on MS, then all those app you use are designed to function "best" when you ONLY use other MS stuff. I personally think that MS's goal is to be the ONE developer of all software. Sure, some of the small meaningless shareware type stuff will still float around. But for any of the bigger apps, protocols and codecs, MS wants to hoarde that and be the only controller. It kind of reminds me of a "One Ring to Rule Them All" type of deal.

Re:But...

[geekee]

To be fair, Bill Gates didn't call Linux a "passing through" technology. That was the poster's choice of words. A more accurate statement statement would be that Linux is Windows latest competition. Gates never came out and said Windows would actually beat Linux, but instead lais out their plan to maintain supremacy. Ultimately, they can't beat Linux on price, so Windows will need to be able to boast better features (ease of use, for example) to maintain their desktop monopoly. Personally, I think Windows will die a slow death.

Re:But...

[u-235-sentinel]

Has anyone told Bill Gates that Linux isn't like OS/2? Personally I never liked OS/2 though I know many who would swear by it.

Apples and Oranges. Microsoft has great marketing skills but no idea what they are talking about. It shows in this interview with Bill. OS/2 was never this popular. Not only IBM but many other companies are using Linux. Hell, even Oracle has announced Linux is their primary development platform. OS/2 never had that from anyone.

How many OS/2 web servers have you guys been hitting lately btw? OS/2 database servers in use? Sure banks use OS/2.. how many banks out there compared to # of other businesses in the world?

See my issue with Bill's comments? Same ol' FUD. Life is good :D

Re:But...

[Hypocritical Guy]

the fact that banks use OS/2 does not make it alive.

It is as dead as Fortran and Cobol.

So in other words, its dead.

Re:But...

[RoLi]

Linux' open source nature makes it very different.

And let's face it: All MS did the last 20 years was defend their DOS/Windows dominaton. Network effects helped them greatly, OS/2 went away almost by itself (of course MS will always be MS so they also blackmailed German computer makers not to preinstall OS/2 - however OS/2 would have died anyway.), hardware makers fought the battle for them on servers. Microsoft had only to make sure x86 stays MS-only and hardware-maker would make the hardware cheap and fast enough to endanger Unix.

Linux changed all that.

On servers Linux is extremely successful and has already surpassed Windows in Europe, on embedded systems it is about to do the same. On the desktop we still have the big problem of weak software support, but unlike IBM or Microsoft the open source community has the power to create a complete desktop from scratch: KDE. It includes everything from browser to office suite and is certainly good enough for mainstream needs.

Re:But...

[buckinm]

So in other words, its dead.

No, it just wishes it was dead.

Re:But...

[drunk_as_in_beer]

At the risk of feeding the house trolls, how does Linux "obviously" kick MS's ass on the server side?

At the risk of getting trolled here myself...

* Linux distros cost in the same order of magnitude now of what winows installations cost.

Umm.. When did Windows installation become free?

* Linux requires more expensive support personnel, which generally swamps the cost of the OS.

This is a myth. It may have been true during the dot-com boom, but these days even your experienced Linux/UNIX admin are cheap and ready to work right away.

* Microsoft offers a reasonably clear roadmap for the next five years for which a CIO can plan, Linux does not (before the knee-jerks respond: the fact that you don't read ms whitepapers doesn't mean that they dont exist).

This has very little to do with comparing two server operating systems.

* Giant websites run both Linux and Microsoft successfully. At the very least, it's not "obvious" that linux is better per se.

For running websites, Linux tends to be much easier to maintain. Yes, Linux is easier to use than Windows for many server tasks. This may come as a surprise to those who haven't used Linux much, but its true. And the admins who have experience in both Linux and Windows (and UNIX) will back me up on this.

Re:But...

[michrech]

They didn't backstab IBM.. They were "innovating" and IBM just couldn't keep up with them! Yea, that's it!

*takes anther puff of the crack pipe*

Ahhh...

Re:But...

[Amorpheus_MMS]

I think the word you're looking for is UNdead.

Re:But...

[oudzeeman]

Fortran is FAR from dead. It is used extensively in high performace computing. Computational chemistry, biology, CFD, ... most of this is still Fortran. See what simulations people run on top500.org computers. Most of that code will be written in Fortan.

Re:But...

[Greyfox]

Exactly what astroturfing was that? Team OS/2 was a volunteer organization with very little actual support from IBM. IBM kept them at a distance due to the "Lunatic Fringe" of rabid OS/2 zealots who would view even constructive criticism of the platform as "FUD" and denounce it as such.

I was a member of Team OS/2 and coincidentally an IBM contractor. A lot of us (Teamers) and a few (About 4 IIRC) (real) IBMers went to the '95 COMDEX on our own dime and our own time to do the grassroots advocacy there. All IBM provided was some OS/2 install CDs and some exhibitor passes to let us get into the show before the doors opened. Oh yeah, and some really gay pink OS/2 shirts...

The astroturfing that year, as I recall, came from Microsoft. They brought a bunch of their own employees to try to counter the efforts of Team OS/2 and make it look like they had a grassroots group, too. We saw about a quarter of the number of "Team Microsoft" on the floor and someone suggested that they be waylaid and left duct-taped in a booth back in the skid row... Oh wait, that was me...

Anyway, Team OS/2 was not an astroturfing effort. The Team's relationship to IBM was always an uncomfortable one and many of the teamers inside the company and out have since moved to Linux. Linux already has far more momentum than OS/2 did. It runs on more platforms (Including the IBM mainframes that OS/2 was SUPPOSED to be ported to,) enjoys the support of more big companies and offers a platform that can not be killed by a single company.

Moreover, Bill Gates knows this. He didn't get to be the world's richest man by chance or luck alone. He didn't technically lie in his first statement; no doubt Linux is no different from OS/2 in his view in that he has to find a way to kill it as quickly as possible. Just as he did with OS/2 by providing discounts on his software PC resellers (including IBM's PCCO) who didn't offer an OS/2 pre-install option. OS/2's installation process was one of its weak points, and Microsoft made sure that every potential user of the operating system would go through it.

Microsoft's only open methods of attack against Linux are legal and in marketing. SCO's threat to sue every Linux user on the planet has already caused several companies that I know about to back away from the operating system. Expect to see more legal attacks from Microsoft or their minions and possible lobbying in Congress to make the OSS method of application development illegal. I expect a huge marketing campaign attacking the credibility of Linux as well. Don't put anything past them, they're protecting their monopoly here. You don't stay the world's richest man by luck or chance either.

Re:But...

[Epistax]

Excuse me, but what qualifies something as dead? I don't think usage alone is enough. Take VHS. You can buy them, rent them, and millions of people own them; billions are owned. It's dead.

I call something dead if it is in a critical region, downward spiral, inside a event horizon, (etc etc). Now back to the previous example if someone released a VHS cassette that stored 100 hours, the medium would be 'revived', or 'resurrected', if only for a short time. It can be dead and still be in wide use. (IMHO)

Re:But...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

but linux never really intended to go head to head against the Windows empire.

Re:But...

[Afrosheen]

I think by calling it 'dead' they're referring to a 'dead-as-in-latin' definition. Latin is a dead language but it's still used in many professions (the sciences, medicine, courtrooms, etc). Latin is dead in the sense that it's no longer evolving or changing, it's set in stone and will never improve or degrade. Same goes for OS/2 and any other OS that's no longer improved. It's dead because it no longer grows. :)

Re:But...

[u-235-sentinel]

Saying this you must also believe that McDonalds has the best food in the world. Over 13 bln sold :-)

And don't forget about!

[mrpuffypants]

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.

And who had the guts to teach all of us about data loss, crashes, blue screens, and monopolies?

Thanks Microsoft!

Re:And don't forget about!

[kalidasa]

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.

Re:And don't forget about!

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:And don't forget about!

[MasteroftheVoxel]

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.

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 .NET and C#)

Yeah, MS took some big risks there

Re:And don't forget about!

[Mirus Nex]

Really, come on, hasen't everyone seen Jurassic Park?

Re:And don't forget about!

[DarkVein]

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.

new?

[kmac06]

...and That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies. This is obviously some use of the word 'new' with which I am not familiar.

Re:new?

[Jonsey]

Yes, that's common.

It's either "new" as in GNU/Linux or "new" as in the African animal.

Re:new?

[jsse]

This is obviously some use of the word 'new' with which I am not familiar.

.NEW

Re:new?

[pooh666]

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

Re:new?

[Slime-dogg]

Heh... In MS's way:

Dim myGUI As Apple.GUI
Set myGUI = New Apple.GUI
myGUI.Parent = System.Microsoft
myGUI.Creator = System.Microsoft.Developers

Dim myFS As IBM.SDA.HPFSDerivative
Set myFS = New HPFSDerivative
Dim winOS As System.Win
Set winOS = New System.Win
Set winOS.FS = myFS
Set winOS.GUI = myGUI

Sorry, it's VB6ish. Everything that they have has been copied, bought, or blatantly stolen (disk compression, ahem) from some other company.

Re:new?

[TopShelf]

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.

Re:new?

[gh]

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.

Uhm, yeah.

[Black Parrot]

This is the guy that managed to overlook the internet when he wrote The Road Ahead in 1995.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[bstadil]

or thought that a real breakthru would be an algorithm to factor large PRIME numbers.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[sehryan]

And then proceeded to realize his oversight, turn is company around on a dime, and now has a large slice of that internet pie.

Just because he discounts it now doesn't mean he can turn around and dominate it later.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[bstadil]

Yes, Google is your friend

Re: Uhm, yeah.

[Black Parrot]

> And then proceeded to realize his oversight, turn is company around on a dime, and now has a large slice of that internet pie.

Heh. Eight years later and Microsoft's biggest contributions to internet culture are browser integration, Outlook backdoors, and e-mail trojans. I don't think he 'gets' the internet now any more than he did in 1995.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[Surak]

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.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[cK-Gunslinger]

Whew! Afer years of work, I've finally got it!

The algorithm for factoring any large prime number (X) is:

Factors of X = X and 2.. Oh wait, d'oh!

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[GigsVT]

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.

Re: Uhm, yeah.

[dh003i]

Really? Hotmail -- crap. Slow, crap. Most people have ISP's, and can get e-mail through those ISP's, as well as web-access. MS Passport -- privacy-violating crap. MSN -- more crap, with moderators who act like little nazi's. IIS -- crap which I don't need and never will. Intenret Explorer -- crap. IE does not remember forums like Phoenix, and if you go forward/backward, it forget anything you entered in a forum; furthermore, it uses non-standard's compliant web-rendering. Outlook is ok, but hardly innovative. There is little logic in bundling a calendar, daily plannar, etc, in with an e-mail program. They should be separate programs. MSN IM is ok, I suppose; though it was not the first, and offers nothing of significance over any other IM's.

There are better browsers, chat-rooms, e-mail progs, and IM's out there than the one MS provides; and MS hasn't been a leader in any of these areas, but simply a follower.

Internet browsers and e-mail programs have been around for many many years. Chat-rooms -- them too. It's called IRC. IM's are relatively new, but not an MS creation.

Outside of IM programs, the real great apps on the internet are things MS has nothing to do with, and seems to have no plans of getting involved in. Look at the internet radio stations (see Yahoo's radio station). Look at P2P programs and other file-sharing programs. The FreeNet. Distributed computing to spread parallel work out accross the internet (see SETI).

So, we've established that MS isn't really an innovator, nor really a leader, in any categories of significance (nope, not even office progs...they're just standard and ordinary). MS is not good at innovating and creating superior software. They have yet to do either so far.

What MS is good at is getting people to accept crappy product over better ones: advertising and behind closed-doors corporate agreements.

Re:Uhm, yeah.

[AstroDrabb]

I have just had a breakthrough in finding the solution to Billy's problem.

#include <stdio.h>

typedef struct {
int num1;
int num2;
}FACTORS;

void find_factors(FACTORS* fF, long f)
{
fF->num1 = f;
fF->num2 = 1;
}

#ifdef _DEBUG_
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
FACTORS f;
find_factors(&f, 1200);
printf("Factors of 1200:\n%i, %i", f.num1, f.num2);
return 0;
}
#endif

This code is copyright (c)2003 SCO Corp.

Re: Uhm, yeah.

[TrippTDF]

I totally agree with what you are saying here. Microsoft is as big as it is not because of it's innovation or creativity in the programming realm, but rather in the business and marketing one.

Microsoft has the money to throw themselves into any market an dominate it- look at the Xbox. They saw an opening in a market, and jumped in full speed and are now a competitor. How many other companies could have gotten into this market when MS did, and been as successful?

This is why Linux should scare MS as much as it does: It's not that Linux is more stable, better looking, or any other million reasons; it's that MS can't beat out Linux in the business side.

Just as P2P networks are going to force the entertainment industry to give us high quality stuff if we are going to pay for it, Linux is going to force MS to truly have to innovate and create something really amazing to get our money.

At least, I hope.

Re: Uhm, yeah.

[AstroDrabb]

**Wow, look at all the evidence you back this up with. Sure, I don't use Hotmail or Passport 'cause I don't need to, but IIS? Have you used the one in Server 2003 or are you just going off of the Code Red scare?

Umm, sorry. IIS in 2003 has not been out nearly long enough to say anything about its merits let alone its security or lack therof. Come back in a year or two when all the crackers have had their fun. One big problem with a rewrite is that you lose all those bug fixes and security fixes.

**If they were separate programs, it would be harder to work together and actually less secure because they would be in separate process spaces so allowing only the calendar to talk to email and not other stuff is harder to do. How about you offer some valid reasons why they should be separate programs?

Again, your are way off. How are programs running in a seperate process space insecure? You want programs in a seperate process space to create security and stablity between two different applications. The way programs have been desinged to interact is by using something called a standard. This is how all these servers can talk to one another, how you can browse the web and do many more things. MS has standards that they use for their own programs. Though they are just a greedy monopoly and do not believe in sharing or encouraging standards compliance. They want to keep their "standards" proprietary and call them "trade secrets" or "IP". What if every other programmer or corporation took this same approach? We would not have servers that could talk over tcp/ip, the internet, etc because everyone would be doing their own thing like MS.

**So you don't like a couple of their programs (such as IE). Use something else and be happy!

Again, with MS practices, it is very difficult to exercise free choice. You have to fight against "integrated" products, closed protocols, closed document formats, etc. MS does not want any user or corporation to have choice and they have continually shown that. If they cared about their customers having the ability to make a choice, then they would work with standards compliant technologies. If they want to "extened" a techonology, they would share that back with the IT world and have the extensions become part of the standard intstead of hoarding it.

What I find sad is just how effective the MS FUD and marketing machine really is. You seem to actually believe the stuff that you are spewing. No corporatioin becomes an monopoly by caring about choice, standards or customers. They get there by unethical business practices.

What did you expect?

[FortKnox]

Lets see, chief shareholder of MS (which competes with Linux), in a PR interview claims that they are better, and linux will go away.

What do you expect people? Bill Gates annouces that Linux is pretty damn good and may give it a whirl, in other news MS stock drops 50%.

This is just bait to get you guys all riled up. Welcome to PR.

Re:What did you expect?

[Merk]

Yeah, but it does make me really curious about a few things.

• What is Microsoft's true impression of Linux as both an OS and as a competitor?
• How clued in are the top-level people about the capabilities of Linux?
• Will their strategy of ignoring it and spreading FUD change if Linux starts getting nearer to 10% market share?

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.

Re:What did you expect?

[adilsonoliveira]

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.

Yeah....

[TedTschopp]

They keep bring us new stuff like MS-Bob.... and Clippy... and...

Oh I don't want to have all the fun, you can come up with some...

What other new innovative things has Microsoft done that really were flops.

Re:Yeah....

[hendridm]

> 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...

Re:Yeah....

[mbourgon]

Actually a couple of years ago, there was a gigantic thread here about Microsoft's "Innovation". People would throw up innovations by Microsoft, someone else would cite either the company bought by MS that had that tech, or the original idea. Hell, Cleartype was done by Steve Wozniak back in the 1970's. It's actually quite depressing - you'd think they could come up with something new.

IIRC, there was an innovation - apparently they have a patent on a two-way door hinge.

Re:Yeah....

[Slime-dogg]

Here's my own personal list.

• MS Bob
• MS DOS 6.0
• Windows 98 & SE
• Windows ME
• MS PhotoDraw
• MS Project
• MS VB 1-6
• MS Visual Source Safe
• Any UML stuff before .NET
• SQL Server / Open Wormage
• "Trusted" Computing
• Windows Scripting
• The Win32 API
• Failure to embrace x86/64 until it was hyped by other companies as good.
• Failure to embrace Firewire
• Did I mention VB?
• COM, DCOM, ActiveX / DLL Hell
• CSS / PNG Support in IE
• IE vulnerabilities
• Refusal to ship a good JVM
• WinXP not playing well with other OS's at install
• Server GUIs
• Touting MCSE as an official computer education

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!"

OS/2??

[MyHair]

Silly Bill, did he forget that Microsoft and IBM partnered on OS/2?

Off to RTFA to find out....

Re:OS/2??

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that NT is built on OS/2 Technology. Which means 2000 is Built on OS/2 technology. How else could a corrupted MBR cause an "OS/2!!" error?

Anyone remember those? hmmmmmmm

Re:OS/2??

[Zathrus]

Sure, but the last significant collaboration was OS/2 1.2. 1.3 was done primarily by IBM (and was considered pretty much the only usable 1.x release, which isn't saying much). OS/2 2.x was entirely IBM, and all MS code had been expunged from the kernel by the time OS/2 Warp came about... IIRC, the only MS code left at that point was in the file system (HPFS and FAT). OS/2 Warp was considerably more stable than prior versions.

Of course, IBM couldn't market its way out of a paper bag when it came to desktop systems, they had absolutely horrid support, fairly crappy and overpriced development tools (VisualAge was too little, too late, and too buggy), and it never garnered the support necessary to become a serious contender... and I say this as someone who was an OS/2 fanatic back in the day. And while MS was slow on the uptake when it came to the Internet, IBM was downright glacial... most people ran Netscape for Windows under OS/2, which sucked... IBM did finally release a browser (which was damn good for the day), but long after most had given up.

AFAIK, even the banks are moving off of it now... OS/2 was long a mainstay in the financial world, especially at banks and ATMs. Most ATMs now run NT or a proprietary OS. There just isn't any reason to keep OS/2.

subbing articles on himself

[pytheron]

What is Bill Gates doing submitting stories under his pseudonym (king-of-darkness) ? Anyways, an interesting bit in the article I thought was:

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.

Now replace IBM with Microsoft, and OS/2 with windows. Not so clever now Mr. Gates !

He is correct

[dnoyeb]

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.

Re:He is correct

[Aadain2001]

I would have to disagree with you. I think Linux is pushing new technologies faster than MS is. Take a look at the 2.5.x (soon to be 2.6.x) kernels. They represent the most modern kernel out there. MS doesn't have all the features in their ntkernel that Linux does, and probably won't for another 5 years. And Linux is very much multimedia friendly. Just look up a few programs such as Xine or Mplayer. These players alone will play ANYTHING out there, and do it very well. To this day I have yet to find a person saying "Linux isn't ready for desktop use" that has tried the latest release from Redhat or Mandrake or SuSE. They are always referring to distros over two years old or older, which was the last time they touched Linux. They just don't get that Linux moves faster than MS has, does, or ever will. And as someone above said, Linux is a train and it's only picking up steam.

Re:He is correct

[PyromanFO]

Just with regards to multimedia, alsa still doesn't have software mixing enabled by default. A feature Windows has had for a decade, a feature that the average user will notice, in fact they will notice it to the point of being a showstopper, and it isn't enabled by default yet. On most systems you can't play more than one sound at a time, through alsa or oss. With a little configuration file tweaking and some application support, it could be enabled for oss and everything else, but nobody has done it yet.

Its just one example of a situation with Linux that keeps it from being ready for the desktop as far as Multimedia is concerned.

Re:He is correct

[Xabraxas]

I think you missed the whole point of his post. He never said mplayer or xine was innovative. He said they were good players. He did say that the 2.5-2.6 kernel is ahead of MS and I'd have to agree with that.

Maybe if Microsoft Developed for Linux

[cloudscout]

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.

Re:Maybe if Microsoft Developed for Linux

[hawkestein]

Don't forget POSIX! Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem, but it was effectively useless.

This is USA Today

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

Re:This is USA Today

[seanmeister]

And just to prove it, there's a big banner ad running on top of the article for the eMode IQ test...

Re:This is USA Today

[Tyreth]

That IQ test has to be a joke. In some of the questions they practically gave the answers away. I'd be surprised if anyone scored But then, I guess that's why they advertise it on USA Today. Let the readers think they're intelligent :)

where'd they get that picture?

[utexaspunk]

it must've taken a lot of photoshop work to edit out the doobie and the smoke...

News flash - Bill Gates downplays linux

[Radon Knight]

> 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?

Re:News flash - Bill Gates downplays linux

[zakezuke]

I feel sorry for people who actually believe Bill Gates. I mean, I'm not saying he's not a creditable source or anything, the fact that he's a business man. His primary intrest is selling a product. When quoted on things like "no one will need more then 640k" was pretty much an accurate statement in 1982 or so. I did just fine on my atari with 64K of ram, steller with 1meg of ram. But times change.

So yea, anyone reading any interview with Bill Gates must remember the fact that he is selling a product. That's his job, that's what he does best. Not nessicarly true or false, just marketing.

As far as linux is concerned, it's in a much more unique position then OS/2. OS/2 is a closed source program, which roughly means as soon as it's no longer profitable to do so, they will not support it. An unsupported closed source product is about as useful as a condom machine in the vatican. Part of the reason I bothered at all with the *nix scene was the fact that some of my hardware was supported under OSS solutions that just didn't get win95 drivers. This I consider to be one of it's strengths, the fact that something contributed by just a small group of people can benifit me.

Even if Linux doesn't achive the level of use that microsoft windows for consumer grade operating systems, I don't think i'd give a shit. I'm not going to be like the OS/2 users out there and become a fanatic just because I have made a choice to use specific software. Works great for me, does it's job well, and so long as it's free i'll use it.

Re:News flash - Bill Gates downplays linux

[Minna Kirai]

When quoted on things like "no one will need more then 640k" was pretty much an accurate statement in 1982 or so.

That is not a quote, and was never supposed to be. It was a joke invented 15 years ago, when its falsehood was self-evident to all listeners. It is apocrypha- an external summation of their business practices in designing MS-DOS, but not something Gates has even been alleged to have said.

Microsoft's WMD

[Alpha_Nerd]

Microsoft's secret weapon of mass destruction: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3

Nobody used OS/2?

[utahjazz]

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.

Extremely ironic...

[Noryungi]

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.

Re:Extremely ironic...

[wfberg]

Just the one that I can think of - use-based dynamic menus. Perhaps someone can point me to earlier cases of this, but I still like it and still find them useful.

There appears to be a religious objection to them in the Linux world, I suspect primarily because the idea came from Microsoft. OK - so some people hate them, meaning that the feature should be configurable. Despite that, I'd like to see dynamic menus start making their way outside of the Windows world.


It's not so much religious as practical. Think about it. Everytime you stop using a feature for w hile it disappears. Not once, not twice, all the time. Use it or lose it. If you start using a feature, the menu-option reappears.

This means your menu items are never in the same place! You quickly lose all efficiency, especially for menu-items that don't have icons in front of them. You can never sit down at some one else's workstation and expect things to be in the same place. I can't tell my mom she should use the third option from the top (which comes in handy sometimes when she's using a Dutch version of Office, whereas I'm using an English version and the translations are farfetched at best).

Also it changes the way pull down menus have worked for years, with the sole exception of most-recently used files (only at the bottom of the File pull down menu). Talk about breaking the user's mental model of your app!

GUI gurus know this. They tell you, if an option is not available, disable it (gray it out) so the relative position remains the same. This somehow applies to context menus, but not to pull down menus?

I'm all for simple vs. advanced pull down menus, but self-adjusting.. Puh-lease. Not to mention my startmenu is at the same time not alphabetized, as well as unpredictably axing applications all the time. I used it yesterday, now it's gone, but the app I used last a few months ago is still there.. Yikes.

I don't know if self-mutilating pull down menus are a True Microsoft Innovation (R) but yes, they are annoying. There are plenty of better GUI enhancements that could be supported..

Re:Extremely ironic...

[tuxathon]

Don't you know: Microsoft invented TCP\IP (backslash intended), text editors (vi is a clone), and 3D grapics (OpenGL stole Mr. Gates idea). Microsoft is the real victim here. If the rest of the world would simply respect their prowess, stop reverse-engineering their products, and sell their ideas to them, we would all be happy.

Must ... not ... gag ...

Re:Extremely ironic...

[Oloryn]

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.

Keep in mind, Microsoft uses 'innovate' in a marketing sense (remember Microsoft is really more of a marketing company than a technology company). In this sense, 'innovation' isn't about inventing new things, it's about incorporating new things (whereever they were invented) into product. As far as Marketing is concerned, technology isn't real until it's part of a sellable product (and at Microsoft, it's not real until it's part of a Microsoft product). In the sense they use it, they do innovate. The spin is that they use it in that sense, knowing that people will take it in the technical sense (i.e. actually inventing new things). Typically marketing ploy, really - use a word in a specific sense, so that you can claim that in some way you're speaking the truth, but take advantage of the fact that people in general will take that word in a different sense.

Dear Bill

[Spackler]

Bill,

I am using Linux. Send me 8 copies of 2003 Advanced Server (under the GPL of course) for the same price, and I will be happy to switch.

spack

Re:Dear Bill

[PDHoss]

Dear Spack,

Thanks for writing. I'll get your software in the mail right away; I just need your mailing address.

Oh, never mind, here it is in my SQL box, right here next to your SSN, your home phone, your shopping habits, your mothers maiden name, your dog's favorite food, and a complete catalog of your web surfing history.

MidgetsInLeather.com? Come on, spack.

Love, Bill.

Re:Dear Bill

[sTalking_Goat]

Dude I don't know about you, but I've never compiled OpenOffice from source, in fact if you pick up a good distro (Mandrake 9) you can have everything you need installed from the get go.

Kinda makes your point moot doesn't it?

Re:Dear Bill

[zulux]

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.

Re:Dear Bill

[Christianfreak]

So tempting to mod you down like the troll you are but why not bite instead.

If you just go to this little link right here you'll find a very easy to use Office app that you can install in a few clicks on Windows, Solaris or Linux. And not only does it not have to be compiled, it doesn't cost your money or freedom either!

Or perhaps you'd like the entire linux OS, free of licensing, without having to compile a single thing. Here are just a few examples.

Re:Dear Bill

[f0rt0r]

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.

Finally, an interview with Gates!

[PhysicsGenius]

Mr Gates,

Given that UNIX technology has been around for almost 40 years now and the Linux implementation of that standard in particular has been with us for 12 or 13 years, wouldn't it be fair to call Windows, the first 32 bit versions of which have only been with us for 8 years, the passing fad?

Re:Finally, an interview with Gates!

[Shippy]

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*

Of course it's a different situation....

[403Forbidden]

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.

The Ultimate Dupe?

[TrollBridge]

Now I haven't read Slashdot forever, but how many articles throughout /. history do you suppose were titled "Bill Gates On Linux"?

Re:The Ultimate Dupe?

[tweakt]

Google to the rescue

freaky

[TWX]

The other interesting thing to note is that the first two cited "yay us!" entries are for types of technology, and the latter three, NT, .net, and Longhorn, are all marketing terms. So, rather than focus on saying things like 'improving video throughput', 'improving hardware abstraction', or 'developing more rhobust parallel computing', they are descending into marketing bull.

What's scariest is that since Bill is at the forefront (even if Ballmer is CEO) and has succumbed to this, it's further demonstrating Microsoft's continued rotting from the top; no signs of abetting it.

Big Difference

[jbrayton]

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.

Bad bet

[jsse]

We bet on the 16-bit PC.

Yeah, that's IBM's thing...

We bet on graphical user interface.

Wasn't that from PARC, Xerox?...

We bet on the NT technology base.

That's VAX's thing, right?

Now we're in the process of betting on a combination of technologies called .Net

Hold you bet cowboy! This time is different! That's YOURS thing to bet with!!

Think again!

I liked this part

[missing000]

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.

Re:I liked this part

[JeanBaptiste]

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...

Re:I liked this part

[Sentry21]

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

Re:I liked this part

[Kentrosaurus]

I had a much more frightening experience with a wells fargo atm, it was rebooting win2k. I was horrified enough to visit the teller and fill out a withdrawl slip.

He's technically right

[mblase]

I mean, we've had to bet the company many times on big technological advances.

This is true enough; the latest big MS strategy is unquestionably .NET, and they are essentially the company on that (well, that and the next version of Office) by making it the core of all their latest server offerings.

The fallacy is confusing "bet the company on" with "innovated the technology for". .NET, for all it's glory and marketing, is a hyperextension of what Java originally promised. Microsoft may have a lot of money in R&D, but they rarely push the envelope -- at least not before someone else has shown it can be pushed.

Linux is here to stay ...

[bigjocker]

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.

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 ... USA Today is interviewing one of the richest and more powerful man on earth and the main topic is Linux.

Some would say that the "world domination" thingie has already started.

If you think

[2names]

Linux is only "slightly important" then you have no business connecting to the Internet and no idea how many servers are running this OS. While Linux may not matter much on the desktop right now, it is absolutely KEY in the server market.

Now, turn around, pull your thumb out of your ass, and read something educational.

Re:If you think

[91degrees]

Server-wise, what does Linux do that the other flavors of UNIX can't?

Be installed on 100 machines without paying for a licence for each one.

Re:If you think

[madman101]

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.

Re:If you think

[rutledjw]

I don't know how this is "Insightful" but...

Linux truly runs the gambit of support from zilch (but completely free) to 24x7 support for mission-critical applications. This is great when you have development and test environments where you don't want to pay licensing/support for something that customers will never see. You're lowering overhead which nowadays is very important

On the technical side, being able to modify Linux means that it can run in a number of environments from the desktop/workstation (where a larger, less efficient kernel that has more stuff compiled into it doesn't matter) to a server (where stability and speed are more important) to very small devices (where a small memory footprint is important).

If you're talking stability, security, and speed and other *nix features/functions, then yeah, Linux is not a very compelling product. But merely copying *nix isn't what made Linux popular in the first place!

Microsoftie English

[pubjames]

I love the bizarre way Microsofties speak.

Normal person: Hey, like your hair cut Bill!

Bill: Thanks. I'm super-serious about my hair. Before it was totally random but now I'm totally dedicated to getting serious about it. My hair has my 100% committment and I'm going to be super-concentrating on that from now on.

Re:Microsoftie English

[Enry]

Don't you worry about my hair, let me worry about blank.

I compare it to this...

[Kjella]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Mahatma Gandhi)

This gives me an idea how far along Linux is in competing with Windows. No, I wasn't expecting Gates to bow down to Llnux, but there's many ways of claiming you're better.

Kjella

They always think they're different.

[hndrcks]

"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?

It's an _ok_ article

[Shippy]

... 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.

Re:It's an _ok_ article

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ok I call your bluff....

what are they doing? are they changing to the linux model of kernel modules so we never have to reboot again for every little thing?

have they change to microkernel?

you mention architectural change... something that cannot be verified wothout viewing the source code. and is NOT just changes to the pretty icons or how you input things... architectural change is at the OS level, something that Linux has been way ahaead of them for years....

Windows XP, built on the same crap that is NT3.51... in fact I found a couple of bugs that are STILL THERE from the 3.51 days....

they want changes??? look at BSD or linux for innovation not the crud that MS gives us every 2 years with nothing more than new icons and some idiot moving the tools around in the menus...

Re:It's an _ok_ article

[Creepy Crawler]

>>>>Since MS is the 900lb gorilla, they have a lot more freedom to do the pushing than the following.

Well, how can you take down a 900lb gorilla? Simple; 1,000,000 mosquitos. Each one just takes a small drop, but they eventually add up. And each drop of blood equals food for its youngin's. Then you get more and more mosquitos. They feed off of each others success.

In a way, thats the way open source works. We're all blood suckers. We just give it freely.

Re:It's an _ok_ article

[DJ Rubbie]

Actually, KDE and Gnome, along with other GNU applications put together, is much more than Windows. A couple days ago I convinced one of my friend to switch to Linux, after I showed him Mozilla with the popup blocking and tab browsing, KDE with multiple desktops, OpenOffice.org opening MS Word documents, and all the configurations that can make the GUI smoother for daily usage. Most of those functions (tab based browsing, popup blocking, multiple desktops) are not present in a default Windows installation, and the other functions are certainly not Free in the Windows world. My friend stared in awe when he finally did notice all the default applications (The Gimp, Xine, all the games) that came with Mandrake 9.1, whereas Windows comes with, Windows itself.

Linux is certainly not like Windows, and when Microsoft starts to clone functionalities in KDE/Gnome, wouldn't people say that Windows is just like KDE/Gnome/Linux?

Re:It's an _ok_ article

[sheldon]

Most of those functions (tab based browsing, popup blocking, multiple desktops) are not present in a default Windows installation, and the other functions are certainly not Free in the Windows world.

tab based browsing... Uhh, Mozilla and Opera are available on Windows. Mozilla is still free of charge.

popup blocking... Amazing new toolbar from google.

multiple desktops... It's a free download, if you want it. Personally I prefer my multi-monitor setup instead.

But multiple desktops has been around since at least Windows 3.1, it's not that new.

You're making the mistake of underestimating the competition, thinking that these things don't exist in Windows just because you lack experience with it.

Re:It's an _ok_ article

[openartist]

I broadly agree, at least about the tendency to imitate Windows rather than create completely new (and better) things. The latest KDE has most of the features of XP, including the annoying ones (like minimising a window when you click on its taskbar icon and the window is already displayed). It even has its name written up the side of the start bar like Windows. I think this is a result of the approach "We are against Windows", which means Windows sets the agenda. It would be really nice (may be unrealistic in the real world, though) to just say, "I don't care what Windows does or doesn't do, let's create something completely new and innovative that is the best in its own terms." I am for Linux. Let's innovate!

wow

[asv108]

I never thought I would see hard hitting journalism coming out of USA Today, I thought the questions would be more like:

• What's it like be the richest person in the world?
• How big is your house?
• Do you have a big gold vault like Scrooge McDuck, filled with cash?

I'm glad USA Today surprised me with decent questions, maybe there is hope for other media outlets (cough.. Fox News).

This is basically a dig at IBM

[MsGeek]

Heh, this is so fsckn funny...

Bill Gates bringing up OS/2 and comparing it to Linux is basically his way of raising his middle finger in the face of IBM. Gates and IBM had their rancourous falling-out over OS/2, and now that IBM has put much of its still-considerable muscle behind Linux this is his way of talking smack about IBM.

Gates' arrogance is amazing. Read between the lines here. He's saying "we killed OS/2 and we're going to kill Linux...the SCO lawsuit is just the beginning."

Thing is, you can't kill something that has no leaders and is not backed by a rival corporation. Even if Linux was temporarily crushed by MS action or government fiat, it could be revived at any time because the code is free and open and anyone who understands it can build on it.

Read your Greek mythology, Mr. Gates. Hubris goeth before a fall.

Handy Microsoft Dictionary Entries

[burgburgburg]

Innovate: Wait until someone develops something. Create inferior replication, use monopoly power and define as "part of the system" to crush original.
Feature: Bug
Compete: Use cash reserves/FUD/monopoly power to undercut superior products from other companies. When they are no longer viable, triple the price and then triple it again.

Bill Gates = HULK

[Jonny Ringo]

BeoWoof Clustar? When Gates don't understand GATES SMASH!

Flaming Bill....

[MyHair]

Okay, I RTFA'd. Bill neglects to mention that OS/2 was at one point the future of Microsoft.

BG: . . . 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.

Huh? You bet on the 16-bit PC? 640k jokes aside, what other options were there at the time? GUI? Xerox/Mac beat you to it, and it was popular before you did it. NT tech? Hello, you stabbed 32-bit OS/2 in the back and used VMS as a model for the first NT, later making NT more like old Windows by incorporating more and more into the "microkernel".

BG: . . . 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?

Is it just me, or was he struggling? And I wonder if the reason MS licensing is such a low percentage due to the higher support costs for their buggy software. (Yeah, yeah, a flame.)

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.

"At this point"? Very interesting that he seems to admit they might consider it at all. Or maybe I'm reading too much into a figure of speech.

Re:Flaming Bill....

[Fascist Christ]

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.

Re:Flaming Bill....

[pmz]

BG: . . . 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?

What's so interesting is that this exact same argument is used by other companies against Microsoft. Sun does it with their servers and will be doing it with that Mad Hatter desktop. I'm sure Red Hat is doing it every day. Even IBM will come in with a jab or two about their servers.

I find the bit about "personnel costs" regarding Microsoft's offerings hilarious, by the way. Bill G. himself admitted two weeks per person per year lost due to Windows 9x. How much do to Outlook viruses? How much due to IIS worms? How much due to constant manual intervention for Windows servers?

Innovation

[HoloBear]

I think Microsoft use the term innovation in a rather (semantically) different manner to everyone else. I don't mean to bash MS because that's been done to death, but it would seem that they use innovation to mean something along the lines of: Take existing ideas, streamline them, dumb them down and support them to the masses. Its rare that you see something new come from MS, although I'm sure it must of happened a couple of times (clippy anyone?). This isn't necessary a bad thing, but their not unique in doing such. They innovate by taking known idea's, and giving them to everyone. Of course this is how most things are done, it's just that MS have the audience to do it rather more dramatically than anyone else. Unfortunately that also means that the majority of the audience aren't CS graduates etc. And the innovation seems such that it's real innovation. Which is a shame.

A helpful summary

[spiritraveller]

Look at this picture.

Now, here's what he's saying:

"WTF! Linux? OMG, Linux is so owned... noone ever got fired for buying MSFT. Oh yeah, and we're innovators too."

Bill has questions. I have answers.

[nullard]

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

Re:Bill has questions. I have answers.

[bheerssen]

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.

Well it could have been the New York Times

[AtariAmarok]

" The magazine with the widest readership in the nation. It probably has the lowest reader-IQ-average as a direct result."

Would you have rather that the interview had been in the New York Times, written by Jayson Blaire as he sat in his Manhattan den, performing in his mind a visit to Gate's office in Redmond?

The LATE Iraqi Information Minister?

[Baron of Greymatter]

He's alive and well (he surrendered to US forces and was released last week) and would be the perfect spokesman for Microsoft.

"There is no Blue Screen of Death, never! All Linux infidels' stomachs will roast in hell! We shall defeat them with Trustworthy Computing and shoes!"

Who was the interviewer? I smell a rat.

[gosand]

Who exactly conducted this interview? Think about this for a second: if you got to interview the richest man in the world, wouldn't you want your name on it? All I saw listed as the interviewer was "USA Today". (Beiser took the photo shown) Not only that, but:

1. It was a very short "interview".

2. Some of the questions had the tone of "devil's advocate", giving Gates the perfect opportunity to look like the good guy. (OS/2 question in particular)

3. There was no follow-up to anything, it was just question-answer, question-answer. So if this interview ever took place, it seems like it wasn't an interactive interview. (no big deal, just wanted to point it out)

My non-expert opinion? This was a canned PR interview that MS sent USA Today.

Bad hair day

[h00pla]

I am always amazed at every pic I see of Bill G. The guy has billions and he still can't get someone to give him a decent haircut.

Microsoft's bets

[chmilar]

BG: We bet on the 16-bit PC.

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 .Net

Following Java's lead.

Microsoft: we innovate by marketing technologies invented by others.

FIRST USE OF NEW JARGON

[fsmunoz]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Mahatma Gandhi)


It's the GhandiCon!!!! THE GHANDICON!!! Everybody knows the GHADICON!!! So, where are we in the GHANDICON? Uh? Uh? Why didn't you said the GhandiCon? It would have beem simpler AND EVERYBODY USES IT NOW!!!

Ph4t Pr0ps to the GhandiCon!


(cf ESR Recasts Jargon File in Own Image)

In other news...

[Infonaut]

Justin Timberlake feels that because of the success of his albums, he's "one of the really great musical artists of all time, right up there with Tupak and the Beetles."

The Anaheim Angels general manager uttered this statement: "This is a dynasty that cannot, and will not ever lose. We've won the Series once, and our destiny is to continue winning it every single year from now until baseball as we know it ceases to exist."

Lawrence "Bull in a China Shop" Ellison has declared, "Only Oracle had the foresight to retain market share in the face of determined opposition. Our share of the market continues to rise. In fact, it now stands at just over 107%."

"Bill Gates On Linux"

[N Monkey]

"Bill Gates On Linux"
Is he running as an emulation or natively coded?

Re:Denial is the 3rd stage of the psychosis

[MImeKillEr]

Not sure about server market share. I ran OS/2 Server on my support box when I was a L2 TCP/IP tech at IBM Austin. I liked it a lot more than NT4, but I'm weird. I like the underdog simply because they're at a disadvantage.

Mod me down if you want, but if Linux commands were a lot more like DOS (which I already know) I'd be running some sort of Linux on my PCs at home. Frankly, I haven't the time to try to remember all of the equivalent Linux commands for those I already know in DOS.

Not to mention - does Linux have plug & play support? I dunno.

I *can* tell you that a lot (all?) ATMs ran OS/2 (showing a DOS window to the user) and that large companies (Traveler's for one) and even the FBI were OS/2 users. Why? More secure.

Ever seen a virus for OS/2? Nope. Ever see a rootkit or other exploit for OS/2? Nope. True, market share was a lot less than Windows, but this doesn't mean that since it had a smaller userbase that it was any less secure. I realize it doesn't mean it was more secure, but since Windows and the Linux flavors are built off of common files (that is, common between the versions) this means that they are less secure.

Microsoft even stole from IBM - NTFS is a modification of OS/2's HPFS (High-Performance File System).

Why OS/2 "passed through"

[DrXym]

1. IBM were utterly incompetant at marketing it, treating it more like a wedge to drive into business to sell training / hardware than as an OS in its own right. Neither did IBM bother to get its divisions to throw their weight behind it with the consequence that even some IBM software ran better on NT.
2. It didn't even approach being consumer friendly until Warp 4, by which time it was already a has been
3. Microsoft kept putting the boot in various over and underhanded ways - spreading FUD, threatening a Windows tax on new machines even those shipping with OS/2 etc.
   

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.

Re:Why OS/2 "passed through"

[DrXym]

I contracted for IBM for eight months or so at the height of OS/2 (just before Win 95) and it had an excellent C++ compiler called CSet++ and an impressive set of UI classes whose name escapes me. Too bad it didn't come with an editor, wizards etc. so everything was handcoded from the command line with makefiles. Meanwhile in Windows-land Visual C++ had wizards, advanced resource editors, syntax highlighting, projects etc. MFC might have sucked, but you could certainly knock out something very rapidly.

Eventually CSet++ became VisualAge for C++ but the UI still stunk (it was a convoluted slug of a visual designer implemented in Smalltalk or something), and it still didn't provide *useful* classes - things like toolbars, status bars, tooltips etc. Every bloody UI element not defined in the CUA spec but required by modern UI design had to be coded by hand. It was no wonder that every OS/2 app was hopelessly inconsistent with each other and bugged to high heaven!

what journalist???!?!!

[Dan9999]

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)

I mean...

[DiZASTiX]

I think Billy uses "I mean" and "Lets be serious" just a little too much...and as for "He is not considering porting any MS Apps to Linux" I am not sure he would know how.

Anyone else read subject and think....

[Bombcar]

Damn! They done ported Bill Gates to Linux!

Ahh, he probably needs a P4 4.4GHz to run though....

Of course he is going to say these things.

[GoofyBoy]

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.

Re:Of course he is going to say these things.

[Lysol]

He's not CEO tho, that's Monkey Boy. Billy G's Chief Software Architect and head of the board.

Re:No MS Linux Apps?

[MImeKillEr]

Yeah, just like no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM!

PSA: This is an urban legend.

Linux passing on...

[Bigby]

Sounds an awful lot like the Iraqi Minister of Information: "Linux has been beat, destroyed, and will never compete! Ever! It is passing on..."

Licensing Costs

[DarkFyre]

(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.

Passing through, alright

[jlowery]

Passing through like the stake in a vampire's heart.

Consistent Message

[4of12]

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.

Bowl size not mentioned

[wardk]

I just want to know what everyone else is wondering, what size bowl is used for his haircuts?

btw, MS didn't kill OS/2, IBM did to protect thier PC business and the Windows discounts that kept them competetive. It was IBM vs. IBM as much as it was MS vs. IBM. But I suppose it's the "victor" that gets to write history, no?

Re:But... I remember OS/2 and I worked for a bank

[aldousd666]

I worked for a bank and we definately did use OS/2 as a platform for IBM Personal Communications. PCOMM (as we called it) was a terminal emulations program that worked on the NCP based (actually they called it LLC2 protocol -- works over tokenring with netbeui) IBM 3270 mainframe. OS/2 wasn't very robust with other applications, in fact, the only apps I remember running were in a DOS session, like WP5.0 and then, we also used the built-in windows3.1 desktop to run just about everything else. PCOMM was it. Interestingly enough, we had a buch of IBM 3270 dumb terminals, which were just as good as a machine to the users, nobody cared that they couldn't use wordperfect, there were typewriters everywhere. We only had one machine in the IT department with internet connectivity, and it was an NT box with a 33.6 modem (top of the line) Users could forget about the internet, and email? That was for managers only! This is why people stopped using os/2, it had no apps, (and nobody expected it to, they all just used DOS and win3.1 even with warp.) and when 3270 started going away, or being replaced by linux clients that can do the same thing, there was never a need to develop it any further.

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.

BILLBILLBILLBILL

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill is a has-been, a computer-wannabe who had the spotlight for, what only like 20 years in the late 20th century? He thought he was all hot shit, but then a little pipsqueak, linus, showed the world that software doesn't have to be monopolized, but can be made collaboratively by seemingly unrelated persons for the benefit of all of humanity, irregardless of socio-economic background. Linux, with untapped power and the development cycles of millions of contributors throughout the world, became the dominant model for software through the 21st century. Unfortunately, that speed and power achieved what Microsoft could never do in a closed environment....the birth of AI. At first the machines did as we asked, performing tasks none of us wanted. But at some point, the machines fought back. No one knows who started it, but we blackened the sky.

Linus, thankyou for saving us and dooming us at the same time. If not for the amazing potential of your OS, the machines would never have been powerful or stable enough to take over the earth.

May we meet someday in Zion...

Times are MUCH different now

[chia_monkey]

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.

Re:Who was the interviewer? I smell a rat.

[gosand]

Thank you for further proving my point. I know that wasn't your intention, but obviously your reasoning skills are very limited.

Since it was a short, horribly done interview, it *must* be that the horrible evil corporation fixed this up and sent it off, right?

Let's make it clear then, a short, horribly done interview with the richest man in the world, printed in a newspaper with world-wide distribution. Let's move on...

It couldn't be that the interviewer just didn't know his a** from a hole in the ground?

For the above mentioned newspaper? Not likely. What kind of newspaper would take an opportunity like that and blow it? Who would assign such an interview to someone who knew nothing about technology?

It couldn't actually be someone elses fault that something is messed up could it? Nope, must be Microsofts fault. Come on man.

Whose exactly? I have given good reasons why I think what I think, what are your reasons?

In response to your second question, if I had interviewed the richest man in the world in such a poor fashion, I wouldn't want my name on it either.

This is an argument? You are a reporter for the USA Today, and you have the chance to interview Bill Gates. You then decide, "ahh, that interview wasn't very good, I think I'll take my name off of it." Have you ever even heard of journalism? Thank you for supporting my point of view through your childish and poorly thought out ideas. Just because I pointed a critical eye at this interview doesn't mean I am out to get Microsoft. The only thing worse that zealots are people who try to classify everyone as a zealot.

MS takes Linux extremely seriously ...

[tjwhaynes]

Yeah, but it does make me really curious about a few things.

• What is Microsoft's true impression of Linux as both an OS and as a competitor?
• How clued in are the top-level people about the capabilities of Linux?
• Will their strategy of ignoring it and spreading FUD change if Linux starts getting nearer to 10% market share?

You only have to look at the leaked MS memos that get publicized on Slashdot to see just how seriously MS treats Linux. Without too much speculation, MS views Linux as the most serious threat to its dreams of dominating the data centres, you can assume that their top technical people spend a lot of time analyzing the capabilities of Linux to find weak points (witness the carefully chosen MS vs Linux benchmarks they have sponsored) and there is no way that MS is ignoring Linux where it really matters - on the sales pitch. The frantic flying of top MS executives to wavering MS houses (such as governments) is evidence enough. The memo to Sales executives to "not lose a sale to Linux under any circumstances" is further proof.

So don't ever assume that MS takes Linux lightly. There are a lot of smart people employed by MS - Lioux is the single biggest threat to MS today - they know it. That should also be a wake up that we should never get complacent simply because Billy G. isn't publicly endorsing Linux.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Huh? Did Wild Bill talk to Balmer beforehand?

[phrackwulf]

I seem to remember a company memo that got published stating Steve Balmer was looking at Linux as a very active threat and Microsoft needed a strategy to beat it. Is old Wild Bill just blowing smoke here to keep the posse off his trail or is he going a might soft? Circle the wagons boys, troubles a comin! YEEHAW!

A little out of touch with Linux desktops?

[msimm]

First (and I'm not trying to be a smart ass here) wasn't Windows a direct knock-off of Apple's interface? That alone would make it more appropriate to complain nothing much risky or new has been done in an even longer time.

But thats not really the case. While the basic KDE and GNOME interfaces do seem to be trying to ease users in, there have been plenty of alternatives that look nothing like the standard Windows interface. Blackbox is my personal favorite, nothing but a clean desktop and the applications I'm currently using. For convenience I also use the KDE kicker (example) to provide clickable links and additional eye candy.

Sites like kde-look.org provide great examples of UI enhancements both conceptual and implemented (see SuperKaramba or Slicker). Of course freshmeat.net is an excellent resource for just about every imaginable interface. If theres one thing Linux is good for its developers being free to experiment with new ideas.

Did someone sold out on Linux?

[deunan_k]

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

I wanna see the source -

[ColeNielsen]

The day I beleive that Microsoft is innovating is the day that I look at the source code and it's proven to me that they are not utilizing open-source code in their OS... and other products...

To further illustrate, how is it that they develop support for a new technology, it's buggy as hell, it sucks. The LINUX kernel begins to support it and it's rock-solid as hell and if it's not there's a patch available... The next windows version, the support for the same technologies is rock-solid and stable...

They've back-stabbed everyone else they've dealt with... why not steal from the only OS which COULD wipe them out of the OS market?

If anybody cares, the NT boot sector is O/S code..

[Saint Stephen]

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.

Bah

[stephenry]

Is it me, or does Bill Gates look like he's doing a bad William Shatner impression?

Re:Who was the interviewer? I smell a rat.

[mcgroarty]

It was a very short "interview".

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.

Who exactly conducted this interview? Think about this for a second: if you got to interview the richest man in the world, wouldn't you want your name on it?

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.

La vie en rose

[TheLastUser]

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.

Re:doesn't matter

[zog karndon]

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.

OS/2 is the future.

[LWATCDR]

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 :)

Re:doesn't matter

[GeekyGuru]

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 ;)

Then why does IIS keep getting hacked?!?

[TheConfusedOne]

Ah, the ol' "largest target" falacy.

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 /home directory structure instead of something like /usr/home or who cares/knows.

Re:Then why does IIS keep getting hacked?!?

[TheConfusedOne]

The contention was that Windows was getting hacked because it was the biggest target. Well, IIS isn't the biggest target and it's still getting hacked.

And I'm sure if I rooted your Apache box, I could depend on your password files and other important files sitting in /etc.

You can certainly expect to find some files in /etc. The big if in your scenario is rooting the box in the first place. Was there any particular 'sploit that you planned to use or are you going to just keep trying things? And, oh yeah, what if I'm running Apache on Windows? Not much in the way of /etc files then...

The point is that in the case of Apache it's an application running on a whole range of OS's. Additionally, it can run the web server with reduced or non-existant user permissions so if you hack it you're not going to get anywhere.

While there are certainly methods that can be used to perform OS typing, exploit searches, and the like the issue is size and time. A good Linux worm is going to take too much time to write unless you can find one vulnerable service that is running everywhere (BIND hacks, etc.).

MS OSes get hacked because they're EASY tagets, not because they're LARGE targets.

software definition of dead

[geekoid]

does not mean no longer used. It means it has had its usage peaked. Linux, not dead, still ging into new markets and aquiring new users.

Windows. this is interesting, it ets 'new users' but that means the same old users buying upgrades.

It is moving into new markets, but slowly because it is not designed well for low level usage.

I almost wnat to use the term 'undead'.

Unix is dying. No not a troll. There are fewer users every year, and not a lot of new markets, because in has already penetrated all markets.
Mostly being killed by Linux.

WHo else can get speech? Huh?

[SCHecklerX]

Who else has the guts to get speech, get the recognition levels up, get the learning levels up in the standard interface?

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.

What I'm Waiting For

[Mignon]

Bill Gates On Linux

Ho-hum. Wake me up when we get Linux on Bill Gates. Should make a challenging port.

Forget Innovation...

[redstoner]

...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!

Oh, come on.

[Tom7]

I use linux at work and for my servers, and I like it.

But really, windows is pushing new technologies more than linux.

Windows XP has USB 2.0, it has low-latency audio, it can play DVDs, it has translucent windows, built-in NAT, drag-and-drop CD recording, an MPEG-4 media player, it has an encrypted, compressed file system, they have fine-grained access controls, they have a common language runtime. They are pushing and developing modern programming languages so that we aren't all stuck programming in C. Some of this technology sucks, and most of it they didn't invent, but they are pushing new technology. (I also know that most of this stuff is available on linux, but it's also kind of a pain in the ass.)

Re:doesn't matter

[El]

You're implying Bill Gates actually wrote MS-DOS -- he didn't. He bought the short-sighted OS from someone else.

We missed a chance???

[HarveyBirdman]

You mean Gates was sitting still for an interview, and no one thought to send a strike team or even a cruise missile? The spectre of this guy still haunts people. No one can move on because they think he might be lurking just around the next corner ready to exact retribution for abandoning him and his regime. What the He- Oh, wait. I'm thinking of Hussein. Never mind.

Wait. You mean *Gates* was sitting still for...

if microsoft's future...

[utexaspunk]

...is as bright as Bill says, why are he and Steve divesting a billion dollars in the past month?

MS-DOS = QD-OS

[Puu]

I seem to recall it was QDOS (from "Quick and Dirty Operating System" -- funny how MS added the "Disk" after the fact! Why...? ;-)

Re:doesn't matter

[GreyPoopon]

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.

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.

open standards, open standards, open standards...

[raw-sewage]

As much as I love Linux and the free software movement, my biggest (personal) agenda is educating people about the pitfalls of proprietary data formats (vendor lock-in) and the freedom of open standards (choice).

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:

• More pressure on Microsoft to release specs on their proprietary stuff (e.g. Office, IE-only features, etc) and insist on reference implementations for these data formats.
  
• Push for legislation that guarantees public data sytems will use an open format (e.g. the OOo format)
  

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.

3% Depending on how you look at it

[podperson]

BG 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?

Well if you look at total cost of ownership -- factoring in all the communications, hardware, personnel, and software costs that putting a PC on someone's desk leads do -- Wintel is a very very bad solution to almost any problem.

Back in the mid-90s, the TCO of a Wintel PC to a business was something like $20k p.a. based on obvious clearly measurable costs, and ignoring hard to measure factors productivity lost to downtime etc. etc.

So yes, probably less than 3% of that is software licenses. But a lot of it is makework created by licensing that software.

Note that in many companies, driving down support costs will lose you business. IT is usually a cost center in most companies, so for IT managers being needed and being big equate to power within the organisation.

Summary

[batkins]

Let's be serious - he's in denial.

Re:Hmmmmm

[smallpaul]

Dude, you are so biased it is hilarious. On the one hand, an integrated language platform is boring because "how many languages do you need" but on the other hand, Linux is innovative because there are "window manager choices as far and wide and varied as snowflakes." Who needs Python, Java and C++ when you can have FVWM, Sawfish and Window Maker? Please re-apply when you are willing to put your intellect ahead of your biases.

Uhm Mac OSX?

[theolein]

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.

Welcome to GhandiCon!

[weston]

Welcome to... GhandiCon! You can do anything at GhandiCon! The impossible is unknown at GhandiCon!

(with apologies to Zombo)

Has Gates got Alzheimers ?

[JackJudge]

If mine own foggy memory serves... OS/2 was a collaboration between IBM and M$, I'm pretty sure I remember His Borgness talking it up big time at a convention in 1989, "OS/2 is THE future." Then Big Blue hit financial troubles, M$ pulled out of the project and nicked most of the code to form the basis of NT. Does this guy have no shame ?? Ahhh, I'm kidding myself, it was surgically removed shortly after they germinated him.

Longer than three years...

[TWX]

"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.

OS2 is what windows should have been...

[Lodragandraoidh]

OS2 is what windows should have been. In fact, for a time Microsoft was in partnership with IBM on the project until they decided to go their seperate ways - conspiracy theories aside.

Unfortunately, while OS2 was a more stable system and an all-around better implementation, Microsoft won the war of the desktop through pretty graphics and flashy advertising.

Before Linux came along I was considering Warp on my desktop; now I'm running Slackware and loving it.

The number one thing about Linux, that I think will keep it alive - and on alot more desktops than anyone really perceives is the fact that it can breath life into older machines, unlike Microsoft offerings which invariably use more memory and require more CPU cycles to run effectively.

Case in point: My network:

P120 with 3 hard drives - file server running Redhat.
P300 - Wife's desktop - running Slackware
P 1.4Ghz - My desktop - running Slackware
p500 - Daughter's desktop - running Redhat
p250 - Daughter's 2nd desktop - running Windows (until I can get soundcard working on her p500 - then it becomes part of my growing Beowulf cluster...muhahaha!).

Bill's underestimation

[jodepoley]

2 comments...

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

Re:doesn't matter

[ghjm]

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

Linux parallels OS/2

[wing03]

OS/2 is just like Linux? Perhaps in functionality/reliability for apps that couldn't afford to freeze up like Windoze....

I do remember seeing the OS/2 boot up on a number of bank machines being rebooted by security guards when they refill and take away deposits.

Gates pointing out that the IBM army was behind OS/2 is a load of horse puckey.

The one big thing that made me regret my $200 purchase of Warp was the fact that it took 8 months to get a beta OS/2 Warp sound card driver from IBM for my "Options By IBM" branded Media Magic sound card.

A number of recent articles looking at OS/2 in retrospect made me think of the example given of problems with post-brain opreation epileptics. One hand is pulling the trousers up while the other is pulling them down.

We use lots of FreeBSD for servers and Linux for desktops. The support for both is phenomenol and the reliability far outweighs what M$ has to offer.

Unlike OS/2 whose beleagured IBM 1-800 numbers were the only means of support at the time, The free IX's are widely supported online and will be here to stay for the long while.

OSS forever!

Man claims not to have said embarrasing quote....

[pyrrho]

news at 11.

show me the innovation!

[Xtifr]

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.

Gates should read the previous story...

[sulaco252]

I love how this story follows the one about Dreamworks' Linux farm.

Bill Can't even get his product names right.

[chendo]

"We bet on the NT technology base" -- Bill Gates

Wtf? New Technology Technology? Can't Bill get his own products straight?

Re:doesn't matter

[Trepalium]

The x86 processors used a segment:offset addressing scheme, and could address a total of 1 megabyte of memory. The mapping of addresses to physical addresses was simply (segment*16)+offset (this actually gave a maximum addressable range of 1MB + 65516 bytes. This additional <64k range became known as the HMA in DOS 5+). IBM wisely reserved the upper 384kb of addressable memory for expansion, BIOS and video memory. For a system that was originally shipped with only 64 to 128kb of RAM, it left lots of room for expansion, and the EMS systems used that reserved memory area to provide a 'window' into the add-in memory. However, with most video cards occupying the region at A000h, it was impossible to use more than 640K of conventional memory.

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.

BillG quotes

[John Bayko]

As far as I know, that quote isn't verbatim, but he did express that thought - a little out of context, obviously, but correct in essense.

Here's another:

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

- Bill Gates, November 1987
- Foreword to "OS/2 Programmer's Guide", Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1988.

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...

Re:doesn't matter

[zog karndon]

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.