Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free

orthogonal writes "That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free: according to Bill Gates, "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...." Gates expects this almost free hardware to support two of the longest awaited breakthroughs in computing: real speech and handwriting recognition. He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."

Comments

Been There, Done That

[RailGunner]

This is the same old crap MS has been saying about Software for years, and they haven't yet, and probably won't ever get it right.

First it was Visual Basic - design your apps then maybe spend a little time with program specific details. Though it never quite worked that way, especially if you need to make a Win32 API call. Then, you had to write a lot of code just to call SetWindowLong().

Then, it was COM. Devleopers everywhere would just be able to drag and drop COM objects to make their application. COM (and the horrible to configure DCOM) worked so well, with it's sometimes confusing threading model and it's reliance on UDP that now MS is saying "Well, VB wasn't all we thought it was going to be, an neither was COM, so.. here's .NET. And C#. No really, we mean it this time."

Meanwhile any developer worth their salt still has their text editor of choice thinking "we'll believe it when we see it."

640k jokes aside, the only thing remarkable about Bill Gates' future vision is that he's often wrong. Or did I miss the Tablet PC revolution that was supposed to happen a couple of years ago? And.. What About Bob? (Hint: Not the Bill Murray movie).

Re:Visual design

[randomblast]

I think it's down to personal experience, everyone i've talked to has said that XP is just fine for them, but every M$ product i've ever used has failed me dramatically. When i boot XP on my box, it feels like i'm walking through treacle. First i've got to boot it, during which time i make a cup of coffee. Then i've got to wait for it to finish saying "Windows has detected new hardware", and "Windows is autmatically updating your computer", and "Hey, why don't you add you .net passport to XP?", and "New version of MSN Messenger available, upgrade now!", and....
The list goes on, a whole bunch of stuff that i don't want, don't need, didn't ask for and have no way of getting rid of. I do whatever i need to do, then reboot to my beautiful Gentoo system, no such problems, 4x faster, much prettier, and with much more features.
In my experience, Linux is better. Feel free to stick with XP.