Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Speaks Out
neoform writes "The Seattle PI is running an interesting interview with Bill Gates." In the article Gates comments on Vista, Google, and a few other pertinent topics. In an amusing bit of related news, an anonymous reader let us know that CNET is also running an interview with Gates. In the CNET interview Gates gives a very interesting response to one of the interview questions. "CNET: So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point? Gates: Well, we don't know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that."
What can one say to something so far off the mark?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
I mean Bill Gates will always rail reactionary against anything he sees as a threat to his business model. I think the real question is why do we care what he has to say in the first place, he may be a savvy businessman but his days as a heady proponent of technology has long been overshadowed by his more nefarious practices.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
"Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not."
So, what was IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture)? Chopped liver?
That's right up there with "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
slashdot is becoming more like a cheap tabloid everyday - making up sensational headlines from sentences in articles used out of context to sell their news to the readers. whatever happened to fair, unbiased news for the nerds? are the editors listening?
Nothing like taking a reply to one question completely out of context.
Yeah, but the Slashdot editors know that the current presentation will generate more site traffic than showing the quote in context. Every bit as sleazy as any politician or used car salesman out there.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.
It's kinda like talking with any politician, since M$ft wants to compete with Google they have to disagree at some level, even if they're trying to do the same things. It's like asking Ted Kennedy what he thinks about Bush's plan for, whatever, helping little children. Whatever the Bush plan is, Ted's gotta disagree with it, that's how the game is played.
That is, even if Gates secretely admired google's plan and slogan and is competing out of jealousy and fear of losing market and customer brand name recognition, he must try to publically discredit google somehow. Even if he thinks they're doing all the right things, he has to discredit it somehow, they're taking people's freedom away, etc. Unfortunately, when the PC Pope speaks, too many listen.
Guess Bill's part of the antidisenplatformization movement.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Microsoft doesn't want cool features and creativity. They want money.
More accurately, they want to continue to be on top and also to be in control. They have money, in fact so much money that they often don't know what to do with it. Like the 30 billion in cash that they had last year and were trying to figure out what to do with.
Competition doesn't make money. Competition drives down profit margins and increases the amount of work required for success.
Or, in MS's case, real competition (such as the threat posed from Linux and OS X) gives them a slap in the face and makes them realize that its sink or swim time again. If they don't get their shit together, they are going to go on the steady slope down to the bottom of the lake.
Conversely, operating a monopoly allows you to slap premium prices on shoddy products and rake in the cash, as long as you are adept at keeping the government off your back.
Which is exactly why people should think before giving in to a shiny new feature. In ANY product. You may be helping yourself in the short run, but in the long run taking the easy way out will lead to difficulties 3, 5, 10 and 20 years from now.
Is it any coincidence that Microsoft is releasing this shiny new version of Office and also considering the subscription based pricing? I don't think so. They know exactly what they are doing.
"There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night."
Either he just doesn't get it, or he's refusing to acknowledge what open source software (and the GPL) really is. Software development *is* services... It's professional services. Work you get paid for. Work you pay someone else to do. Open source spurs innovation because it both allows you to stand on someone elses shoulders and forces you to make your shoulders available to someone else.
That OSS developers cut hair for a living to support their "habit" is ridiculous. Would you let a slashdot member cut *your* hair?
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing.
So its not just me. Even the Founder knows they suck (comparatively)
Right now, because of the breadth of what we do, we have that in many areas. Nokia is way ahead of us in phones; we're closing the gap. Sony is ahead of us in video games. We're just on the verge of something (the Xbox 360) that will help us close the gap there. In Web search, Google is the far-away leader. Big honeymoon for them. Even if they do "me, too" type stuff, people think, "wow." nd Apple in music has done a fantastic job.
We interupt this Bill Gates Honesty Break to bring you the following.
In those areas where somebody else has done well, that's great. We'll match what they do, we'll bring new things to it, do it better and integrate it in with other things. And so it's very healthy for the consumer. We see that in search, we see it in music. It's not new at all that that's out there
Translation: We make inferior products, bundle them, make exclusive deals, failing all else we buy the competitor and bury/integrate their product.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Ok, he's right there ... if this quote was from like 1962. Before there was teh webbs, before there was teh netz, before there was teh Microsoft, before there was teh UNIX, there was an operating system that was designed from the ground-up to incorporate advanced/enhanced security features (relative to the times), and it was called Multics.
Unix has been established as a legitimate operating system since the 1970's. I guess you could say the "C" version would be the birthday of modern Unix, so we're talking 1973. Was Bill Gates out of grammar school yet at this point?
Native TCP/IP support was built into the kernel in the early 1980's, a few years. http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm">Micros oft itself created a Unix port, and it probably doesn't surprise any of us that SCO ended up with it. The similarities between how SCO and MS behave in the industry and market aren't totally coincidence.
So, Bill, you HAD a network-ready and relatively secure operating system 25 goddam years ago. And you're saying that it's just now that anybody cares about networking, communications, or information security? Security has been a concern since the fucking 1960's, and your own friggen company had a Unix build.
Jesus H. I normally don't jump on the bash-Microsoft bandwagon and often grapple with some of YOU Slashdot turds for doing so, but if this isn't a bunch of merry sunshine blown up the collective asses of industry journalism, I don't know what is.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Corporations have a legal mandate to make money. It doesn't mean they can do no good, just that they are opposed to good deeds if they result in the haemorraging of cash.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the work Google do (at the moment at least). Just don't expect them to honestly set out inspirational visions for their future.
"And despite what a lot of people will think on the surface (whoa look at how cool Microsoft has made Office 12), it is really Apple, Linux and the Open Source competition that has made Microsoft get its ass in gear."
Not to mention AOL (which consistently beat MSN throughout the dial-up era)*, Palm (held off Microsoft for several years in the PDA market), Nokia (fending off Smartphone via Symbian), TiVo (mopped the floor with UltimateTV - leading to Windows Media Center improved annually), Adobe's PDF format, Sun's Java, and Sony (Playstation2). And Google thrashing Microsoft in search.
While Apple's Mac OS X is forcing improvements with Windows, its in the other media areas that Apple is thrashing Microsoft interests consistently. The cablecos and satellite companies have settled on Apple supported H.264 as the HD codec of choice over Windows Media. The Windows Media codec may be eliminated from the Blu-Ray format before its market debut, and as it stands, H.264 is also supported with the HD-DVD format. The Microsoft supported DVD+R spec did not trump the Apple backed DVD-R format and now combo drives are the norm. And Apple's iPod/iTunes support of Dolby's AAC audio codec has seriously frakked up Microsoft's WMA format dominating the MP3 player market.
If Corporate America ever is successfully persuaded to switch to Linux or OS X and open source application suite software, Microsoft will be toast...and I don't mean that application by Roxio either.
*Forgot to mention how AOL's AIM (and AIM supporters like iChat) is still more popular than MSN Messenger.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
THAT is the comment that made me flip back to Slashdot! No software was setup for all the computers to be connected together? I guess he never heard of Unix.
That can't even be blamed on ignorance, because he knows better. That is genuine, straight up, in your face and looking you in the eye FUD. Maybe they need that on the boxes of Vista when it comes out:
Windows Vista: The ultimate software for computers that are not connected.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You could have made almost exactly the same comment when Microsoft was struggling to come up with a web browser that could compete with Netscape, the application that most new computer users thought of as "The Internet" at the time. Sure, it may scare them, but they've shown themselves to be quite capable of displacing their competition when it matters. I'm not saying that MS will inevitably win, but I *am* saying that while they may be worried about Google's industry presence, I doubt very much that they're not confident in the plan that they're working on to come out on top.
In all fairness, Unix didn't start all that secure. There was a default assumption of trust. Reasonable at first, but the environment changed over time.
hawk
My opinion?
.)) and leaked documents (halloween memos, anyone?)
Google is the anti-MS.
They do the opposite. They market via word of mouth, and by having solid, simple, well-designed products. At google, the baseline is elegant, practical, high-performance engineering. If a product isn't *really* good, it never leaves the lab. If a product isn't *near-perfect*, it never leaves beta. Contrast that with MS. Most often, version 1.0 and 2.0 of an MS product is terrible, or even non-functioning. I'm not taking about beta versions, or lab versions; I'm taking about the crap they sell to people. Even these 1.0 versions, however, are introduced with all kinds of pomp and circumstance.
Enter Google. When was the last time you 'bought' a Google product without *knowing* that it was awesome? The products that they do 'sell' (ads, google earth, and google appliances) they sell unobtrusively, and I've never met someone who purchased one that didn't already *know* that the product was have extremely high quality. They do most of their development in-house, and they pursue paths of research almost as radical as the MIT media lab, but with a healthy dose of practicality.
The search engine was not innovative.
A clear, concise search engine, using page rank, a *very new* way of relating millions of search results WAS innovative. They continue this trend even now, its just not as well publicized, because they have to keep up with the Search Engine Optimization firms.
Maps and driving directions are NOT innovative.
Clear, easy to use, visually attractive maps, with a natural language interface, a well-documented API, an excellent ties to the aforementioned search engine?
That's innovative.
Not all innovation is flashy user interfaces and silicon gadgets. There is such a thing as innovative database design, and brilliant code.
Google is not out-Microsofting anyone. Microsoft's business strategy is well-known: Entering an existing market, form an alliance with the 2nd strongest player, gut that players efforts with your own product, and outspend the top player on marketing dollars. That's it.
I've *never* seen an intrusive ad for Google. I've *never* heard of Google screwing another business.
I've *never* heard of Google participating in dishonest negotiation.
While fanboys may choose to deny it, MS's tendancy towards these underhanded tactics is well-documented, both in terms of court cases (where they tend to PAY the settlement for being guilty, and move on (Novell (DR-DOS), Stacker, etc. .
Google's had a bit of luck, but they've also put a lot of hardwork and intelligence into their business.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has built its empire on marketing, dollars, manipulation, and outright fraud. They've even been found guilty, and forced to pay settlements; but to MS, that's the cost of doing business.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell