Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads
fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that 'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."
What colour is the sky in your world, Bill?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Seriously, come on. The ad where the PC buys the Mac that C++ reference manual that he secretly lusts after himself is just so much blatant false image building it's ridiculous. Are they implying that Mac programmers live in a glorious world where technical manuals are unnecessary? Or that every windows user is a technical programmer? It's ludicrous.
The "home movie" comparisons where the shapely woman is the mac one and the ugly unshaven guy in drag is from the PC is just dumb.
The PC going in for surgery is another joke. At least he PC CAN be upgraded instead of simply requiring replacement for a major OS update.
They're great ads. Seriously, they're billiant. But they lie.
I think Microsoft should fire back. With one man representing one game they should show the PC addressing a full concert hall. Then the Mac should be addressing a hotel conference room with a bunch of empty seats. With five seats full of really old men, one should realize he's in the wrong room and leave.
Then show the PC calling in to some Microsoft-product-only connection and getting through, while the Mac gets, "I'm sorry - we can't help you."
At least those would sort of represent reality.
Aside from Gates doing it for a promo, it is true that the Mac Ads are inaccurate. Some of the people who testified on the past mac commercials were complete tools. Their kids should be ashamed of them. I'm talk about Bill Swan. Mister "I had to dig cards out of my daughter's comptuer to make the printer work".
:)
The new mac ads aren't much better. The whole photo album vs GUI programming guide makes Mac users look like elementary school retards and PC users like real coders.
Don't get me wrong. I love ibooks. I just think that people who write these ads need to be shot.
Twice.
So you can't cite any Vista examples. How many of those '140,000 known Windows exploits' work on Vista? Do you at least know that? Or should we count exploits that only work on Windows 95 against Vista?
We could always do the old Mac Zealot trick of redefining what an 'exploit' is rather than admit there are any problems with a platform - for example where they will redefine the meaning of 'virus' or deny that a proof of concept counts as a 'problem' because it 'doesnt do any damage', in which case I could probably get that '140,000' figure down to about 6.
The interview has a lot of funny quotes... I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are. Of course, they're dinosaurs ! _Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC--
_That's for my customers to decide. So please vote if you want Bill to be bothered or not about the entire tenor of that campaign.
Erm sorry. You're probably not a customer, you're an end-user... If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. /me thinking about rats and room 101... So you feel in 2010-2011 Microsoft will be back with the next big one?
Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time. That explains all those features removed from V... erm... Longhorn ? So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like?
Well, it will be more user-centric.
What does that mean? Bill then goes on explaining
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
That's like saying it ran windows, just not the latest version. Microsoft hasn't been charging $100 for each service pack... on the otherhand upgrading to the new OS is about $150. Apple is pretty pricy about charging for each bug fix/release.... and they stop supporting old releases after a year or so... Microsoft still supports many of its old releases even after 5 years....
Anyone have a daylight saving fix for OS 9? 10.0? 10.1? 10.2? How about OS 8?