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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."
Lets see: 140,000 known Windows exploits, most of them surfacing in the last 12 years makes that at least one exploit released every 45 minutes - or there abouts. Hell, Vista has an installed base smaller than BeOS right now and it has more exploits already.
Most of the stuff on
That's some pretty big talk for a company with Microsoft's record, isn't it? Especially compared to Mac.
I'm the "computer guy" in my family and I've convinced everyone to buy a Mac. So I'm constantly looking around for possible exploits to warn my parents, my wife, and my mother-in-law about. I paid particular attention to the month of Apple bugs.
So I'd know if people were finding "daily" security flaws with Macs. This isn't to say that there aren't any, but three hundred sixty five a year? That's not even happening in Windows. And most of the ones that I've heard about require physical access to the machine, or for the attacker to be on the network. And the very few that have been able to be remotely triggered have been fixed within the month through Apple's software update.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
...checks calendar... Yep, only 4 days until patch Tuesday. Gonna have my Word patches ready this month, Bill?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
When the OS you feel comfortable with results in my inbox filled with spam from zombied machines, my firewall and server log files are filled with lame Windows attacks on my non-Windows machines, or the accessibility of a web site or portion of the internet becomes pathetically slow as one of those bot nets goes on a rampage, your choice of OS sucks ass.
If your not connected to the internet then choose what ever crappy OS you want, if your going to be part of a public network, consider how your choice will affect others on that public network.
What hasn't sunk in with Bill and probably never will is that most Windows users are pragmatists and not fanboys. There simply isn't much in the OS to incite rabid love and loyalty, just the sober realization and acceptance that it's an OS with the widest hardware support, the most available software, and which runs on a cheaper and more open hardware platform. Other than that, there are plenty of more elegant and emotionally engaging operating systems out there.
I am not a big fan of the "I am a Mac" ads. Being a Linux user, I don't care that much about OS X or Windows based PCs. So perhaps my opinion is unbiased.
I think the fact that you know what Slashdot is makes you the wrong viewer for those ads. I'm an OS X fan, and I use Linux and Windows every day. I probably have a better handle on each platform's strengths and weaknesses than most people. Those ads are targeting people who don't even know what an "OS" is. Try to put yourself in the mindset that you have never heard of Linux, and you don't know what an OS is. Now imagine, all the computers at the store(Walmart) run Windows. You don't even know where you'd get a computer that ran something else, except maybe if there was a Web site. Now imagine you've only ever run Windows, and you don't have any idea how you get viruses or worms or trojans. You've heard of Apple computer and know they sell Macintosh computers, but you don't know how you'd use one or where to get one or if they are better in any way. Now watch the ads again.
From the perspective of a computer geek these ads are patronizing and imply some inaccurate things. They are not precise and the concepts they explain are way fuzzier than in the real world. For average people, however, the messages they convey are fairly truthful and simple enough for people to understand. "Getting a mac means negligible chance of malware" is a valuable message for the clueless and I wish more would listen to it.
I think that these ads might offend Windows users instead of getting them to switch to the cool side. These ads do not show the strength of Macs. These focus more on insulting Windows based PCs.
They focus on benefits of the mac the average person can understand. I dare you to drive to the middle nowhere in Iowa and try to explain to an average person the benefits of having a capable bash shell instead of the Windows command prompt or Cygwin, in 30 seconds or less. Or explain system services or not being part of a monoculture or default network services settings.
Moreover, don't know why, but I've always felt that any company that really has superior products doesn't have to attack the competition this way.
When you're dealing with a monopolized product often the only way to market a product is to compare it to something the user does know about. If people don't know why they should go out of their way to get a mac instead of just picking up a Windows box anywhere, they aren't going to do it.
ps. I know that writing something against Apple might not go very well with my Karma, though :-(
People often complain about an anti-windows or pro-linux or pro-mac bias on Slashdot. Most of those people are incorrect in my experience. I say good and bad things about the actions/functions/features/or image of all three regularly and I haven't noticed any one being modded more than the others. I made comments both in favor of and criticizing Linux development on the desktop yesterday and both were modded way up. So long as what you say has value, in general the masses overpower the occasional fanboy who thinks Linux or Windows or Mac is some sort of religious choice.
There was absolutely nothing I could do to make the system run it. Oh sure, the system could be upgraded with a new processor, memory, hard drive or whatever, but no upgrade would allow [my beige G3 Mac to run OS X 10.2].
I feel ya, brother. I mean, I'm trying to get Vista Home Edition to run on my 486DX2/66, and it just won't, no matter which components I upgrade!
And I'm not being funny, but it's easier to upgrade a PC than a Mac.
Umm, in what way? If you compare Apple machines to comparable PCs, they are about the same ease of upgrading hardware. Now Apple sells more all-in-ones, laptops, and small form factor machines than average, so I suppose you could argue that Apple makes more machines that are harder to upgrade, but that is pretty, bloody weak.
for example if you want you can change the motherboard etc. - can't exactly do that with a Mac tower.
Actually you can, they're just expensive and you have more limited hardware options. Having limited hardware option != harder to upgrade though. They are different issues.
How about some counter points. When upgrading hardware on the mac, you never have to worry about calling Apple to get a new key, because your OS decided you are a criminal. You never have to worry about reinstalling the OS, or OS's in succession because you only have an "upgrade" version. If you are replacing the whole machine, say you got a new laptop, moving all your files, software, certs, accounts, etc. from the old one to the new one is an order of magnitude easier with a mac.
In nearly every single Vista article, there is mention of OS X and how it's had these features for years, which is a refreshing change. It's been extremely frustrating for Mac users the last six years because they had this OS that, despite early flaws, was years ahead of its time, but the tech media continued to ignore it. Maybe this started after OS X Tiger was released, but since last year's Vista delay, the media has been really harsh toward Vista and praiseworthy toward Apple. It's like they're finally giving Apple some long overdue credit for keeping the momentum going on OS X while the "biggest software company in the world" couldn't even squeeze out an update to its aging Win32 codebase.
It's like the press finally realized how behind Windows is and how it never really came to dominate the market based on its merits. Microsoft just got lucky with a braindead IBM contract in the 80s and rode the commodity PC wave. Everybody has realized that Microsoft isn't that big and scary at all, and now that they're being forced to compete with Google, Apple, and others, we see just how floundering they are. The tactics they used to use in the 90s (announcing vaporware to freeze the market, releasing buggy 1.0 versions and getting OEMs to bundle them over competitors, etc.) don't work anymore.
Vista is a headache to use. The interface, the extra dialogs, the multiple menu styles, the redundant buttons...it's a schizophrenic OS, and it even runs your games slower. Apps like Windows DVD Maker are a pathetic joke compared to iLife. I bet we didn't see an iLife '07 announcement at MacWorld because it's going to be bundled right into Leopard as part of the OS, just to stick it to Microsoft even further.
Seeing Bill's reaction is just funny. This isn't the first interview he's been asked about OS X--there's a clip on YouTube where a CNN guy asks him about it as well, and Bill just pauses and reacts. It's funny. The press is finally waking up.
you do realise that as far as Bill's concerned, those 140,000 exploits don't exist anymore... When they put Vista out the door, they got to "reset" the Windows Exploit Counter... as of 30th Jan 2007, XP is no longer Windows... Vista is Windows
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"Mac ads are as inaccurate as Microsoft ads"
Lemme fix that for you.
"Ads are inaccurate."
By definition.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Those 140,000 "exploits" are largely redundant and exploit a small number of actual vulnerabilities - most of them being the user.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
It is good to see more tech-specialised media having a go at him. Still, his reaction majorly upsets me - page 2 of TFA in particular, where he first whines about the lies of mac. Then he goes and makes blatant lies such as implying that OSX stole concepts which they announced, because Vista security took too long... (erk), and So.. MS came up with File, Edit, View and Help... while Apple came up with the GUI and the DESKTOP.
And also I have yet to see any interviewer get to the hard issues - DRM, WGA, licensing, and so on. All the media focusses on is the visible issues - HD media, parental controls and aero.
OS X was disruptive because it was a completely different OS from previous versions of Mac OS. When you replace the OS completely, you get a little wiggle-room in the disruption department. Microsoft doesn't get to play that card with Vista, though. XP *was* Microsoft's "OS X 10.0". It was the OS that accomplished the painful transition from the Win9x kernel to the WinNT kernel in consumer-space. Vista is just a continuation of that code-base.
Vista isn't disruptive because it had to be. It's not a rewrite, it's not a replacement, it's just a new version. The reason it's disruptive is because Microsoft took five years worth of new features and new APIs and instead of developing them incrementally over half a dozen releases, like Apple did, they stuffed them into a single mega-release. The result is that instead of updating apps gradually as new APIs come out, developers have to massively overhaul their apps for all the new APIs in Vista. And consumers, instead of dealing with a few apps breaking with each incremental release, have to deal with a huge amount of software breaking all at once.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've never met one of these mythical "I like Macs because they are shiny" people. Perhaps you live in a very strange neck of the woods, like Beverly Hills or something?
The vast majority of Mac users I know are people who like them because they make a lot of money out of them - in areas like publishing, music, photography and video. Macs have only become "shiny" recently. They used to be beige, just like PCs. So why did people buy them then? Why did so many Mac users switch to Mac clones that were boring and fairly ugly, when Apple licensed the OS?
Remember the world before Photoshop, the laser printer, and Desktop Publishing? You could only get Photoshop for the Mac. Apple brought the Postscript laser printer to the masses, and revolutionized the publishing industry. Same with music. For a long time, Pro Tools on a Mac was the only thing worth using for professional-grade digital recording. And today Apple has powerful and easy-to-use video editing software. Most Mac users are users first - they care more about their field of work (often a creative field) than they do about the Mac itself. It's just the Mac makes otherwise complex things very easy, so you can focus on the work, and not "operating a computer." There's a whole generation of filmmakers who are growing up on Final Cut Pro right now, because they want to make films, not because they want a shiny computer.
I think most likely it is you who has the superficial tastes, and are projecting your own interpretation onto people, rather than trying to understand their true motivations. Sure, users might appreciate the looks as well, they might like the Aqua interface. That doesn't mean they bought it because it is pretty. I doubt they wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't a great system as well as being pretty.
In fact, that pretty much sums up how Microsoft thinks, and how a lot of Windows users think. They think if they copy the "look" of the Mac, then they can have the Mac's appeal. But that's just superficial, "skin deep" beauty - the Mac offers form and function together. I'm reminded of when the original iMac was a huge hit, and other companies thought they could capture market-share by adding colored panels to their machines, while maintaining the same clunky form-factor and Windows OS. Notice how you didn't see Mac users buying those machines based on appearance, and they ultimately failed to interest anyone?
As an example of this in user-space, why do so many Windows users use absurd animated cursors, or elaborate screen-savers, or "skins" on applications? Why do so many Windows gamers "pimp" their PC with neon and case-mods? Those trends never caught on in the Mac world - especially the "skinning" thing. So, what explains the desire of Windows users to change the surface appearance of their system, without improving the functionality? Often these appearance mods actually get in the way of usability, let alone enhance it.
... and then they built the supercollider.