20 Years of Bill Gates Predictions

NewsCloud writes "The Seattle PI's Microsoft Blogger Todd Bishop asks "How does Gates shape up as a seer?" None strike me as particularly clairvoyant, but the missed ones are winners: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." and "Two years from now, spam will be solved." But in fairness to Gates, for many years Microsoft's tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home.""

Comments

I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

that he will stay rich, but leave his wife for Steve Jobs.

Re:I predict

[eln]

Look, I don't know how you got Mr. Gates' private diaries, but you can expect a call from his lawyer shortly.

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

What - leave her to Jobs in his will?

Re:I predict

[BrianRagle]

I think Steve has higher standards than to reciprocate that move. After all, he's a smart guy and Gates already burned him once...

Re:I predict

[nihilonian]

Don't know about Gates' lawyers, but just got off the phone with Jobs' laywers...something about trade secrets and zealous protection of their upcoming plans with Gates

CEOs are not seers

[eln]

The problem is, Gates made most (if not all) of these comments in order to push efforts that Microsoft was working on at the time. As a CEO of a major software company, part of his job was to make comments in public that would try to influence the industry to move in the direction that would align with what his own company was doing (or at least attempting) already.

These sorts of comments can often be successful at moving the industry because people automatically equate wealth and power with wisdom. In this way, they take what is basically a marketing statement and turn it into some sort of prophecy. Gates was right on some of these because his own company took the industry in that direction. Where he was wrong, it was because his own company failed in its efforts in that area, or (in the case of OS/2 especially) they decided to go in a different direction.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[morgan_greywolf]

These sorts of comments can often be successful at moving the industry because people automatically equate wealth and power with wisdom.

People? Who people? Speak for yourself!

Re:CEOs are not seers

[jimstapleton]

You've never talked to what could be considered an "average" manager, have you?

Many people would see such arguments as silly, and blatant advertising, but for some reason, management often sees people who are able to make a lot of money as founts of wisdom in all matters.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[paintswithcolour]

I'm working from memory here and I can't find an exact quote reference, but didn't Gates come out in support of the Dreamcast as the gaming console of that generation (I'm guessing, like you say, with a vested interest in the inclusion of their own tech). I'm guessing was a similar situation to OS/2, didn't work out with finances and they took it in the X-Box direction.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Opportunist]

Hey, they HAVE to be right, after all, they make a shitload of money!

Don't you dare questioning the way of the money! Money makes right! Ask any congressman next time he discusses matters with mafiaa representatives.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[aussie_a]

Reminds me of The Secret in that its a self-fulfilling prophecy. People involved in the Secret claim following it will lead to success. People believe them and give them money, making THEM successful. If people hadn't bought into it, they wouldn't have given them their money and they wouldn't have become successful. Same with Gates. He says "this will happen" and people believe him so they give him money to make sure it happens.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Da Fokka]

Of course you are right. But frankly, I'd say it's harder to shape the future than to predict it.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Chris Burke]

One common theme in literature is the question of whether oracles predict the future, or create it. Would Oedipus have killed his father had the Oracle at Delphi never prophecied that he would and thus his father never sent him to die in the wilderness? Had the witches not said that Macbeth would not be harmed by any of woman born, would he have gone down the path that led to him being killed by the C-section-birthed Macduff?

Which relates to what you said in that Gates is trying to be the non-supernatural form of seer -- the one who tries to create the future with their prediction, instead of predicting some future that is destined to happen. Now, one of the common traits of literary oracles is that they are extremely wise and clever, such that truly distinguishing whether they can actually see the future or merely guide it meticulously is extremely difficult. They also tend to have unclear motivations, which also clouds the issue. This is what makes it interesting.

Gates' motivations are patently clear: Guide the direction of the industry in a way favorable to Microsoft. He also isn't supremely wise or clever. Though in the comparison I'm making he doesn't fit precisely because he's also the executor of whatever real path his company takes into the future. Somewhat like if it was Macbeth who predicted that he was to be king, hoping that saying so will help cause it to become true. Strangely that doesn't work as well.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[AKAImBatman]

The Dreamcast was capable of running Windows CE. My memory is fuzzy as to why, but I believe it was intended as the platform upon which game makers could create networked games. AFAIK, the idea never panned out.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Kjella]

As a CEO of a major software company, part of his job was to make comments in public that would try to influence the industry to move in the direction that would align with what his own company was doing (or at least attempting) already.

Not to mention the infamous "deny-everything-until-we're-ready-to-launch" tactic. This comes both in the "dazzle the market" and "scramble to catch up" variety. Maybe there was some visionary insight in the boardroom or strategy sessions, but you didn't hear about it until they were ready to make money off it. CEO public statements are always about pushing you somewhere they need you to go or holding you back where they don't want you to go, also known as FUD.

Consider it a lot like the people playing the stock market. Some people want to talk the market up, some want to talk it down, some want to talking you into trading (brokers), others would rather scare you away (real estate) all depending on their position. None of them are into charity and free stock advice. Neither is the CEO of a public company out to give you free business predictions.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Linker3000]

"I'm working from memory here"

About 640Ks worth? That should be sufficient!

Re:CEOs are not seers

[rocjoe71]

OSQ: Hello, this is Happy Dude. If you'd like to know more, send one dollar to: "Happy Dude", P.O. Box 14, Springfield. ... You have the power.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Gonarat]

OS/2 was originally designed to be the successor to DOS back when Microsoft and IBM were working together. Microsoft and IBM then had a falling out and both companies went their own ways. IBM owned OS/2, so Microsoft pushed out Windows 3.0, which was not a DOS replacement, but a windowing system that ran on top of DOS 6.

Microsoft had to go back and develop Windows NT to replace DOS, and DOS did not actually go away until Windows XP ended the Windows 9x/ME line which were technically running on top of DOS.

IBM continued to develop OS/2 (remember OS/2 Warp), but while IBM may have owned the mainframe world, Microsoft owned the PC desktop. Windows won, and OS/2 was eventually retired.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[CheShACat]

What are you talking about Dreamcast WAS the console of that generation!!

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the real mafia makes of the riaa and the mpaa being called the mafiaa...

Re:CEOs are not seers

[drinkypoo]

Some Windows CE games were made; AFAIK only one of many games I own runs on CE (Armada). It's the least reliable game I own, and just removing and reinserting a controller can crash WinCE.

I believe the web browser also runs on WinCE.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[ronadams]

Consider it a lot like the people playing the stock market. Some people want to talk the market up, some want to talk it down, some want to talking you into trading (brokers), others would rather scare you away (real estate) all depending on their position. None of them are into charity and free stock advice. Neither is the CEO of a public company out to give you free business predictions. Wonderfully stated. What is often missed in this, and many similar, circumstances is that talking points, especially the most sensational ones, put out in the tech sector, are really meant to push and shape rather than reflect and idealize.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[TravisO]

And I'd like to add I don't consider his prediction about OS/2 to be as incorrect as the article points it to be. I'd say in a way he was 100% correct, as long as you're willing to accept the fact that Microsoft eventually decided to "take it's ball and go home" and use it's knowledge of OS/2's creation and rewrite Windows. The future market was there, Microsoft just shifted it's efforts from IBM's OS/2 to their own OS/2ish OS, you may now call it NT. Ok I know NT isn't OS/2, but you can't deny how the events took place and that in a way, his prediction held some of it's weight.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[sarahbau]

Not only were the predictions what MS was working on, but all of the correct ones were things that were already starting to come true by the time he said them. In 1997 he predicted that the Web would be a big thing. By then I had been online for 4 years, and it was already getting pretty big. Anyone could have predicted it would only get bigger (as the article said, it would have been more impressive if he'd made it two years earlier).

Re:CEOs are not seers

[hackstraw]

As a CEO of a major software company, part of his job was to make comments in public that would try to influence the industry to move in the direction that would align with what his own company was doing (or at least attempting) already.

To me, that implies vision.

Two excellent comparisons between billg and steve jobs are http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/200 5/11/the_zen_estheti.html and http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/200 5/11/it_was_one_of_t.html .

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

Every CEO is free to say what he wants in order to 'move' the market but on the other hand, every time they predict something that turns to be totally wrong makes them look stupid, and that does not help the Enterprise they lead.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 was originally designed to be the successor to DOS back when Microsoft and IBM were working together. Microsoft and IBM then had a falling out and both companies went their own ways. IBM owned OS/2, so Microsoft pushed out Windows 3.0, which was not a DOS replacement, but a windowing system that ran on top of DOS 6.

This isn't quite right. IBM and Microsoft had been joint owners of OS/2, but had been developing it in two branches. The x86-only branch was OS/2 2.0, which was based on OS/2 1.x, whereas the portable branch was NT OS/2, which was built on a completely new portable kernel being developed by Microsoft, with OS/2 as a server running on top of that kernel, and was eventually going to be released as OS/2 3.0, for both RISC and x86 systems.

When IBM and Microsoft split, they also split the OS/2 intellectual property, with IBM taking sole ownership of the more finished, but technically less advanced, 2.0 branch, whereas Microsoft took sole ownership of the more advanced, but less finished, OS/2 3.0 branch. Prior to that, OS/2 had been jointly owned by both companies.

I think Windows 3.0 was released in 1990 too, whereas the last release of the joint Microsoft/IBM OS/2 was OS/2 1.3 in 1991. Microsoft had been pushing Windows for a long time, and I think 3.0 actually moved the graphical interface in Windows closer to the one Microsoft and IBM had been developing for OS/2.

Microsoft had to go back and develop Windows NT to replace DOS, and DOS did not actually go away until Windows XP ended the Windows 9x/ME line which were technically running on top of DOS.

Well, OS/2 was supposed to replace DOS, and the NT OS/2 branch was started in 1988. It only became Windows NT after IBM and Microsoft ended their OS/2 partnership in 1991, but what was the 3.0 branch of OS/2, and became Windows NT, did eventually replace DOS.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what passed for witty sarcasm on Slashdot these days? The Diggification has begun.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[hiryuu]

Would Oedipus have killed his father had the Oracle at Delphi never prophecied that he would and thus his father never sent him to die in the wilderness? Had the witches not said that Macbeth would not be harmed by any of woman born, would he have gone down the path that led to him being killed by the C-section-birthed Macduff?

Awww, man, would it have killed you to put a "SPOILER" warning on that?

Re:CEOs are not seers

[guruevi]

Remember OS/2 Merlin? Ah, the good days. Sometimes you'll see that it's not always the best nor the cheapest that win, usually it's the one that can talk your manager into buying their sh*t

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Braxton_Bragg]

I would suggest that folks read "Accidental Empires" by Cringely for a bit of insight.

Does the altruistic "Gates Foundation" offset the economic harm done by a de-facto monopolistic Operating system ?
In my opinion, it does not.

I guess we have to find other measures of success other than profit.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Ravnen]

The problem is, Gates made most (if not all) of these comments in order to push efforts that Microsoft was working on at the time. As a CEO of a major software company, part of his job was to make comments in public that would try to influence the industry to move in the direction that would align with what his own company was doing (or at least attempting) already.

Another way of looking at it is that perhaps Microsoft started those efforts because Bill Gates thought, or was convinced by colleagues at Microsoft, that they were going to take off. If Gates thought everyone would rather use a pen than a keyboard to interact with their computer, then it naturally follows that he wanted to invest resources in the idea. Remember, the reason Gates quit Harvard Business School and started developing software is because he correctly thought selling software was going to be a huge busineess in the future. Some people see that he got that one right, so think maybe he'll be right on other technology issues.

The reason I don't give a huge amount of weight to Bill Gates's technology predictions is because the context is completely different. In 1975, the personal computer industry was in its infancy: hardly anyone even knew about it, much less about selling software for microcomputers, if they even knew what software was at all. The combination of familiarity with software, knowledge of microcomputers and a grounding in business, which Gates had, was relatively rare. It wasn't altogether surprising that Bill Gates had a better ability to predict the rise of the software industry in the mid-1970s than most other people at the time: he had a relatively rare combination of information. Today, there is a massive number of people analysing the IT industry, and Microsoft itself, so the idea that Bill Gates is going to have a similarly rare set of information today isn't very plausible.

You could replace 'Bill Gates' with 'Tim Berners-Lee', who was right about the web (and even invented it), and come to much the same conclusion. The fact that Berners-Lee had a rare set of knowledge that allowed him to predict and invent the web doesn't necessarily mean he'll be better at predicting anything else.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Pandare]

http://hankspotter.ytmnd.com/

Re:CEOs are not seers

[RockoTDF]

Awww, man, would it have killed you to put a "SPOILER" warning on that?
Yeah, I'm sure thats what the audience at the globe said after hearing " A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife."

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft and IBM then had a falling out and both companies went their own ways."
I believe MS went their own way first. IBM and MS then had a falling out partly because IBM thought MS's OS/2 code was crap, and partly because MS pushed Windows instead.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

So when he says "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.", he's trying to make it true by saying it?

Damn, first I get a college degree, and to make things worse, it was in mathematics. I'm going about this in all the wrong ways.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

How do you know that Bill Gates isn't wise or clever? Is he really able to both speak his mind and keep the stock holder's interests at heart?

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Chris Burke]

Awww, man, would it have killed you to put a "SPOILER" warning on that?

According to the Oracle of Delphi, I shall not die ere I have of spoilers warned the initiate to the tale of more than century told.

So, uh, maybe?

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Chris Burke]

In the context of his ability to predict the future of technology, he is clearly neither wise nor clever. In an article called "20 Years of Bill Gates Business Decisions" I would be forced to give him a more positive review since the metric of success is different.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

It would be nice to put a little context into this... I don't see any of the other industry leaders making predictions at any better rate than Bill.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[bbagnall]

As the article states, Bill Gates never made that comment. It's just more misinformation from people who see him as a favorite target.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Opportunist]

Actually, it was meant as a rant to vent off some steam. What you make out of it is up to you.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[stocke2]

actually the article states that Gates says he didn't say it.
I am not saying he did, just making the distinction.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

"it was already getting pretty big. Anyone could have predicted it would only get bigger"

That's what she said.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[Anonymous Coward]

About 640Ks worth?

You measure memory in Kelvin?

Re:CEOs are not seers

[drsmithy]

You're vaguely on the right track, but woefully inaccurate in the details.

OS/2 was a joint IBM and Microsoft venture, originally meant to replace DOS on "high end" PCs.

DOS and Windows was meant for "low end" PCs.

Around 1988, Microsoft started working on what was originally meant to be OS/2's replacement, to be run on 386+ machines (OS/2 targeted 286s, at IBM's insistence, and it was a huge mistake). This product eventually became Windows NT, but at the time was known as "OS/2 NT" (which is why those "WNT=VMS+1" comments are so easily demonstrated as wrong).

However, Windows 3.0 was a surprise (to everyone) runaway success and that subsequently caused friction between Microsoft and IBM - IBM still wanted the default API in "OS/2 NT" to be "OS/2", Microsoft now wanted it to be "Windows". Since they couldn't agree, Microsoft took their ball (NT) and left. This was the famous "Microsoft-IBM divorce" and happened in (late, IIRC) 1990.

IBM were then left with the task of taking OS/2 1.x and turning it into OS/2 2.x (and successors). IBM, however, did not "own" OS/2 (at least not all of it) and even as late as OS/2 4.0, were still paying Microsoft royalties for their code.

Also, from about Windows 3.0 onwards, DOS became less and less "the OS" and more and more "the bootloader", as Windows took over the low level functionality. Windows 3.0 was doing memory management, CPU scheduling and some hardware support (video, printers). Windows 3.1 took over more hardware support (disk, network). By Windows 95, DOS was pretty much irrelevant (past bootup), unless you were unlucky enough to still be running old 16 bit code. Microsoft killed DOS in about 1993 - it just took everyone a decade to say goodbye.

Re:CEOs are not seers

[BluBrick]

You're 100% correct, of course. The article does indeed point out that no evidence can be found that Bill Gates ever said that. But there are times when, in the interests of humour, the judicious application of a little artistic license renders that (mis)quote thoroughly appropriate.

In other words...

WHOOSH!

OS/2

[C_Kode]

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

Two points here. First, he was selling the product when he said this, and secondly he was actually right in the idea of it. It just happen to be Windows and not OS/2. Microsoft attacked the general market. IBM only knew about dealing with businesses. Once Microsoft moved away from OS/2 and went full bore on Windows, OS/2's days were numbered even though OS/2 had a lot of things going for it over Windows.

Re:OS/2

[morgan_greywolf]

Windows is sorta the next generation of OS/2 anyway. OS/2 was a joint development between IBM and Microsoft; when IBM and Microsoft parted ways, IBM got the old code and Microsoft got the new code. Windows NT started out with the name 'OS/2-NT' internally at Microsoft, despite the fact that many, many revisionist historians love to leave this point out.

Re:OS/2

[elwinc]

Exactly. Gates was acting as Salesman-in-Chief when he made these remarks. So the real question is how much product did he push with his remarks. Or, if you wanted to put him in context, you could compare Gates' predictions for the future with his CEO peers such as Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, and Larry Ellison. My guess is Gates would come out on top in that comparison.

Amusing aside: my first experience with Steve Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" was a talk he gave at MIT in the early eighties around the time of the Fat Mac. I remember him saying something to the effect that "it turns out for networking all you need is about 150K/sec." He was trying to tell us that Appletalk was adequate and that ethernet was overkill. So powerful was the reality distortion field that nobody even called him on it!

Re:OS/2

[SpinyNorman]

In fact he really was correct since Windows NT was originally known (during development) as NT OS/2 or simply OS/2 3.0, even though it was a different code base. It'd really be quibbling not to give Gates this one. Windows NT really has as much, or more, conceptually in common with OS/2 as it does with Windows 1.x - 3.x.

Re:OS/2

[morgan_greywolf]

When you find out, let me know, k? Thanks!

Re:OS/2

[weicco]

And what I remember reading here at Slashdot is that IBM didn't even know hot to deal with businesses. If memory serves me well, OS/2 run on 80286 somewhat well but not so well in 80386. This caused MS to move to Win API which broke compatibility with OS/2 and gave rise to Windows NT line. But my memory is faint about this, so please correct me if I'm wrong (and please, come up with facts and links, not speculation and conspiracy theories).

Re:OS/2

[dreamchaser]

Because of people with mod points who were still sucking on their mother's tit for sustenance when the events in question happened, and who never bothered to learn computing history.

Re:OS/2

[dpilot]

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

You guys are all making the mistake of interpreting Bill Gates' remark in a technical sense, then playing semantic games about OS/2, NT, etc.

Instead look at this statement politically, and you'll see that Gates was *exactly* correct. OS/2 was the point where, thanks to a shifty business-doublecross, Microsoft cut itself from the apron strings from IBM and emerged as the next 800lb gorilla. They didn't simply come out with a new product that took over the market, they got IBM committed to and preoccupied with a joint development, then brought out their own product and sabotaged the joint development effort. Had OS/2 not existed at the time, Windows would have merely been introduced and grown in the market, like DOS before it. By reframing Windows as a battle with OS/2, already having all of the necessary preload contracts in it's back pocket to make the win, Microsoft was able to be seen as the victor over IBM. Add to Microsoft's preload contracts the fact that at the time the industry was ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see IBM take a fall, and the result was foregone.

So OS/2 and it's link to IBM led to the sea change with Microsoft's dominance.

Was Gates clever enough to have planned it all this way? I don't think so.

Now of course Microsoft is where IBM was back then. The industry is ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see Microsoft take a fall. That doesn't mean they want Microsoft to be gone, just like IBM isn't. But we're about sick of Microsoft's tenure as the 800lb gorilla.

Re:OS/2

[Have Blue]

Depending on the systems you're looking at, he may have been right. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Macs of the time were not capable of generating or properly receiving network traffic at higher rates than 150K/sec. If that's true, and you had an all-Mac network, Ethernet would be expensive overkill. And at the time AppleTalk wasn't exactly chopped liver- it had auto-detection of services working decades before zeroconf came along.

Of course, this being MIT, they had all kinds of systems that could greatly exceed that transfer rate. Jobs looks dumb from that perspective, but this is where his purpose as a Mac salesman and evangelist comes in (and the RDF).

Re:OS/2

[Chris Burke]

I'll give it to him, but really this was a trivial prediction. He was essentially predicting that Microsoft would remain the dominant OS vendor -- and I think we all know enough about the difficulty of breaking an entrenched monopoly to know that he wasn't really going out on a limb there.

Re:OS/2

[Richard Steiner]

Windows is sorta the next generation of OS/2 anyway.

Sure ... but without the best features, and with a lot of additional bloat thrown in for good measure. :-)

Re:OS/2

[Ravnen]

Well, Microsoft had less than half the OS market as late as 1990, and in 1987, its market share would have been even smaller than that, so nothing close to a monopoly. On the other hand, NT certainly wouldn't have become as dominant as it is today if it hadn't been compatible with the Windows 3.x line, which is what drove Microsoft from being just the largest desktop OS vendor to being virtually a monopoly (especially after Windows 95). That's of course why Microsoft wanted to add a Windows-like API to NT OS/2, which in turn led to the dissolution of the IBM/Microsoft partnership.

Re:OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, OS/2 2.0 was the 80386 version of OS/2. NT OS/2 was the portable one, meaning it didn't rely on hardware features specific to particular CPU architectures, and was largely written in C rather than assembly. It was initially developed on the Intel i860, but soon moved to MIPS, with a concurrent port to the 80386.

It's true that IBM's insistence on the '286 rather than the '386 was a big complaint Microsoft had about OS/2 1.x, and this almost certainly drove Microsoft's interest in adding '386 support to the DOS/Windows line. Windows/386, which was released in 1988, was the first version of Windows with support for '386 features, although the support was very limited.

Re:OS/2

[OwnedByTwoCats]

OS/2 was also important to Microsoft as a way to beat Lotus 1-2-3, the dominant spreadsheet at the time. MS developed the Windows version of Excel while it was developing Windows, and publically spreading the line that OS/2 was the way to go. Lotus put their efforts into the OS/2 version of 1-2-3. When MS revealed Windows, Excel was ready to go, and 1-2-3 wasn't.

Re:OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought that VMS was the ancestor of Windows NT, David Cutler is the "father" of both. Most of NT's core designers had worked on and with VMS at Digital; some had worked directly with Cutler.

Re:OS/2

[KiltedKnight]

There is something else about OS/2. Its days were numbered not because Microsoft jumped ship to produce Windows. IBM actually had OS/2 Warp 3.0 ready and on the market BEFORE Windows 95 was ready for release. There were two major flaws.

The first is IBM's marketing tactics. They had Microsoft beat, time-wise. The mistake they made was a poor marketing campaign. They should've been out there, touting the whole thing, trumpeting its arrival, etc. Instead, they seemed to come out with the general attitude of, "We're IBM. People will flock to us anyway."

The other mistake is software availability. IBM never went out and got various third party companies to make readily available software for Warp 3.0. So you could go out and get this new operating system... but couldn't run anything on it except the expensive IBM software.

Change those two things, and Windows might not be as dominant as it is now.

Re:OS/2

[whit3]

The networking of the early Macintosh (1986-ish) was DEFINITELY superior in cost to 10base5
Ethernet (does anyone else remember thickwire?), and sold LOTS of Laserwriter II printers
as networked office print centers. I'm still using Laserwriters on an Ethernet/Localtalk bridge.

LocalTalk serial adapters ran at 239 kbaud and had circa 500 meter cable-length limits.
It worked on a straight Mac serial port, or addon cards for ISA PC slots.

For nearly a decade, the 'killer app' for Macintosh computers was the laser printer driver.
Apple made good money on it.

Re:OS/2

[mqduck]

Why was THIS moderated Offtopic? *Buckles down*

Re:OS/2

[drsmithy]

Windows NT started out with the name 'OS/2-NT' internally at Microsoft, despite the fact that many, many revisionist historians love to leave this point out.

Like who ? That Windows NT was originally written to be a replacement for OS/2 is a pretty widely and well known fact (amongst people who are interested in this sort of thing). It'd be hard to see how (or why) anyone could/would "leave it out".

Re:OS/2

[drsmithy]

Windows NT really has as much, or more, conceptually in common with OS/2 as it does with Windows 1.x - 3.x.

Well, it doesn't really have much "conceptually" in common with either of them...

Re:OS/2

[elwinc]

Yeah, but thinwire was available by then. And the effectiveness of an appletalk network depends on how many machines are on it. 20 or 30 machines; not a problem. But there were buildings at MIT with 60 machines or more per floor, and the campus-wide Athena network had hundreds of machines and dozens of servers. Appletalk was adequate for small islands of connectivity, but not a building-wide network; much less campus-wide.

Fairness to Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

So now we are going to be fair to him ?

Re:Fairness to Bill Gates

[morgan_greywolf]

So now we are going to be fair to him ?

Yeah. The story submitter must be new here. Welcome aboard, NewsCloud!

Re:Fairness to Bill Gates

[Opportunist]

No problem. But quid pro quo, I'll start being fair to him as soon as his company is to its customers.

Msft tagline ripped off from Apple?

[walterbyrd]

> . . for many years Microsoft's tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home."

Wasn't that Apple's idea? As I understand it, that's why they called the company "Apple" - it was supposed to be something every kid should have on his/her desk.

Re:Msft tagline ripped off from Apple?

[Luthair]

As I understand it its called Apple because Jobs is/was a big fan of The Beatles who had created their own record label, Apple Records.

Re:Msft tagline ripped off from Apple?

[Corporate Troll]

Please go read the "Logo" section in the wikipedia Article. It was a tribute to Newton... Even, I, a non-Apple users knew that.

Re:Msft tagline ripped off from Apple?

[anthroboy]

And it's worth noting that even this prediction hasn't proved out. To suggest otherwise is pretty darned classist IMHO...

Re:Msft tagline ripped off from Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_ Computer

Grandparent was making a joke.

The Alternative

[lonechicken]

He could go the other direction and predict really mundane stuff. Sort of like that old Christopher Walken skit on SNL in which he plays a "Dead Zone"-like guy, but says stuff like, "You're going to get an ice cream headache. It's going to hurt real bad...right here for eight, nine seconds."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken#Ap pearances_on_Saturday_Night_Live

Extra Extra.. read all about it!

[JustASlashDotGuy]

Business man makes business predictions about the future. Some are right... some are wrong!

And in related news.... critics choose to focus only on the predictions that were wrong!

* Personally, I really loved OS/2. It's wasn't the best piece of software *ever*, but it was truely remarkable for it's time. I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.

Re:Extra Extra.. read all about it!

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be truly remarkable for any time, is if you mastered the mind-boggling concept that IT'S means IT IS.

Re:Extra Extra.. read all about it!

[drsmithy]

Personally, I really loved OS/2. It's wasn't the best piece of software *ever*, but it was truely remarkable for it's time.

OS/2 was certainly solid, but "truly remarkable" ? Not really. Pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection weren't exactly cutting edge, even back in the mid-late 80s.

I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.

Like what ? Windows NT was superior in pretty much every measurable way (except maybe the WPS - but IME opinions about the WPS tend to be pretty polarised, so even that's debateable). Not to mention Microsoft _wrote_ a non-trivial chunk of OS/2, so they couldn't really stea^H^H^H^Hborrow from themselves, could they ?

Holly Duplicate Post Batman!

[canipeal]

I wonder if Mr. Gates foresaw that one coming!

the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[rucs_hack]

At the time mr gates and co were pushing that product and had paid a lot of money into its development. Therefore his not bigging it up is about as likely as Ford suggesting people use bicycles instead of their cars.

Also no-one had any idea, or could even conceive of the idea that spam would become such a big problem. Again though, if they had an inkling, he was hardly going to say 'well yes, in a few years most mail on the internet will be spam'. That's hardly going to help him sell Outlook now is it?

He wasn't talking as some kind of all knowing Oracle, he was talking as a powerful businessman with a definite agenda. Why do people keep dragging this up?

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when this quote and a related Comdex video came out ("OS/2 will be the operating system of the 90s"), and I still have a copy of the video somewhere. People always laughed at this one and say that Bill was a turn-coat to OS/2, but, you know, he was right.

I was a die-hard OS/2 fan, and still have a copy of it running on a virtual machine. I don't give a nod to Bill easily. However, MS worked with IBM on OS/2 version 1, before abandoning it to go with the monster Windows was becoming. MS took their work and used it to shape Windows NT, and everything derived from NT still has an OS/2 heart.

For evidence of this, just check out:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/ntwrkstn/ reskit/os2comp.mspx

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[trudyscousin]

"He wasn't talking as some kind of all knowing Oracle, he was talking as a powerful businessman with a definite agenda. Why do people keep dragging this up?"

I think it's because he positioned himself exactly as an "all knowing Oracle" when he produced the book The Road Ahead.

That's what people do when they've got an inflated sense of self. We keep bringing it up because we enjoy wielding the pin.

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[Lunar_Lamp]

At the time he said it, spam was already a problem to the average user in clogging up their inbox.

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[gordo3000]

his spam comment is probably the most true he ever made. 3 - 4 years ago, I had to delete hundreds of spam emails a week. wtih the advances in filtering technology, now I'm lucky to ever need to delete more than 10 a month, and that is on 3 separate email accounts compared to 1. I'd say the problem of spam has been replaced by a more benign problem: family forwarding on stupid messages about Bill gates giving away thousands of dollars for forwarding an email....

has anyone had their spam actually increase over the last year or 2? I'd be interested to find out how that happened.

Now, if someone thought he meant magically people would stop sending spam, then they are just stupid. the problem of spam was it filling up your inbox because there weren't good ways to filter it out. that has been solved to a major extent now.

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[Terrasque]

He wasn't talking as some kind of all knowing Oracle, he was talking as a powerful businessman with a definite agenda. Why do people keep dragging this up?

Because some people think he is an all knowing oracle.

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[Ravnen]

Windows doesn't really have an OS/2 heart. The whole point of 'new technology' OS/2 (which became Windows NT) was to create a new 'heart', i.e. a completely new and portable kernel, for the OS/2 API, with the POSIX and MS-DOS APIs included for good measure. This is because the 'old technology' OS/2 was tied to either the 286 (OS/2 1.x) or 386 (OS/2 2.x), and most people in the late 80s and early 90s thought RISC was going to kill off the x86.

If you include NT OS/2, which was started in 1988, in Bill Gates's 1987 prediction about OS/2, then I suppose you can say it was, in a way, right.

Re:the OS/2 stuff is predictable

[drsmithy]

MS took their work and used it to shape Windows NT, and everything derived from NT still has an OS/2 heart.

In name, maybe, but not in any meaningful way. There's certainly not any architectural similarities between the two. Windows NT is in no way derived from the OS/2 codebase.

For evidence of this, just check out:

Linux runs Win32 binaries, too - does that mean in every Linux box beats the heart of DOS ?

Re-tooling words a little...

[packetmon]

In the article... "You'll watch a program when it's convenient for you instead of when a broadcaster chooses to air it." I wonder if he'll soon say... "You'll watch a program when it's convenient for your broadcaster to decipher whether or not by you watching it, it is not pirated, the operating system pushing your media center is not pirated, it has passed the then behemoth MPAA/RIAA/DoJ/DHS joint task force aptly named NOMIND or "National Oversight on Mentally Intergrating National Deficencies" benchmark tests which include:

1) Methods to ensure proper copyrighted procedures (RIAA)
2) Methods to ensure proper filtering and re-programming the American Apple Pie way (MPAA)
3) Methods to ensure political correctedness (addenDumb to new DoJ/Christian Law "Thou shall not criticize thine government" doctrine)
4) Methods to ensure Osama is not in your living room and or you are not exporting crypto to him or his terrorist via any methods including telekinesis.

Re:Re-tooling words a little...

[Kjella]

4) Methods to ensure Osama is not in your living room and or you are not exporting crypto to him or his terrorist via any methods including telekinesis.

<Hermes Conrad mode="technically correct">Unless you're using a piece of chalk to draw it on his cave wall in Afghanistan from your living room, I think you mean telepathy rather than telekinesis.</Hermes>

Spam problem has been solved...

[RingDev]

Just not implemented. With a variety of solutions from a variety of vendors that require both sides of the communication to run their new standard... Well, you have resistance from the users, the ISPs, and each of the vendors as they try to get their product out while holding up everyone else's. In the end, there are a number of new standards to stop spam, just none of them that will be implemented.

-Rick

Re:Spam problem has been solved...

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Yeah. It just goes to show you how stupid humans can be sometimes. I think even chimpanzees have solved their spam problem by now, but humans will just keep squabbling and squabbling without fixing anything. Nobody wants to make any effort to fix spam, everyone just wants someone else to do it for them and make it all magically better..

Re:Spam problem has been solved...

[Zaatxe]

Spam problem has been solved (at least for me), by Google on gMail. In three years, I got no more than 10 spam e-mail in my inbox.

Re:Spam problem has been solved...

[VagaStorm]

You don't need a specific vendor tec to stop spam. If you ISP dos their job, they should stop almost all your spam. I myself got a spam today, and I actually laughed at it since I coulden't remember when I got the last one :p

Re:Spam problem has been solved...

[Kazrath]

Spam has been solved. The problem is no one is implementing it.

What Bill was referring to was using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or a form of it. The reason why spam is so prevalent is due to the ease of spoofing from addresses. With SPF enabled and enforced you would need to poison a ROOT DNS server or have a legitimate text record to send spam.

Bill gates was right on this one. Organizations are/were to lazy to enforce it to the extent AOL did.

On CEOs as seers.

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

Bill Gates doesn't seem to be much of a seer in the development of his software, either. From what I've seen his comments correlate well with the way Microsoft works: they make some fine products, but seem to be continually behind the ball on everything. All the major innovations of Windows et al were done somewhere else first, and often much better. Like the web that Gates keeps alluding to. They bolted that functionality on to Windows back in the day (let's not even go there) and to this day the overwhelming body of evidence is that Microsoft doesn't really get the web.

So no, I don't think Bill is a particularly insightful seer. He may be an evil genius or something when it comes to the minutiae of building an empire, but future-aspected he is most certainly not.

You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[bberens]

I'm not contradicting your statement in the least but did want to comment that this idea of innovation invented elsewhere is the norm for big business. Big businesses tend not to take risks. They let smaller companies farm markets for new products and then they buy into the market. Apple, for instance, didn't invent the portable music device or the online music store. Microsoft (and Al Gore) didn't invent the internet. Rupert Murdoch didn't invent MySpace. That's the way it works.. small companies start out with an innovation and either become big business or big business buys them out. IBM is an example of a company that became big business rather than being bought out. However, nowadays they mostly purchase or recreate technology.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[orclevegam]

You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing. Also Robert A. Heinlein. I still can't believe how accurate some of his stuff was considering a lot of it was written around the 1950s and 60s.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[WED Fan]

Also Robert A. Heinlein. I still can't believe how accurate some of his stuff was considering a lot of it was written around the 1950s and 60s.

If so, I want...

• My flying car
• My jump tube
• Cryo Sleep
• Martian religion
• Moon-sized, multi-generational space ship
• Moon Nazis

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Martian religion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Al Gore did see the value of public computer networks long before the vast majority of politicians, and played a significant role in the internet becoming what it is today.

Google "Cerf Gore" and click "I'm feeling lucky"

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[Dolly_Llama]

Don't forget living hundreds of years while fornicating with countless attractive young women.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[WED Fan]

Don't forget living hundreds of years while fornicating with countless attractive young women.

Damn Skippy.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[Drathos]

If so, I want...

• My flying car

That's because Dante changed his mind and wouldn't let a German scientist hack off his foot and have his way with him.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert A. Heinlein. I still can't believe how accurate some of his stuff was

What about Asimov? "Multivac" was the only thing in science fiction that even came close to describing the internet.

But none of these guys, from Verne to Heinlein, really were "seers". Maybe Orwell. None of them foresaw cell phones, let alone cell phones with cameras in them.

As a guy who remembers a world without space travel, the internet, the PC, the microwave, the VCR, the digital clock, integrated circuts, fuel injectors, and a host of other stuff we take for granted today, I'm wondering what weird and wonderful things are coming in my second 50 years (5 of which have alas already been spent).

-mcgrew

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our lawyers have been dispatched, you have 10 seconds to step away from the keyboard.

- Friends of Xenu.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[putaro]

None of them foresaw cell phones, let alone cell phones with cameras in them.

Hey, don't forget Dick Tracy. He had all that stuff!

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[joekool]

Heinlein talks about a personal phone in chapter 1 of Space Cadet. He does not mention the technology backing it. He does however receive a call from an aquaintance (possibly his mother or uncle, its been awhile). That pretty much covers cell phones as actually used.

Integrated devices (cell phone/camera) are talked about in general ways in many books during the 40s-50s, although camera phones specifically are not mentioned to my knowledge. The wrist communicator/data access device was one particularly common example of such a device. It wouldn't surprise me if one had a camera.

Re:On CEOs as seers.

[unitron]

As a guy who remembers a world without space travel, the internet, the PC, the microwave, the VCR, the digital clock, integrated circuts, fuel injectors, and a host of other stuff we take for granted today, I'm wondering what weird and wonderful things are coming in my second 50 years (5 of which have alas already been spent).

We appear to be of an age, but there were '57 or '58 Chevys with fuel injection (no microprocessor control, of course), and for that matter the fuel injector is at least as old as the Diesel engine. And you left the biggie off of your list, the remote control. :-)

As for what wonders may come, I look forward to some, fear others, and expect that pop music is only going to continue to get worse (from my point of view).

OS/2 Did Win

[Ian McBeth]

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

It is true, Windows NT 3.1 = MS OS/2 with windows 3.1 interface on top.
Basically Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 are the MS version of OS/2 with their own GUI tacked on top, so technically
Gates got this one correct.

Better prediction...

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that I will sleep with your mom, and she will take you to court and make YOU pay for child support. This will only work because I am your identical twin.

That's really not it.

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

Read the article. Most of the quotes aren't either right or wrong; most of them are simply mundane, and were mundane when he made them. Read every single quote and see if you don't say, "Well DUH!" in your head a bunch of times.

Maybe the article sucks, or Bill's holding his crystal ball close to the boardroom, but it's all pretty standard stuff.

I predict

[aussie_a]

that he will stay rich, and beat his wife for Steve Jobs.

Intersting...

[jfade]

I find this pretty interesting in general, just because of how all kinds of wild predictions about computers have been made by all kinds of people, most of them totally wrong, but for one person to be (more or less) correct more than once about things is pretty fascinating to me.

I have to say, though, speaking of newspapers, the Epic 2014 video makes some pretty interesting predictions about the future of print newspapers. I'm relatively sure that news is going to continue to make a move to be more online (and probably subscription) based, but the Epic 2014 video is pretty interesting to think about.

Augur the Seer...

[Vexler]

The only "seer" of technology for me is Augur, and he doesn't use Windows.

At any rate, only a person with truly innovative and revolutionary approach has the insight to guess how technological advances will influence societies. Gates' approach has been to buy out companies he can't compete with, and then re-branding the acquired products. It was true with PC-DOS v1.0, and it continues to be true to this day.

Seer? Pah!

[el_flynn]

You know, when you're the richest person on earth, it's not that difficult to make what you say become fact. I mean, if Gates had really wanted spam eliminated, he could spend some of the $56 billion he has to put out hit contracts on the world's most wanted spammers. Or, more realistically, fund something like the X-prize, but for spam elimination instead.

Re:Seer? Pah!

[rbarreira]

Maybe he's more interested in more worthwhile causes such as curing diseases? I say this because he does donate a lot of money for disease research and many other charity endeavors, look it up...

Re:Seer? Pah!

[soft_guy]

I have actually communicated with Bill Gates personally regarding the elmination of spam. (I am no longer a Microsoft employee.) At the time he was only interested in eliminating spam provided that the proposed solution would tie people into a Microsoft proprietary solution which was not the kind of solution I was pitching.

Re:Seer? Pah!

[TheRaven64]

If by 'curing diseases' you mean 'using donations of drugs to persuade poorer countries to sign IP treaties with America, and crippling their chances of developing their own software and pharmaceutical industries' then I completely agree. He has achieved a lot with his money.

Re:Seer? Pah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow you're a serious fucktard. What the fuck have you done against malaria?

What's the problem here?

[DJCacophony]

Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.

Re:What's the problem here?

[Anonymous Coward]

/me can't believe nobody mentioned "640k" yet

Re:What's the problem here?

[Anonymous Coward]

/me can't believe you didn't RTFA.

Re:What's the problem here?

[tecie]

/me can't believe you didn't RTFA. You must be new here.

Re:What's the problem here?

[noidentity]

Solved? When I look into my gmail's spam folder, it gets tons of SPAM every day. Sure, I don't see it, but it's still costing Google in bandwidth. It'll be solved when it's not taking up any bandwidth and CPU time on any servers.

Re:What's the problem here?

[gkhan1]

Umm, that was his point. Google does a FANTASTIC job of sorting spam into your spam-folder so you never have to see it. I get virtually no spam in my main inbox and right now I have 556 mails in my spam-folder. I used to check occasionally to see if they had caught a false positive, but since that never happened, I stopped. Nowadays, I never even look. It's like having an email address in 1993!

Re:What's the problem here?

[evilviper]

Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.

I use a dozen blacklists and every other spam filtering method you can imagine... Plenty of spam still gets through, of course it's about 1/10th what it would be without them.

If you aren't getting any, your e-mail address can't be very popular. Put it in a mailto: on a few popular websites, get active on some high-traffic mailing lists, etc., and you too will have the most skilled and dedicated spammers out there trying to get hundreds of pieces of spam in your inbox...

Even my completely unlisted GMail accounts have had a couple pieces of spam slip through. The one thing gmail has going for it is with a large enough userbase, they can just wait until they get the first spam report, and then delete anything similar from every single mailbox. A bit like an army of spam reporters.

Re:What's the problem here?

[kisrael]

Not if you redirect all the mail from a domain you own into our gmail account. Plenty slips through, especially bounces from Joe-Jobs.

Re:What's the problem here?

[jank1887]

Ummm... but that was His point. The problem isn't solved. It's hidden. "I don't care where the garbage goes as long as it's not in my back yard..."

You still pay for it one way or the other. If it still costs you, it hasn't been solved.

Re:What's the problem here?

[gkhan1]

But... it doesn't cost me anything. I never check my spam folder any more, and I don't have to. It is as if spam didn't exist for me. Ergo, it has been solved.

Re:What's the problem here?

[Torvaun]

That's akin to Bill Gates saying that poverty has been solved because he has plenty of money. It hasn't been solved, it's just not a problem for you.

Re:What's the problem here?

[babyrat]

Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.

That's funny, I use gmail and my spam directory fills up with junk emails every day. Once in a while a legitimate message ends up there as well. This at best is a workaround, not a solution.

Re:What's the problem here?

[Anonymous Coward]

/me can't believe it's not butter

Re:What's the problem here?

[poot_rootbeer]

Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.

Filtering is not a solution to the spam problem. Not while there' a non-negligible amount of the total mail traffic going over the networks consisting of spam.

It's one thing to prevent spam from being delivered to users' eyes, but it's another thing entirely to prevent it from being sent in the first place. There hasn't been a tenable solution to that problem yet.

Re:What's the problem here?

[noidentity]

You might not see SPAM in your inbox, but it's definitely included in what you pay your ISP (unless they don't do e-mail at all). There's not a specific "SPAM costs" item, but it's in there.

Re:What's the problem here?

[Falkkin]

Gmail has "solved" the *easy* half of the spam problem. Indeed, I never get spam in my Gmail mailbox. On the other hand, about 1-3 non-spam messages get marked as Spam every week. I'd rather the filter erred in the opposite direction -- I'd much rather see 10 spams a day but be ensured that there are no false positives.

Re:What's the problem here?

[gkhan1]

I should clarify my position a little here I think :) I didn't mean that the general problem of spam has been solved, I was just pointing out that Google had solved in a very nice way. No doubt it is still rampant and a plague on the internet, however there are ways to ensure that you don't have to deal with it.

Re:What's the problem here?

[denobug]

Last I check my Gmail account still gets couple SPAMS in my Inbox on a daily/once every two days basis. I suppose it is a lot better than other, but SPAMS will still come through.

Nothing works better than having a team of experts working on filtering out the junk mails. Oh, wait, we the /.ers are the "experts". I guess we'll have to do it ourselves...

Re:What's the problem here?

[oni]

Not if you redirect all the mail from a domain you own into our gmail account.

Is that because you're sending more email to the gmail account or are you saying it's because google downgrades its spam filter when you redirect?

thanks.

Re:What's the problem here?

[kisrael]

I'm assuming it's a HUGELY greater volume of email... from pseudo-dictionary based spam runs to bounce backs meant for the asshole whole sullied your good name by sending mail from sdkgbskpbg@yourdomain.com

My gmail 30 day spam box usually has between 70K-90K messages in it.

SPAMMERS BURN IN HELL.

Re:What's the problem here?

[jjersin]

Seriously, do you not get spam in your gmail account? I definitely do. Not as much as in my school email account, but google definitely still has a problem with spam.

Anyone interested in the details should post their email address and I'll forward some.

Re:What's the problem here?

[drsquare]

It has been solved, it's just that most people don't bother using the solution. If everyone used gmail, there would be no spam as it wouldn't be worth sending it.

Re:What's the problem here?

[stonedcat]

/wrists

Re:What's the problem here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, I am a spam message. You probably will not read me because I will be modded down:

xjkdchvkjxchxkcdhvnsxjkdhbvxsjkdcvbxzkjhdvbzkjdcvb zkjvbkxzj,dcvbxzkjdhzkjxvhnzkjhvzkjvchnzjxcvnzmbcx vbvnx,mvnz,mxncz,mxvnzxm,cnz,mxncz,mxnczm,xncz,mxn cz,mxnczm,xnczm,xcnzm,xncz,mxnczmxncz,mxncz,mxnczm xncz,xmvc

Re:What's the problem here?

[Smight]

I think your misunderstanding what spam he was talking about. I admit it's a little bit late, but as of today burgerking has solved the Spam Matrix in Hawaii!
http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?story id=254168

It's only a matter of time now...

Re:What's the problem here?

[Anonymous Coward]

It may "cost", but it's not much. The last TV episode I downloaded was probably larger than 6 months of my unfiltered, spam-infested e-mail volume. And that was just one video file.

Re:What's the problem here?

[BluBrick]

Hell, I get both. I occasionally get spam turning up in my Gmail inbox - very rarely, I admit, but it does happen - and I get some valid emails flagged as Spam (more of the latter than the former). So yeah, it's not a problem solved, but it's no longer much of a problem for me. I reckon it's a pretty reasonable compromise, so I keep using it.

Re:What's the problem here?

[rtb61]

Now come on this a Bill G story not a plug for google, now what do you think about Hotmail and it's services and how well they are tackling spam.

I can't comment on gmail as I never use it but my netscape email account has had the best track record over the past ten year, and in fact has been better than my own ISPs mail as well as hotmail or Yahoo mail (we are talking single digits in total).

What is going on here, the googlites are getting as bad as the microtrolls.

Re:What's the problem here?

[bhiestand]

It has been solved, it's just that most people don't bother using the solution. If everyone used gmail, there would be no spam as it wouldn't be worth sending it. Isn't that kind of like saying "It has been solved. Everybody knows the solution! The spammers just have to actually stop sending spam."

Re:What's the problem here?

[name*censored*]

Recently Gmail *has* been getting spam (at a rate of about 1 every 2 days), but they're always relegated to the spambox (and there doesnt seem to be any option for marking it as spam to update the filter, if they're already in the spam box). //*

Re:What's the problem here?

[Tsagadai]

Sorry I only have 640k it didn't load the whole way.

His comment on phones...

[Gordonjcp]

We don't see the desk phone existing as a separate device in the future.

http://www.stateoftheark.co.nz/icl/opd.html

Gates Predicts He'll Make Another Billion

[Doc Ruby]

Gates says whatever is most likely to make himself more money in the next year, without losing money.

And since making his kind of money means we all do it his way, his "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies.

How's that speech recognition and DB filesystem working out? Just fine, because the convincing promises sold several $billion more Windows installs on servers and desktops.

Bill Gates is the self-fulfillingest prophet ever, measured by the age old question "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

OS2 prediction - OS2 became Windows

[jan de bont]

Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", given that after the divorce, Microsoft shipped NT 3.5.1 with a Bootloader that still said "OS2" (hexdump the boot sector on an NT 3.5.1 drive, if you still have a copy - You'll see it). Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!

The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.

Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.

Re:OS2 prediction - OS2 became Windows

[drsmithy]

Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", [...]

No, they weren't. OS/2 and "OS/2 NT" (Windows NT) were completely different codebases. About 30 seconds with an archtecitural block diagram of each should make that pretty obvious.

Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!

OS/2 didn't evolve into NT. However, technically he's still right, since the product he would have been talking about at the time - OS/2 1.x's replacement - becamse Windows NT.

The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.

Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.

Ironic.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Regarding OS/2

[minus_273]

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

If you are laughing at that, you need to brush up on your operating systems. It is one thing to laugh at something because the other guy is wrong. It is another thing to laugh at someone because YOU don't know what you are talking about and think he is wrong.

NT4, win2000, XP, win2003 and vista are descendants of OS/2. The win 9x line is dead and all we have are the bastard sons of OS/2. I would say that win2000 and XP were pretty significant operating systems for good or for bad.

Dont laugh Gates was right.

Re:Regarding OS/2

[DannyO152]

Okay. Let's make the substitution:

I believe Windows NT will be the most important operating system of all time.

It's widely adopted, that's true. But, if someone wants to learn what computer science issues are addressed by an operating system, do they crack open some NT code? Nope. Unix was then and is now the most important operating system: it provides a standard and it may be adapted into places where only the insane would put NT or its descendants.

Re:Regarding OS/2

[minus_273]

Okay. Let's make the substitution:

I believe Windows NT will be the most important operating system of all time.

It's widely adopted, that's true. But, if someone wants to learn what computer science issues are addressed by an operating system, do they crack open some NT code? Nope. Unix was then and is now the most important operating system: it provides a standard and it may be adapted into places where only the insane would put NT or its descendants.

We do on occasion look at the NT code to see how MS did things (its not always wrong) on. You do know that some academic institutions are allowed to see the NT and CE code right? check your CS dept you probably have to sign NDA and stuff, but yeah, you can see the NT source.

Re:Regarding OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

actually i think he was wrong...osx is prolly the best most influential o/s on the market today :)

Re:Regarding OS/2

[geekoid]

Pfft.
No, it copied ideas from the most important prgram of all time, the Mac. If you think a GUI is the most important thing of all time. Wait, maybe you mean muti tasking..no Apple beat him there as well. I'm not even a fan boy, but I can smell the stink of revisionist.

the much toated HPFS was better, but eh, multitasking wasn't new or very good.
WHile not wrong with the consept, calling OS2 the most important progam is no different then the spin he put's out about EVERY product MS has ever released. Which is his job, btw.

Here's a better saying

[goombah99]

"Pioneers get the Arrows, settlers get the land". Gates has always been a settler. They take proven technologies and ideas, copy cat them, and then try to inflate them to one way standards (embrace and extend). Settlers are useful. Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.

Gates would not look like such a stogy inept prognosticator if it were not for a few brighter lights and pioneers like Jobs and the Google boys. Even Michael Dell gets some credit for being a sort of henry ford at one time but that was sort of a one time flash.

Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.

Re:Here's a better saying

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.

You know, I really like that analogy, and I'll extend it one step further: the people who actually invented those things were explorers, and some explorers come back rich and covered in glory, but most die miserable deaths a long way from home. The pioneers are a bridge between exploration and real settlement.

Re:Here's a better saying

[Angstroem]

Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.

You must be rather young -- or old enough that you start forgetting things.

(1) There were standardized platforms before the PC. Apple II would come to my mind, but also don't forget the CBM 2k/3k/4k/8k line of machines. What the PC in the end did was wiping out this wonderful heterogeneous world to install a monoculture. And yes, back then software standard existed so that you could take the Vizawrite file from machine X and import it on another Vizawrite running on machine Y. Btw, there even was a cross-platform operating system around which you might or might not remember as CP/M for the home consumer or Unix for the crowd with deeper pockets.

(2) Peripherals were already standardized before the PC. In fact, the PC started to disregard these standards by mingling the Shugart bus standard into which became the "PC floppy drive cable" or introducing IDE where SCSI was already an adopted standard. Heck, it even introduced an own (analog) joystick interface where the rest of the world adhered to Atari's de-facto standard of digital joysticks.

Microsoft did not create a "low end PC vendor market" as this market was already there -- we just called it "homecomputers" back then rather than "PCs". When the homecomputers (because of blatant failures in the management of various companies) didn't catch up with the technology development cycle, this void was filled by the PC which wasn't all that low-priced in the beginning anyway -- despite the fact that it was technologically inferior compared to modest homecomputers for quite some time.

What created the low end PC vendor market was IBM's failure to patent the BIOS and the PC architecture, opening the market for 3rd party PC board and chipset manufacturers. In the end, the PC platform won against the others because of its open architecture. Whatever component became obsolete could be exchanged.

But that was not Microsoft's achievement... Still in the late 1990s Microsoft was struggling to reach a level Apple, Atari and Commodore already had reached in the mid 1980s. Heck, even today they hardly come close to the look'n'feel of an Apple or the stability of a Unix machine.

Was Microsoft able to exploit its niche and become the world-dominating player in operating systems and office software? Definitely. But in no way they created the low-end PC vendor market.

Re:Here's a better saying

[goombah99]

I suppose the whole food chain goes like this:
1) discoverer's report there's a there there
2) explorers report it can support life and has many interesting properties
3) pioneers report it can support civilization and is useful
4) settlers civilize it and make a self-sustained business model.

Re:Here's a better saying

[BluBrick]

Must... resist... urge... to... exercise... Slashdot... List... meme...

AARGH!

5. ?
6. PROFIT!!!11

(I'm sorry, I just couldn't help myself!)

Are OSS predictions any more accurate

[Timesprout]

Some of the usual culprits I see are

(1996-2007) is definitely the year of Linux on the desktop. (Apparently if you recite this one enough times it will become true)

XXXX product from MS is doomed to failure for no particularly logical reason despite the fact we really know nothing about it but we love unfounded speculation.

MS is on the verge of collapse because little bobbie just started a project in sourceforge and although it has not released anything yet it will be an XP/Exchange/Outlook/SQLServer etc etc etc killer when they do and so the MS Evil Empire will crumble.

Re:Are OSS predictions any more accurate

[fishbowl]

>(1996-2007) is definitely the year of Linux on the desktop. (Apparently if you recite this one enough times it will become true)

The only people I know who are not using Linux "on the desktop", use Macs. I switched to Mac too, for the laptop, but I still use Linux on the desktop. I don't even understand what the argument was supposed to be, something to the effect that Linux isn't already on the desktop? Of course, I work in science, not in business, so when I look around, I don't expect what I see to be representative of any other domain.

Re:Are OSS predictions any more accurate

[RockoTDF]

When we say "linux on the desktop" it is referring to mainstream acceptance as a competitor to windows and OS X and usage by your typical joe schmoe.

Re:Are OSS predictions any more accurate

[notepad_doodler]

Ah, but MS did invent microscopic type for product keys and EULAs the size of novels.

Re:Are OSS predictions any more accurate

[fishbowl]

"Mainstream acceptance" might be useful as an ego boost, and it might help grow certain commercial markets, but it's not necessary. I think that's the whole point.

Re: you must be a young-un

[rubycodez]

in its early years before Windows even existed Microsoft indeed said "A PC on every desk and in every home" At later points in time they added bit about windows, and even later said they wanted a server in every home.

Ruddy hell its Harry and Paul

[ThirdPrize]

Anyone else see the sketches about Bill and Steve o the new Harry Enfield show? Quite amusing.

Re:Ruddy hell its Harry and Paul

[alnapp]

for differing values of "quite"

Re:Ruddy hell its Harry and Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

Negative values can be "quite".

I am still trying to get over my disappointment, having watched the first episode. It had such potential. But Paul Whitehouse seems to have let himself get steamrollered into unfunny sketches by Harry. You can spot some of Pauls brilliance (I'm betting the builders and the surgeons are probably his original ideas) but it's mostly lost under a tidal wave of crap characters, bad stereo types and unfunny dialogue. Darn.

Re:Ruddy hell its Harry and Paul

[ThirdPrize]

Check it out here. Prime time Tv.

So they fail, then

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no MS software purchases running on any of my six machines at home. I have about 8 installations of linux, mind...

Oh, the irony

[ffreeloader]

On the same day we have /. articles about how Bill Gates predicted how content would be available for fair use and about how the DRM in MCE is shafting users by keeping them from viewing content. Way to go Bill. You killed your own prediction. That is brilliant business planning....

He won't say it. He'll do it.

[Opportunist]

He'll continue to keep the spin up, with you as the customer being allegedly in control of when and where you watch your content.

Why do you think that people do what they say? Or tell you what they do?

Re: you must be a young-un

[morgan_greywolf]

I never said anything about Windows.

And no, I'm not a 'young-un'.

I'd highly suggest reading Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews. Excellent book-- and it's the source of my comment.

Missed Queues

[Dan East]

"When wallet PCs have become ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that plague airport terminals, theaters and other places where people queue up to show their identification or a ticket."

He really missed this prediction in multiple ways.

For ticketing, the internet allows people to pre-purchase tickets for just about anything, allowing a very quick scan of a printed-at-home ticket for entrance.

For identification, RFID is revolutionizing that arena, and it does not require an actual computing device ("wallet PC") on the end user.

These "wallet PCs" turned out to be PDAs, and although latecomer Microsoft currently dominates this area with their mobile OS, the real revolutionary and cutting edge advances were made by other companies, like Palm.

The queues we see today are not because of the reasons he suggests, but due to the security required to prevent mass murder.

The ironic thing with his predictions is that his company actually has the resources to make a lot of them come true. I just wonder why other companies are the ones bringing us the gee-whiz technology and software. Internet search, iPhone's slick touch-based PDA interface, input devices like the Wii's. These are all arenas Microsoft compete in directly, yet others take the lead. Why can't MS make these kinds of things happen?

Dan East

Re:Missed Queues

[WorkerGnome]

Actually, I'd say that the wallet PC is actually the cell phone. And while they may not be used in the US like this, Asia is certainly using cell phones as virtual wallets. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/22/tech/mai n631231.shtml

OS/2 Being Most Important

[nurb432]

In a twisted way he was right, since they stole the codebase and created NT from it, which has morphed into 2000, XP and now vista.

Re:OS/2 Being Most Important

[demon]

I think Dave Cutler *might* have a thing or two to say about that...

Re:OS/2 Being Most Important

[nurb432]

Hes either a liar, or has selective memory.

Re:OS/2 Being Most Important

[demon]

Selective memory? The guy that MS poached from DEC to write the entire NT microkernel? Uhhh... No. As others pointed out, NT was a *completely* separate project; early on in its lifetime it was referred to as "NT-OS2", but it shared almost no code with OS/2 proper (it did borrow the code for HPFS - the original NTFS was in fact *interchangeable* with HPFS, because they were the same filesystem - and I've heard the bootloader may have been an offshoot of OS/2 Boot Manager). But to say that NT was an offshoot of OS/2 is a complete misnomer - only in name were the two codebases ever so related. Why do you think there had to be a whole separate kernel subsystem dedicated to OS/2 1.x program compatibility? (There were also DOS and POSIX compatibility subsystems, as well as the Win32 layer.)

Re:OS/2 Being Most Important

[drsmithy]

[...] (it did borrow the code for HPFS - the original NTFS was in fact *interchangeable* with HPFS, because they were the same filesystem)

Not really. Well, maybe in the _very_ early development stages - but NTFS was created specifically from scratch for NT and even in its first release was a significantly more complex and more capable FS than HPFS.

Not to mention Microsoft wrote HPFS as well ;).

OS/2 was a deception

[michaelmalak]

Gates' promotion of OS/2 was an act of deception, not prediction. He mislead WordPerfect into developing for OS/2 instead of Windows so that Word would have the advantage.

Re:OS/2 was a deception

[romland]

NT* But that doesn't make any sense. I don't know the exact history, but the following would make more sense to me: OS/2 had the upper hand at this point, I believe. So developing for OS/2 would make perfect sense. It's more like the opposite of what you say, Microsoft had to make sure they made a WP killer for Windows.

Now if you were modded funny, it'd be okay, but since you are modded informative and I have no sense of humour I would not be able to tell. :)

*NT: Anyone remember those t-shirts/mugs/etc? NT = Nice try!

Re:OS/2 was a deception

[Anonymous Coward]

...companies like Lotus decided not to waste time developing for Windows, but went straight to OS/2; while Microsoft covered all the bets. And then, when the Windows bets paid off and the OS/2 bets didn't, MS changed their strategy.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=228031&cid=184 76475

NT and OS/2 Error Codes

[Mad Geek]

Even the error codes were the same (at least in the earlier versions). I used to use the OS/2 help command to figure out what some SYS errors NT spit out meant.

It's definitely come a long way from the time where you could crash an entire NT subnet by hooking up a workstation with an incorrect IP config, but I still think the NT 4.0 SP6 was the most stable release of Windows...

Re:NT and OS/2 Error Codes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'd go with NT 4.0 SP5 for stability. SP6 did several weird things to explorer that hindered its stability at times. Other than that, NT 3.51 SP5 was darn stable too (and wasn't prone to certain vulnerabilities that exist in NT 4.0 through XP.)

A goal, not a prediction.

[Russ Nelson]

Microsoft's tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home."

That's a goal, not a prediction. A prediction requires that you have no ability to affect the outcome.

A server in every home

[Spy der Mann]

Well, thanks to Microsoft there are mail servers in every home... in South Korea ;-)

descendants of OS/2 .. ?

[rs232]

'NT4, win2000, XP, win2003 and vista are descendants of OS/2'

Only in the sence that lower primates are decendent from homo sapiens. At the time even MS recognised that OS/2 was superior. They only abandon it once they realized they couldn't get total control of it. In the imortal words of billg we can't get IBMed on this one.

Re:Regarding OS/2 (Score:2, Insightful)

Re:descendants of OS/2 .. ?

[LWATCDR]

OS/2 Ver3 became NT. They just ported the Windows API to it. Some of the things that IBM and Microsoft had a falling out over with where.
1. IBM wanted support for the 286. Microsoft thought that the 386 was the wave of the future.
2. Microsoft wanted to use the Windows API to make migration from Windows to OS/2 simple. IBM wanted to distance OS/2 from Microsoft's "failure" called Windows. Not only that but the Windows API was a mess. When OS/2 started almost no one used Windows. 2.11 was the first usable version of Windows and frankly it still sucked.
What is funny is that IBM wanted to support 286 for marketing reasons and Microsoft wanted to drop 286 for very sound technical reasons. Microsoft wanted to support the Windows API for marketing reasons and IBM wanted to drop it for sound technical reasons. They both made bad technical choices but Microsoft made the better marketing choice.
I hate marketing.

Re:descendants of OS/2 .. ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that your comments are wrong.

Dave Cutler's NewTechnology group was cut from DEC at a time of financial trouble. Cutler walked over to Microsoft who took over the code/technology. The took some time to add the Microsoft look and feel to make it into NT3.5.

This is why lots of the NT4.0 (and 2000) APIs are similar to VMS.

There is a book about this whole topic. Too bad I can't recall its name.

Re:descendants of OS/2 .. ?

[drsmithy]

Only in the sence that lower primates are decendent from homo sapiens.

Not even in that sense. There is no common ancestor.

Heck, FreeBSD and Linux have more in common than OS/2 and Windows NT.

fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

i just love how you asshats sit around and pat yourselves on the back for having hindsight.

how long have i been hearing that mantra that linux will own the desktop or this year is the year of the linux revolution?

if i were so overwhelmed with insight into technology do you think i'd be sitting around posting on slashdot or would i be making billions and changing the face of technology? i'm sure all you guys who are laughing it up today had seen the problems in everything years ago but didn't do anything about it. or maybe you tried and failed miserably.

oh, that's right, bill gates got you down. whatever. move along.

Let's see...

[peterbiltman]

... Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world, check. ... Microsoft is still the dominate OS, check. ... Microsoft revenue increases every year, check.

I don't see what this has to do with news at all. Just another Microsoft rant this place has become so famous for.

Re:Let's see...

[oGMo]

... Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world, check. ... Microsoft is still the dominate OS, check. ... Microsoft revenue increases every year, check.

...Microsoft is still the follower, not the innovator, check.

This simply provides some insight as to why. Microsoft fanboys need not apply.

Money is the way you keep score

[El_Smack]

And Bill is way ahead.

640k is enough for everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Is 640k enough for everyone?

Billy boy ofcourse denies he ever said such stupid things.

2003 he said 4 gig would be enough for everyone. Is it?

MafIAA vs. The Mafia

[mr_mischief]

The Mafia is a myth and legend, for one. It's a bunch of otherwise independent crime organizations that sometimes scratch each other's backs and other times claw at each other's eyes. The most cooperation one can usually expect is that it's mutually beneficial for both sides in a dispute to avoid the ire of the authorities and that it's sometimes convenient for two crime lords to split rackets on geographical or crime-type boundaries.

The MafIAA is much more organized. This is partly because they haven't yet been proven to be doing things illegally, which allows them to communicate and plot as openly as they do. Many of the tactics do seem like racketeering, and there's chatter in the courtrooms and the press that some counter-suits are trying to make a point of that.

More directly to you question, though, protection payments, strong-arm tactics, threats, trying to bar outsiders from competing, and divvying up markets among member organizations are all time-tested mob tactics. If "The Mafia" is upset about anything involving the comparison, it's probably that the MPAA and RIAA are less romantic of a notion.

Re:MafIAA vs. The Mafia

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mafia is a myth and legend, for one.
It's a bunch of otherwise independent crime organizations that sometimes scratch each other's backs and other times claw at each other's eyes.

So which is it?

Re:MafIAA vs. The Mafia

[Opportunist]

Huh? Where does the Mafia come into the picture? I'm talking about the Music And Film Industry Association of America. What kind of acronym would you suggest for it?

Re:MafIAA vs. The Mafia

[hicksw]

If "The Mafia" is upset about anything involving the comparison, it's probably that the MPAA and RIAA are less romantic of a notion. More likely it would be about not getting their cut... unless they are.

Seering advice

[Anonymous Coward]

"a PC on every desktop and in every home." Bill was right on that one.

Compare that to Linux, which predicted it would be ready for the desktop by now. Amazingly, it's still chasing Windows 95's tail lights. On the other hand, it has the largest variety of text editors of any OS.

Re:Seering advice

[Gilmoure]

Don' dis mah Pico!

No need for prognostication...

[pestie]

There's no need to predict the future when you can control it instead.

NT IS NOT OS/2!

[lwriemen]

People, you really need to check your history! Microsoft may have borrowed from their co-development of OS/2, but they developed with a different kernel. I can't believe how many times this MYTH got repeated!

IBM made OS/2 a much better product after the split. If you ask for recommended versions, you'll get OS/2 1.3 for the command line version and post OS/2 2.0 for the graphical version.

Microsoft leaving OS/2 was the best thing that ever happened to OS/2 from a technical standpoint, but not from a marketing standpoint.

Re:On Jules Verne

[Anonymous Coward]

"..You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing..."

You want a seer who was right? Try H G Wells.

Monsieur Verne suffered from a lack of vision. He just looked at current technology and 'expanded' it. He knew no physics, and didn't see the need to be accurate, so things like his 'From the Earth to the Moon' ignore the obvious acceleration problems of being shot out of a gun. Or the practicalities of being 'snatched' by an earth-grazing comet!

Much of his minor stuff is frankly incomprehensible - 'Master of the World' says that travelling at 200 mph makes you invisible, for instance. And he was so tied to the mid 1800s politics - Germans were alternately good (when they were in competition with the British) and then bad (after 1871!). Everyone was a stereotype.

Wells, however, had his physics dead to rights. He invented whole new genres of Sci-Fi - Time Travel, The Invisible Man, amazingly accurate social predictions in 'Anticipations' and 'The Shape of Things to Come'. When he did space travel he invented the 'warp drive' with his 'Cavorite' material which rejected gravity.

The 'War of the Worlds' invented the entire 'alien battle' genre that America loves so much. Did you know that his predictions of the 'Atomic Bomb' inspired Szilard to invent the 'chain reaction? Wells' description really was that close!

He did Bio-engineering with 'The Island of Dr Moreau'. Really there was no limit to his vision. But I presume I hardly need to list the rest - Slashdotters must all have copies of all of his books off Gutenburg. If they haven't, I don't think you can see any SF movie which doesn't relate back to his work in some way.

He missed the internet

[QuietLagoon]

The quotes from the "Internet Tidal Wave" memo should be counted as misses. Gates, and Microsoft, were caught unaware of the impending power of the Internet. Only belately (as the article states) did Gates realize this and write the memo.

If Gates were really a great seer, he would have written the Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1990, not after the wave rolled onto the beach in 1996.

I am wondering why all this effort over the past year to pump up Gates' reputation? Has his illegal activities so ruined his reputation that there is an active effort in place to clean Gates' reputation for the history books?

Re:He missed the internet

[iapetus]

Which reminds me of my favourite Bill Gates quote, from back in the early '80s. "What's a network?"

OS/2's days were numbered .. ?

[rs232]

'he was selling the product when he said this .. he was actually right in the idea of it'

Illogical non-sequitur. Even though he was wrong he was actually right as he really meant Windows. So assuming in a parallel universe OS/2 is preeminent he is also right there also. Is achieving quantum coherencece across the multiverse also one of billg.s many talents.

He was selling OS/2 when he said that and he was actually wrong in it. MS likewarm support was what actually killed it eventually.

'It just happen to be Windows and not OS/2. Microsoft attacked the general market. IBM only knew about dealing with businesses'

Yet more retrospective revisionism. Why did MS fail to market OS/2 sucessfully since it was after all a joint MS IBM project.

'Once Microsoft moved away from OS/2 and went full bore on Windows, OS/2's days were numbered'

Even before the schism with IBM, MS was busy about FUDing OS/2 in public.

"The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect -- to FUD OS/2 2.0"

'even though OS/2 had a lot of things going for it over Windows'

Onc of those things being isolation between processes while Windows was still at Win3.1. OS/2 (Score:5, MOD up yet even more excuses)

Re:OS/2's days were numbered .. ?

[demon driver]

Even before the schism with IBM, MS was busy about FUDing OS/2 in public. And something which I seldom see referred to when talk goes about MS and OS/2, which was testified in one of the earliest antitrust suits against MS before US courts, was MS threatening to stop licensing Windows to IBM hardware if they'd continue actively pushing OS/2 onto the mass market. That must have been around the time when one of Germany's largest computer store chains actually offered PCs preloaded with OS/2 Warp 3 for a while. Since Windows had already gained a significant market share, IBM succumbed. It was not just IBMs awkwardness in marketing that defeated success, it was MS already having the market power to blackmail a company like IBM.

most seers missed the speed of internet growth

[peter303]

Most people anticipated something like the public/commercial internet some years in the future, but not that it would take-off in a couple of years (1993-1995 courtesy of NSF Mosaic). Event the founder of the MIT Media Lab and Wired Magazine Negopronte missed this in his book about computing trends (Being Digital) published that year. Gates missed until he had his "revelation" that MSN would not be the Internet.

Um, DOS FOUR, not six

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM owned OS/2, so Microsoft pushed out Windows 3.0, which was not a DOS replacement, but a windowing system that ran on top of DOS 6.

DOS 6 did not yet exist in 1990. In fact, Windows 3.0 has some weird issues with DOS 6. Try modifying the swap file settings, for instance. Windows 3.0 thinks you are running some version of DOS older than version 3!

Other than that, your points are quite valid.

the Oracle at Redmond ..

[rs232]

'no-one had any idea, or could even conceive of the idea that spam would become such a big problem'

How does a statement Gates made in Jan 2004 logically relate to no-one concieving spam as ever being a problem, in what ever time frame you are referencing.

'Again though, if they had an inkling, he was hardly going to say 'well yes, in a few years most mail on the internet will be spam'. That's hardly going to help him sell Outlook now is it?'

But by Jan 2004, everyone had an inkling that spam was a problem, including Gates. The difference was that no-one else predicted the demise of spam in TWO years. 'He wasn't talking as some kind of all knowing Oracle, he was talking as a powerful businessman with a definite agenda'

What amazing psychical ability you must posess, being able to retrospectively read the mind of the chief software architect of the universe.

'Why do people keep dragging this up?'

Because when someone sets themselves up as a predictor of future events, when we get past the annointed day and the thing didn't happen we kinda suspect the architect has no clothes.

the OS/2 stuff is predictable (Score: go back to usenet)

"seer" ?

[l3v1]

He's not a seer in any way, he's more an influencer, i.e. when people like him talk about the "future" of computing, they really mean what they would like to see happen, not what they "know" what will happen. And so many people just hang on these people's every word and believe what they say that when they hear these "fortune telling" sessions they start working towards achieving that "future" to not be lost in the big march led by these people, so eventually these "visions" become reality to an extent. And tada, then you can write articles about how "seers" these people were in the first place :)
 

Re:He can't see the future of governance

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Government '08 comes with a bribing feature, military add-ons, and the Pro version (for $220 billion extra) has commerce capabilities.

Unfortunately, even the alpha versions already have anarchy viruses.

A PC in every home...

[geekinaseat]

and a Zune in every pocket....

Oh wait...

Spam is only "solved" when spammers stop sending

[Joce640k]

Spam is only "solved" when spammers stop sending it.

As far as I can tell spam today is worse than ever. Maybe we've just got more complacent then before and set things up so we only see an "acceptable" amount of it, but in no way is the problem solved.

And it really ought to have been solved by now. A change of mail protocol is all that's needed, and Microsoft is one of the people who's thrown more spanners in the works of that than anybody else. Instead of collaborating with the world they tried to make a land-grab.

Are we really going to be stuck with SMTP for the rest of eternity...? It makes no sense to me.

If everybody got together, set up a new protocol and a definite date to "throw the switch" then spam could largely be solved on one go.

OS2 did not become Windows

[Tony]

The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.

Ironic statement.

Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.

The code for OS/2 was truly a joint effort. Both IBM and Microsoft had a hand in the design and implementation of OS/2 1.x. After the divorce, the code ended up in IBM's hands.

The code for NT was developed by Dave Cutler, who wrote VMS before going to Microsoft. The higher-level code was developed independently of Microsoft's OS/2 effort, at most sharing a few developers. (There was once an OS/2 1.x-compatible subsystem of MS-Windows NT. I don't know if it's still there, but like the POSIX subsystem, it was a compatibility subsystem, and not part of the main operating system.)

MS-Windows NT could perhaps be a cousin of OS/2, or even a nephew/niece, but is not a direct descendant. I would even go so far as to say that GNU/Linux has more OS/2 code than MS-Windows.

Re:OS2 did not become Windows

[technos]

It made it through to Windows 2000. You could still sort of run almost any 16 bit binary and most 32 bit ones..

They killed it off in XP/2003 though I think there is a third-party OS/2 subsystem for those.

1981 Prediction

[unborracho]

640K of memory should be enough for anybody

That's about where I lost faith in any Gates predictions

Re:1981 Prediction

[TheMediaWrangler]

It was a limitation of DOS and the Intel chipset of the day that . From Wikipedia...

The 640 KiB barrier is an aspect of the IBM PC and compatibles when running under MS-DOS, which could only address up to 640 KiB of memory for running applications. This is due to an architectural limitation of the Intel 8088 CPU, used in the original IBM PC.The 8088 and 8086 were only capable of addressing 1024 KiB of memory (220 bytes), since the chip offered only 20 address lines; of these 1024 KiB, IBM reserved the upper 384 KiB for system purposes -- the Upper Memory Area. This left only the lower 640 KiB for user programs and data.

Re:1981 Prediction

[Dobeln]

Also, it is unlikely that Gates ever said it. He denies it, and noone appears to be able to come up with an actual source of the quote.

Re:1981 Prediction

[Kennego]

Not that people at Slashdot read the article, but I did, and it had something REALLY interesting that I haven't seen anyone mention:
FTFA:

One quote frequently attributed to the Microsoft chairman is that "640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

However, Gates has long denied ever saying it, and no evidence has ever surfaced to show that he did. In 1996, when Gates was writing a syndicated newspaper column, a reader asked about the quote, and he replied, "No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things," he wrote, "but not that."

Perhaps he never said it at all? But then what would anti-Microsoft Slashdotters use as their trump card every time Bill Gates is mentioned???

MS - DOS, Windows, IntExplorer - leading IT indust

[inews.110mb.com]

Well, I could not remember anything in IT industry that have been the leader for the last 20 yeasr except Microsoft. IBM fail for a 10 years, Apple is still have just 9% of the market. But Microsoft - DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer - take a deep bow. Anyway I am using Linux ...:) see my essentials http://inews.110mb.com/

Re:On Jules Verne

[babyrat]

'Master of the World' says that travelling at 200 mph makes you invisible, for instance.

Have you ever seen me traveling at 200 mph? Perhaps it is because I WAS invisible...

Tablet PCs

[basic0]

I can't believe Gates or anyone else actually expected tablet PCs to take off, especially with people in IT that attend conferences and expos that Bill Gates appears at. Personally, I can type WAY faster than I can write (which is probably true for most techie sorts), my computer doesn't have to try to "interpret" my typing like it would with writing (less software getting in your way), and I don't have a stylus to lose. Oh, and when you have to spend about double the price of a nice new laptop for what's essentially a laptop with a swiveling touch-screen, that's a bit of a turn-off too. It amazes me that giant companies like Microsoft manage to remain in business when they're so clueless about what their customers want. Imagine this scenario:

Retail Associate: "Hi, I see you're looking at the Fujitsu XYZ-1000 laptop there, have you seen the XYZ-1000T?"
Customer: "No, what's that?"
R.A.: "Well, it's a very similar computer to this one, but it's a tablet PC"
C: "What's that mean?"
R.A: "It means that it's a little slower and less capable, but the screen swivels and rotates and you can write on it"
C: "Slower? Less capable?"
*STRIKE ONE*
R.A.: "Yes, but the handwriting interface is really neat-o, once you learn to use the digital ink software..."
C: "I have to learn new software?"
*STRIKE TWO*
R.A.: "Well, yes, but it's really keen! See, watch as I...oh..um..it looks like I broke the swivel joint on the screen..."
C: "How much does this monstrosity cost?"
R.A.: "Eighty-thousand dollars."
C: "Eighty-thousand dollars?! This monstrosity costs eighty-thousand dollars? I'm ruined!"
*STRIKE THREE*

Alright, so I may have borrowed some dialogue...but I've made my point.

Re:Tablet PCs

[geekoid]

If you point is "I'm an idiot." then yes, you made your point very well.

If it was an arguement against a tablet, then you made no point what so ever.

I watch a guy use his tablet, and quit frankly, I am envious. It'a hand writting software is very accurate, probably less error rate then your typing, and certianly less then mine.

It's fast and keeps up with is writing and is easir to use then a keyboard in the situation one would use one i.e. walking around.

It could easily replace my work computer. It's about 25% more then a laptop.

A PC on every desktop recursion

[lawaetf1]

Gah, it's like GNU but less elegant..

A PC on every desktop with a desktop in a PC on a desktop.. fork fork!

Actually, on OS/2 he was right...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Remember that Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 V3. IBM wouldn't go along with abandoning the Presentation Manager and went it's own way. Given the success of the Windows NT and it's successors, I think most people would say he was right.

Re:He can't see the future of governance

[Anonymous Coward]

Rupert Murdock does run the new government. Its called Myspace.

Re:On Jules Verne

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you were invisible, but only when nobody was looking.

iPod will never play video either...

[Anonymous Coward]

By Steve Jobs, yet you all love him, I don't get it. He owns jillions of dollars instead of bazillions, so he's ok I guess.

Ha they proved yer point!

[dreamchaser]

Mods on crack again...this dude was spot on.

Re:On Jules Verne

[Intron]

Verne saw bicycle spokes disappear at high speed and assumed that people would too. Not unreasonable.

As for the gun, I remember that he did calculate the amount of "gun cotton" required to launch his spaceship, and had a very long barrel to make the acceleration more reasonable. It may not have been high quality science, but it was a lot more plausible than Star Trek technobabble.

Wells in "Food of the Gods" predicted the problems of GM food supply, including tests escaping into the environment. He failed to call the company Monsanto, however.

Yes, H.G. Wells got it pretty right....

[Wooky_linuxer]

Because we are all spending our vacations in the Cretacean, fighting three legged aliens and using Warp Drives all the time (I'll concede that the Island of Dr. Moreau paints a very possible and frightening future. But thinking that he is more accurate than Verne... you've been playing too much HL2 or watching too much Star Trek, or both. I agree that Verne maybe expanded at current technology, but he predicted submarines, airplanes and travelling to other planets in a time most people would mock this. Now they are real, even if he got the methods and technology used wrong. As for being tied to the 1800s politics - he was writting sci-fi right in the middle of the Romantic era! His stories are truthful enough, and I'd call them apolitic, specially the earlier ones. Germans, British, Americans, Scottish, Indians, everyone got their share of the cake. Next someone will criticize him for not pro-actively defending the environment, as in the whale-killing that happens in 20k LUtS (BTW, a tripulant of Nautilus ended being taken by a giant squid that we now know are eaten by the very whales Nemo killed... curious huh?).

Anyways I'll throw in my own favourite sci-fi "seer": Ray Bradbury. I read a short tale of him that described how people would face having wrist-sized personal communicators. Decades before we got cellphones/mobile phones. Sorry, can't remember the name of the story.

Which one? It's both!

[mr_mischief]

It's both. "The Mafia" as a single organization of oath-bound criminals does not exist, and is a myth and a legend. The people upon which the myth and legend are based exist, but are not a single organization of oath-bound criminals.

"The Mafia" does not exist, and is a Hollywood fairy tale. "Organized crime" is real (although not necessarily as organized as the name implies). There is no "The Mafia" member card and secret handshake. Yet there are multiple independent organizations which do commit crimes of racketeering, protection, murder, general extortion, and the other types of crimes which movies and television have so romanticized. There are syndicates of criminals working together, but not all of those syndicates work together and not all of them are even aware of one another.

Re:CEOs build infrastructure!

[pacalis]

Your commentis totally off. It's not that your average manager see's the rich guy as a fountain of wisdom.

Instead, statements by Gates and other CEOs offer the 'average' manager some insight into investments into new technologies, and some expectations for medium term infrastructure. Sure this is competitively positioned, but when Bill Gates says he's going to be making $100M commitment on something, it's far more important that if I were to say "x will be big in 5 years, start saving"

Re:On Jules Verne

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are trying to convincingly argue that Wells was a seer, then you failed to do so.

Time travel, the warp drive, invisible men, and aliens are not fact today. And Wells didn't manufacture most of these ideas anyway! Let's consider Martians. People were fascinated of the thought of life beyond Earth because they thought they saw canals on Mars! Wells took advantage of that fascination, in much the same way ghost stories take advantage of the publics fascination with the afterlife.

It would be much closer to the truth to say that Verne and Wells both wrote speculative fantasies that happened to accidentally predict a couple of things. Neither were prophets, they were entertainers.

Microsoft moving to open source

[El-Wrongo]

Not a long time ago (1 year tops) my boss was at a conference of some sorts at MIT, Bill Gates held some sort of speech there, I don't really know the details, but according to my boss he said something along the lines of: "Whenever we (Microsoft) releases some software, it just takes days and the same features are already in some Open Source software", he goes on to "In the future Microsoft will only release open source programms, and make money supporting, rather than releasing software" (I don't know the sentences he used, as my boss only summarised it to me, but that is the general message that my boss recieved (since I wasn't there I don't know if that is the message Bill tried to send)). If you ask me this seems rather unlikly, but I won't rule out some possibility of a lite Microsoft version of some type, where you only have to pay for support, but the way you can get support on the internet etc, kinda makes this a slightly risky buisneiss (no ide how to spell that in proper english, and it is better with a typo than biznitz) model.

And Windows 2000, not XP

[SanityInAnarchy]

Windows 2000 actually replaced the 95/98/ME line, and was NT-based. XP was just the next version after 2000.

For that matter, 2000 is also NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. And I didn't make that up, though I can't remember where it came from -- that is how Microsoft versions them.

GP's points may be right, but it's really hard to tell, given how wrong their facts seem to be.

Re:And Windows 2000, not XP

[Garabito]

Windows 2000 actually replaced the 95/98/ME line It did for a lot of mainstream users, but they were in different product lines:

Workstation / Bussines line:

Windows NT 4.0 - Windows 2000 - Windows XP Professional

Home line:

Windows 95 - Windows 98 - Windows 98 SE - Windows ME - Windows XP Home Edition

Windows XP was the point when the two product lines merged their underlying technology. Before that, the home version of Windows used DOS as its core.

Many bussines users were using 95/98 instead of NT (which was aimed at high end workstation, so very few bussines dektop used it), so when 2000 came out, it was an obvious upgrade path.

Re:And Windows 2000, not XP

[Anonymous Coward]

For that matter, 2000 is also NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. And I didn't make that up, though I can't remember where it came from -- that is how Microsoft versions them.

Windows OS versioning.

- T

Re:And Windows 2000, not XP

[mqduck]

Windows XP was the point when the two product lines merged their underlying technology.

Not quite. Windows 2000 was the point where they finally managed to give Windows NT basically full support for all 95/98(and ME) software. Windows XP, the sequel to 2000, was the operating system that officially replaced the 95/98/ME line.

Re:And Windows 2000, not XP

[Gr8Apes]

Windows XP was the point when the two product lines merged their underlying technology.

Not quite. Windows 2000 was the point where they finally managed to give Windows NT basically full support for all 95/98(and ME) software. Windows XP, the sequel to 2000, was the operating system that officially replaced the 95/98/ME line. And still wrong. Win2K was where they stabilized the NT kernel and were able to start DirectX development in earnest, which allowed them to roll out Win XP for both home and business. The major problem with converting home users from the Win9x line was games and the way they were written. They didn't create an NT kernel able to run all Win9x code, they converted new Win9x code to an API shared across both platforms, so that about 7 years later they were able to convert everyone to a single code branch.

This is actually one area where MS succeeded. If you think this isn't true, try getting games circa 1994-98 written for Win9x to run on an XP system. You can also try various software, including some MS non-game software which unfortunately I don't recall off-hand that didn't work on the NT kernels. Check DejaNews for incompatibilities, if you're really interested. There were tons of things that didn't run on Win2K or WinXP when they came out, and never will.

If money is the way you keep score

[Anonymous Coward]

you're in a sad, sad place.

I wouldn't trade my wife and daughter, nor my family and friends, nor the least of my hobbies for mere money.

I've had interactions with mega rich and famous folks on different levels (as the friend-fo-a-friend, as an employee, etc.) and almost without exception they are some of the most unhappy folks you will ever meet. Paranoid that something will happen to their wealth, afraid that someone will kidnap a family member for money, worried that their friends only like them because they are rich, and suspicious that the people that they interect with every day are all out to "use" them. One place I worked (the home of a very rich singer/songwriter) the house had cameras everywhere (inside and out), a steel-lined "hidey hole" off the master bedroom, a windowless playroom for the children that had what amounted to "blast doors," and guards armed with automatic weapons (at least, I assumed that the Thompsons they were carrying were full-auto) walking around outside day and night.

Money is a useful tool, but either you control it or it will control you.

But I predict...

[gregleimbeck]

... that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.

Ken Olsen said the Memory Quote...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment who back in my day said 512kb (I think he said 512) was more memory than would ever be needed, to parahprase. Bill Gates was never noted as saying any such thing as far as I recall. I'm shocked the article author didn't know this as it's pretty well known.

Totally wrong about the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that live near Seattle, the local ABC affiliate (KOMO-4) has often interviewed Gates on their nightly local news program. I recall seeing one interview shortly before the Windows 95 was released that I really caught my attention....

When they asked Gates a question about the Internet, he tried to downplay its importance and said he didn't think it was of much use for the average person. i.e. something to the effect that it was mostly useful for "business and academia" only.

I recall he also talked about MSN and how it would "maybe" have a connection to the Internet for e-mail, but that was all.

For those of you may have forgotten, the original version of MSN was planned to be nothing more than a Microsoft version of AOL (without Internet capability). Real visionary-- NOT!

Confirming this whole stance, the original version of Gate's book "The Road Ahead" basically ignores the Internet.

So where was the amazing linux during all of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

A late comer.

Lack of vision?

[jotaeleemeese]

Do you want some ketchup in your freedom fries?

So a guy that envisioned space travel, submarines, underwater cities, the aqualung at times when the fastest moving thing was a train and most sea faring things were submerged only when lost in a wreckage?

To think that somebody describing such alien mechanisms for his time, would get all accurately correct from a scientific point of view is completely bogus.

You praise HG Wells but clearly chose to ignore the all too glaring mistakes on his predictions. Jut for starters, there is no life on Mars for example.

Talk about a selective, most likely jingoistic view....

eComStation: OS/2 still not completely dead

[demon driver]

As a matter of fact, Serenity Systems Inc. are still continuing to support and enhance OS/2 in the shape of their eComStation product, with whatever support by IBM there may remain (after "IBM standard support" for OS/2 was discontinued on December 31, 2006) for them as OS/2 licensees. Since February, eComStation 2.0 Beta 4 is available for subscribers of their "Software Subscription Services for eComStation". (On a side note, at this time I'm still running a small-business internet server, a workgroup file and print server and a desktop workstation on OS/2 aka eCS and I'm still quite happy with them.)

Re:On Jules Verne

[BodhiCat]

Wells, however, had his physics dead to rights. He invented whole new genres of Sci-Fi - Time Travel, The Invisible Man, amazingly accurate social predictions in 'Anticipations' and 'The Shape of Things to Come'. When he did space travel he invented the 'warp drive' with his 'Cavorite' material which rejected gravity.

And as we all know invisibility, warp drive an time travel for human beings are all possible according to the currently known laws of physics. In fact I think I will get in my invisible star ship and travel to the Andromeda galaxy in the year 2,000,000 right now.

640 megabytes

[nobaloney]

What Gates didn't predict: One quote frequently attributed to the Microsoft chairman is that "640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

Gates may never have said it, but somebody did.

I'm old. And these are my recollections: I first had a TRS-80 Model One and later a Model III. The majority of computers of the day were 64K. I worked for Lobo Systems (http://oldcomputers.net/lobomax80.html) which managed 128K. Then all of a sudden the PC came out and it could handle 640K.

If he didn't say it, then perhaps Don Estridge, The Father of the IBM PC, did. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/is_20 0412/ai_n9466612

Or perhaps I did. I certainly remember thinking something like Wow, five times the capacity.

;)

No we know why Microsoft is getting a suemaniac

[owidder]

See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/05 /the_worse_is_th.html Bye, Oliver

totally different topic

[dafing]

Just getting back to the Prius thread a while back, this just in today from Tesla Motors, the electric car company:

"Batteries? Pink bunnies? I smell a lawsuit

: Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric car start-up that this fall will roll out the meanest, greenest roadster ever, has already found a potentially lucrative side business emerging from its research. The company announced today a new division, the Tesla Energy Group, to sell its lithium-ion battery technology. And the division debuted with a contract in hand -- a deal to sell battery packs to Think, a Norwegian maker of electric cars bouncing back from bankruptcy and a failed Ford ownership.

In a blog post, Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard says it took seven generations of design and more than a few "Fourth of July" moments in the testing before producing a multi-cell battery pack that was safe, light and mass produceable. "

I believe Fourth of July is when you shoot off fireworks? Ha, thankfully they have caught the bugs (they tell us) before it goes into production. But what about when all the companies rush to copy them, since they are the Lamborghini of hybrid/electrics and Ford releases Pinto 2.0?

Just saw it come up in my email today.

Re:On Jules Verne

[Anonymous Coward]

And YOU didn't see me because I was traveling at 400 mph!!!