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Gates Successor Says Microsoft Laid Foundation for Google
thefickler writes "According to Bill Gates' successor Craig Mundie, there would have been no Google without Microsoft. 'I mean, the fact is: Google's existence and success required Microsoft to have been successful previously to create the platform that allowed them to go on and connect people to their search servers. Now, Microsoft's business is not to control the platform per se, but in fact to allow it to be exploited by the world's developers. The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business, but in some ways it doesn't give us an advantage over any of the other developers in terms of being able to utilize it.' This comment comes from a lengthy interview between Mundie and APC magazine, which talks with the newly installed strategy and R&D head. Other interesting topics discussed include the future of Microsoft and Windows, OOXML, and and the 'rise of Linux' on the desktop."
No. The 'salvation' attitude at Microsoft will continue. They can do no wrong, and will defend each legal claim until exhausted (and have the money to do it, too). Their success is an accident of history, boorishness, and illegal behavior, as documented through hundreds of judgments. There's a nugget of good work done here and there, but you won't change their ego, their testosterone-driven hubris. It's silly to try. Step aside, let the train go through, and continue on. Let Gates retire, the sooner, the better. Mundie adds little.
The nice thing about dictatorship is that eventually, the dictators either retire or pass on, leaving lesser leaders in their place. These lesser leaders inevitably fail.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Alas, that's a canard that people tend to use.
There was a Law&Order episode, for example where Fred Thomson's character says, "Somehow I don't think this is what Bill Gates had in mind when he invented the Internet".
And unfortunately, many people will see that sort of thing on TV and believe it's true.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
OS/2 was heavily written by Microsoft in the early years (the 1.x versions were all called "Microsoft OS/2"); if Windows/386 hadn't been invented (setting the stage for Windows 3.0) and prompted the IBM-Microsoft Divorce, Microsoft would have still been the dominant PC OS vendor in the 1990s, selling OS/2. Which, given various factors, probably would have had a 16-bit 2.0 version similar to OS/2 1.x, and a 3.0 version based on the Windows NT kernel with a more OS/2-like 32-bit API.
However, let's assume Microsoft is wiped out by some sort of financial scandal in, oh, 1984. It ceases to exist, IBM winds up with exclusive control of PC/MS-DOS, Windows never comes along, IBM tries developing OS/2 in-house for the 286 processor.
Well, the most likely result here is the Revenge of Digital Research. DR ships DOS Plus (a predecessor of DR-DOS able to run both CP/M-86 and DOS 2.11 programs) and GEM/1 (a GUI) in 1985; the clonemakers buy both from DR instead of just DOS from IBM.
The likely evolution of PC OSes probably then follows the historical late 1980s evolution of DR products -- you wind up with a multitasking GEM (similar to the historical GEM/XM) and DOS (probably something similar to Concurrent DOS) pretty much filling the Windows 3.x role as everybody's standard x86 PC desktop, and an evolved version as Windows 95-equivalent. (Past there gets murky; does DR do a Windows NT? Do they use 4.4 BSD Lite and create a Unix that runs DOS/GEM programs? Or does a competitor knock them off the perch?)
Dude, read your own comment: "I was using a SLIP connection to access the Internet from Linux and OS/2 before Windows 95 came along."
What's the first word in that sentence? I? Yeah. Ask most people on the street what Linux and OS2 are and you'll get a blank stare. At work, our web servers are RHEL. We have a guy on our team who is deaf, and his interpreter, during a conference call, asked how to spell that word we kept using, what was it, linx? linuts? liniz?. I howled with laughter; I mean, what rock was she living under, right? But in reality, stuff geeks might prefer to use are incomprehensible to most folks. That's why we're geeks. If someone calls himself a windows geek, we laugh, right? I know I do.
My point was this: just because some people were using the net before windows 95 came out doesn't mean that everyone was capable of doing that. If the web wasn't polluted with 999,900,000 people who know jack about technology but like to buy stuff online, google would be just another geek tool like telnet or SQL. Yes MSFT was a late comer, but they also made it easier (maybe just by perception) for average Joe to get online. That brought the money, and that's why many of us have jobs today. If not MSFT, then probably someone else, and things might have been better for it today. But that's not the way it went down, and it's pointless to speculate on what would or could have happened. As much as I don't like MSFT, you do have to give credit where credit's due.
Again, I don't even understand why that's such a controversial statement. You'd think I advocated DRM or something.
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