Gates Says "A Lot of Work" Ahead In IT Development

An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates concluded his last Microsoft-associated public appearance in the EU today with comments about the future of IT. The long-time company head said that there's still a lot of work to be done before Information Technology resources truly come into their own. '"There's another side that is how software is allowing people to be more productive at work. It's the empowerment of these people to do their jobs more effectively." Gates also commented on the potential of the Internet, calling it a "huge democratization tool". But Gates said there is still a long road ahead for tech development. "It's come a long way in the last 30 years but we're not even halfway there with building the systems we need to have."'"

Comments

The punchline?

[Sta7ic]

"...and Microsoft is working to bring you the tools YOUR company needs to be competitively productive!"

Stating the obvious

[KillerCow]

There's another side that is how software is allowing people to be more productive at work. It's the empowerment of these people to do their jobs more effectively.

That's a revelation? Isn't that what has been promised continually since day one?

Just fucking retire already!

[Quiet_Desperation]

I spent all day today tracking down the reason why one of our lab XP machines would only respond with "Access Denied!" to any attempt to log in remotely. A web search produced at least four dozen distinct possibilities from simple sharing settings to obscure security flags you need a team of digital Sherpas to even find

*My* problem turned out to be one of the really obscure ones, and by sheer luck it was the second one I tried or I'd be working this tomorrow as well. The problem with *IT* is that the dominant OS is a deliberately obfuscated pile of week old baboon jism.

I had to use RegEdit last week to make Visio behave the way I wanted to. WTF is that? Is that supposed to be even remotely sane? And this week it's reverted back to its old behavior for no known reason.

Re:Just fucking retire already!

[bzipitidoo]

You imply that the 2 camps are roughly equivalent in quality, and that the unequal bashing is just bias. Not so! On the majority of objective measures, open source is superior. There are the obvious, whole point of libre ones, such as ability to examine and modify the code. And then there are the measures that take a little research to determine, such as which systems are more secure. I've read that CERT has always found more problems with Windows than with Linux. There are plenty of other measures: code quality, performance, robustness, nimbleness, and portability to name a few. Libre OSes are better than Windows in all those categories. And the reason they are better is in part because they are open and cannot be monopolized-- the many eyeballs effect, and the inability of private interests to be the gatekeepers of all progress. Windows does have a few advantages, I'm not denying that. Even when you move to applications, what do we see? Yes, Firefox is better than IE. Pidgin is much better than AIM thanks in part to AIM actually getting worse. OpenOffice vs MSOffice is more a matter of what's important to the user. On the other hand, I read that the GIMP still isn't as good as Photoshop, but it's gaining. And I don't know where gcc stands compared to Visual Studio, but I've read that in the past gcc definitely generated the poorer code but now this is not so clear. Overall, libre is better. I only wonder how long MS can carry on in the face of the massive disadvantages their chosen business methods put them at. For years now we have seen MS resort to unethical methods, and that's the mark of a weak competitor. They are only strong because of their near monopoly position, not because of any inherent superiority to their practices (the ethical practices, that is) or software. They've also made a lot of enemies, not least the previous monopoly computing giant, IBM. Strip away that monopoly, and MS would have to change or die, and they know it. It will be a real shame to see the huge pile of money they've saved up be frittered away year by year in hopeless attempts to maintain the status quo, but activation for XP, WGA, and now Vista seem a clear signal that's the direction they're determined to keep pushing towards.

Those comments that get "modded into oblivion" very likely deserved it for misrepresentation or outright lies. Genuine problems with libre software are fixed right away, or acknowledged. Those that are buried are rare, and often they get forked. Xfree86 and Xorg come to mind on that last.

Your comment seems trollish to me. Consider that maybe the majority of Slashdot has good reasons for believing as we do.

being stuck for the last 20 years doesn't help

[GreatDrok]

The Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and so on were all capable of many of the things that Windows is only recently capable of and yet they were all products of the 1980s. MS has done nothing to advance the state of computing. The resources that are wasted on trying to deal with their proprietary crap would have been better spent elsewhere. Even today with OOXML we are still fighting them while they dig their heels in to slow progress until they are good and ready.

20 years and counting Bill. 20 years. I weep for the state of computing under MS's jackboot.

yes, you idiot!

[Tom]

He's right. And the main reason is the stuff that his company sells.

A consistent picture in every company that I have seen from the inside, with not a single exception: The Unix (or in some places, the mainframe) department is an order of magnitude more professional than the windos group. The Unix servers run reliable (mostly), while the windos network is always a hassle. I've twice replaced the windos infrastructure for a small team with something non-windos (Solaris once, OS X once) and it worked better, with less maintainance, and more useful features.

By now I doubt it's a coincidence, and I've come down from my former arrogance of simply assuming that windos admins are mostly stupid fuckups who couldn't get a job in real IT. If there's one constant in all the cases you see - namely microsoft software - then doubt as you may but the chances are excellent that that's the reason.

I mostly learned that from the one really good windos admin I had the pleasure of working with. He could make things work. But the amount of trouble he had to go to was astonishing. Since then, I'm sure the problem isn't the admins (though they sometimes add to the problem, as many of them are stupid fuckups who couldn't get a job in real IT), but the crap they're forced to work with.

change for change's sake

[Bill Dog]

"We'll be talking about a computer in the desk in the future."

We've had desks for a long time now with for example a big hole in the middle covered with glass and a computer monitor angled up below it. What I don't need is a computer that is also my desk. Why? Just because we can? I want to be able to upgrade those two things independently. Most people have phones in their bedrooms near their beds, but that doesn't mean we need phones built into beds!

"One of the biggest changes will be how you interact with the device. The devices themselves will get a lot smaller,..."

Make the devices as small as you want, but please keep the UI portion of it sized to, oh, I don't know, maybe the operator? (Cell phone "keyboards", I'm looking at you.)

Re:Productivity

[misleb]

I may be showing my age now, but I wish they would stop releasing new stuff and simply improve the existing stuff. The time and effort they've spent re-implementing Java could have made Vista into a kick-ass super OS that was easy to develop for and would run so efficiently I needn't have bought another 2 gig of RAM and a dual core CPU!!

Given the roots and legacy of Windows, there's really not a whole lot MS could have done with Vista to make it a kick-ass super OS short of writing it from scratch (ditch Win32) and force all existing apps to run in a sandbox the way Apple did with OS 9. There's just too much legacy stuff tying Microsoft's hands. Here's a great article comparing what Windows is now with what dBase once was: http://garywiz.typepad.com/trial_by_fire/2006/03/windows_vista_p.html Windows seems to be following a similar demise for similar reasons. What is comes down to is that Microsoft is getting to the point where the best they can offer in a new product is backwards computability with their previous products. Few people care about what NEW software they can run on Vista. Most just want it to run the same software they've always run with a little more flair and perhaps with a little more security.

-matthew