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

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.

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.

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