Bill Gates's Last Speech

Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.

Comments

Re:don't let the door

[DaveM753]

it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil".

I disagree. I noticed MS being evil with the introduction of Windows 95, when the then-standard Word Perfect oddly didn't seem to run properly under Windows. Shortly thereafter came MSN and the introduction of the free Internet Explorer and the beginnings of Netscape's death. That was several years before Ballmer entered the picture.

Flamebait?

[zappepcs]

Who modded that flamebait... and what are you smoking while you mod?

This is exactly how MS built the company into it megalithic existence. Lets see if we can name some software/companies that they killed off?

Digital Research, Word Perfect, Netscape, GEM, Paradox, oh screw it, we are all aware that the embrace and extend was MS speak for extinguish. There are products that never even made it to market thanks to MS (can you say tablet pc)

The point is that this is not flamebait. It counts as truthful comment.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Super Jamie]

For those who missed it, this is a quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski, one of the most notable Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today, and memorable for attending anti-trust court proceedings against Microsoft sporting a colored mohawk and wearing army boots - a true cyberpunk.

Also, Jamie's version is "Linux is only free if your time has no value" ;)

Re:You will be missed bill

[SanityInAnarchy]

Have you ever met him, listened to him speak in "private" or the likes? Not that it's relevant, but have you?

Bill never really ran Microsoft, he was too much an idealist for business at that end. He did, however, put himself in a position where he could easily make decisions. In fact, he was CEO for awhile, right? That's essentially a position where your whole fucking job is making decisions. He's got, what, a hundred billion dollars for doing absolutely nothing?

His "business strategy" that I mentioned earlier was putting low cost PCs into the hands of the masses so that he could offer a universal system. That may have been the goal, if you believe him. I certainly can't deny that the way in which Microsoft screwed IBM early on was of benefit to everyone, in terms of how cheap hardware is now.

But that does not excuse what he, and Microsoft, have done before and since.

From what I remember, Microsoft's very first product was Altair BASIC. The reason they got the contract with Altair was a classic (perhaps the first?) example of vaporware:

Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[5] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter. Keep in mind, this was when Microsoft was Micro-Soft, a two-person company. Your argument that he "never really ran Microsoft" is not an excuse here -- he made the phone call, and he helped develop the software, with exactly one other person.

It warms my "zealot" heart to know that Microsoft was, quite literally, founded on a lie.

His DREAM was one of oneness. His ideal wasn't "open source" but one of "openly available to all who wanted to partake in the scene." For a small fee. He was certainly against sharing, and demonstrated very early on a complete lack of understanding of the free software community (this was before the term "open source") -- read "An open letter to hobbyists."

Oh, and... if his dream was of openness, why didn't the Bill&Melinda foundation donate to OLPC?

Now, I will say this carefully and as nicely as I can... Reading down, that's not particularly nicely.

And you still haven't said much of substance.