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

You will be missed bill

[Dragoonkain]

You are a true American Hero

Re:You will be missed bill

[Divebus]

It's ironic but the natural choice for these massive data centers is to use free software - their own. And they're bewildered why everyone else wants to use free software. Hmmph.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Penguinisto]

Wow... that's some serious America-bashing mojo you've got going there. ;)

In all seriousness though - I think Bill got all he can get out of MSFT... the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."

The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.

From here on out, any further news will be tacked onto Ballmer's reputation, both inside and outside the tech community (even though most of us in the tech community already know who to blame/praise --depending on your viewpoint).

/P

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember folks, Bill Gates was a strong part of OOXML. Bill Gates phoned French president Sarkozy and the American Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce, and the president of Mexico Felipe Calderón.

The taint of OOXML lies with Bill Gates. Don't forget.

Re:You will be missed bill

[ISoldat53]

Nobody likes a poor thief.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Serpentegena]

I think the main point of failure was on the creative side of things. How do you knowingly continue to claim individuality after you've become a trend-follower instead of a trend-setter?? Even the managed services thing comes about a year after IBM already deployed a similar solution.

So far, Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success".
(Oh wow! Best.sig.ev4r.)

Re:You will be missed bill

[Ethanol-fueled]

So far, Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success". Isn't it "Microsoft put the succ in success?"

Re:You will be missed bill

[Serpentegena]

Phonetical joke, seven-digiter.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Yaztromo]

Isn't it "Microsoft put the succ in success?"

That's a bug that will eventually be fixed in SP1.

Yaz.

Re:You will be missed bill

[dmgxmichael]

When it's your own dog food it is free.

Re:You will be missed bill

[jeevesbond]

Microsoft software is only free if their time has no value. ;-)

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he is the champion of capitalism. As he said at All Things Digital's D6:

Gates: Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete. Seriously!

Re:You will be missed bill

[el americano]

And yet, even when they can do whatever they want, their success is attributed to "the relationship with developers", innovation, or some other third thing. Control of the market never has anything to do with it in Bill's eyes. That's what I call living the dream.

Re:You will be missed bill

[zerocool^]

the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."

Pffft. Get over yourself, pl0x.

At peak, Microsoft held $64,000,000,000 in LIQUID CASH ASSETS. Think about that. (source)

At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves. In terms of gross domestic product, that puts Microsoft's cash reserves 80th (out of 180 sovereign nations) when compared worldwide to yearly GDP. (wikipedia). And it's only dropped to that level because Microsoft, after it won all the antitrust battles, instituted a stock buy-back.

If Microsoft were to never, ever sell another product or acquire a business or accept a licensing fee, and simply put that money into a money market account at a bank pulling 8% interest, they would make 2,300,000,000 yearly. Wikipedia lists Microsoft as having 79,000 employees. Just with the interest they could make without any strategic investing, they could pay each employee at the company $30,000 a year. For nothing. Before the stock buyback, that number was around $70,000.

Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.

That's how "not in trouble" Microsoft is. Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't. Microsoft is not in danger.

~Wx

Re:You will be missed bill

[naveenoid]

On the bright side, may be they are finally on their way to building a Vista-Capable machine ;)

Re:You will be missed bill

[The End Of Days]

And if you look at it without bias, it's obviously true. Their monopoly came about because they beat all comers, and they eagerly enter new markets, sometimes without success. The conditions that defined them as a monopoly (which are fairly narrow given their current business) don't even exist anymore.

This isn't to say that their business practices are a shining example of ethics and decency, although I'm sure some of you will read it that way.

Re:You will be missed bill

[cplusplus]

Personally, I think he deserves some of what you said, even if you meant it as a joke. His foundation is doing some remarkable work in this world.

Re:You will be missed bill

[pdusen]

Nobody said anything about Microsoft going bankrupt. The fact is that they are slowly losing their stranglehold on the personal desktop market. Whether or not they can survive financially is irrelevant.

Re:You will be missed bill

[ispeters]

One wonders why the shareholders haven't demanded that Microsoft either start paying a dividend or greatly increase the current dividend, as appropriate. That money isn't really Microsoft's--it belongs to the shareholders and it strikes me as ridiculous that Microsoft thinks it can better direct all those billions of dollars than the individual shareholders could. (Whether or not Microsoft could do better is irrelevant--the shareholders should be clamoring for their money so they can put it in a hedge fund, blow it on drugs, fund their retirement, or whatever, because, as I said, the money belongs to the shareholders and they should be free to choose what to do with it.)

Ian

Re:You will be missed bill

[canuck57]

Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.

That's how "not in trouble" Microsoft is. Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't. Microsoft is not in danger.

~Wx

I have thought about that. Isn't that very similar to Novell in it's demise about 1995? Lots of cash and a failing market. (maybe add a zero for inflation)

Today, Novell is a bit player. Lets just give it 10 years shall we?

BTW, anyone taking 2 year shorts on MSFT?

Re:You will be missed bill

[Unnngh!]

Very true. Plus, their company-wide sales are still very strong. They are so large and wealthy, with such a huge install base, that they will likely never go away.

Re:You will be missed bill

[ikkonoishi]

I bet the software won't be listed as free on the invoices they make to send to the IRS.

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

[chamont]

Holy Fucking Shit

Re:You will be missed bill

[Skim123]

Um, I believe they do offer a dividend. I'm no financial wiz, but according to Google Finance the dividend is 0.11. To be honest I don't know if that means 11 cents or 11%. But I assume it means some kind of dividend is paid out per share owned.

Re:You will be missed bill

[abigor]

You raise an excellent point, and that's probably the main reason their stock has remained flat for the past while. You basically have a value stock in the hands of a management that can't let go of their growth past. My guess is their dividend payments will increase significantly.

Re:You will be missed bill

[BrainInAJar]

What's that then? Investing in companies that pollute the drinking water, and then using the proceeds to pay to clean up the polluted drinking water that they helped create?

Re:You will be missed bill

[caseih]

Mou misunderstand. MS is definitely solvent. That's not the point. MS is definitely not quite the powerhouse it once was in terms of sheer market influence. Perception has definitely turned against MS and all the money in the world won't change that. Remember that IBM is still a huge, very successful company and still very much "Big Blue." But no one would argue they control the PC (or general computer) market like they once did. MS does still have a monopoly in the area of OEM desktop OS's and Office suites, but that hold on the market is weakening. This doesn't mean that MS will go bankrupt by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:You will be missed bill

[dido]

The fact that Microsoft is wealthier than my country is not in question. They have a shitload of money, but they no longer wield the kind of influence and strike the kind of fear into the hearts of competitors as they once were able. Paul Graham put it very well in this article.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly--for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money--so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

Microsoft will likely persist for a long, long time indeed, but people at the leading edge of software development need no longer be afraid of what they might or might not do. They have, in a sense, ceased to matter for those engaged in software development, a lot like the way IBM and SAP are too. Sure, they've got lots of money, and they aren't really going to stop making more, but there's no way in hell that they're going to use that massive war chest that dwarfs the funds available to some third world countries to bring themselves back into serious relevancy. Their very size makes that impossible. Their shareholders would never allow the immense risk doing that would entail.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Tomy]

Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR. You obviously haven't shopped for real estate in Seattle lately. 70k is a paupers salary in Seattle. The three bedroom, 1900 sq ft house across the street from me in sleepy Ballard just went for 700k. Which means you need a 140k down payment and a combined income of around 186k to qualify.

But I think the real point is not that Microsoft is going bankrupt any time soon. Simply that they are going the same route as IBM. Once IBM was the 800 pound gorilla and you played their game or got crushed. Then MS played that role for a while.

I don't expect Microsoft to *increase* market in their core profitable businesses (win32, office), and so far they have failed to show an ability to innovate in any new markets (Zune) or be profitable in those markets (XBox).

Even after IBM lost the crown, they were still mostly profitable, and eventually MS will go in the same direction as IBM as a more services oriented business.

But the only innovation that will be seen coming out of Redmond is the steady bleed of the better talent to more lucrative startups.

For any really good programmer in Seattle, the pecking order of where you want to work is:

- Working for a startup that could be sold to Google.
- Working for a startup that could be sold to MS.
- Working at Google.
- Working anywhere.
- Working at Amazon.
- Working at Real Networks.
- Working at Microsoft.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah you really are an hero

Re:You will be missed bill

[TooMuchToDo]

With regards to your pecking order, working at Google is a joke. They offer you a "pauper's salary" (typically half of what the market rate is for your position) with little to no stock options, and tons of benefits whose sole purpose is to keep you at work or working on a Google project longer.

I enjoy using some of their products, but you'd be a fool to work for them if you have a family to support or live in a real estate market that actually requires a decent salary.

Re:You will be missed bill

[jo42]

All that money. All those people. Some many resources. And yet they still managed to excrete The Pile Of Poop Known as Vista. Something be wrong here...

Re:You will be missed bill

[Brian Gordon]

by Super Jamie (779597) Coincidence?

Re:You will be missed bill

[Super Jamie]

Just repping it for Jamies everywhere :P

Re:You will be missed bill

[KGIII]

I opened this and followed this until I found the first idiocy required to make this post.

Are you so inept or so blind that you're unable to see the benefits that Bill Gates, yes he, made to the industry that you are able to take advantage of today? Are you so unwilling to acknowledge that his business strategy, while certainly illegal in many areas, is simply brilliant?

Have you ever met him, listened to him speak in "private" or the likes?

I am guessing you are just a gibbering gibbon and, to hell with moderation points, have not one iota of a clue about who he is, what he thinks, what he's done, and what he's always been behind. You, like many, will confuse him and his ideals with that of Microsoft. Bill never really ran Microsoft, he was too much an idealist for business at that end. 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. 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."

I am not going to scroll down through these messages. I am unwilling to re-post this to everyone. Bill, and read carefully and judge my posts accordingly, is not someone whom I'm close enough to call a "friend" but I have had the chance to listen to him and I have had the chance to hear what he's had to say and have had the intellect to listen to. No, not on stage. There on campus...

Now, I will say this carefully and as nicely as I can...

Don't speak until spoken too and then say only "yes sir/ma'am" as you're unaware of the positive benefits he has had (don't count the attrocities of Microsoft as even remotely his blame) to what you are fortunate enough to experience today. It may not be proper to speak the truth here at this site but the reality is that, well, that is the reality.

If you want to blame anything or anyone then blame stock holders and a loss of control. But don't you now, or ever, even remotely blame Bill until you've taken a minute away from the zealotry you have obviously fostered and actually comprehend the truth.

And, before you mod me down or whinge 'cause I'm picking on you, know that I looked for the first retarded post and responded to it and that I, of all the people here, don't now and never will, blindly make assumptions based on ideals. (Yes, I'm a Microsoft user and a Linux user, and mostly a Mac hater but I'll use one if I must.)

Re:You will be missed bill

[glens]

[MSFT] hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves... And it's only dropped to that level because Microsoft, after it won all the antitrust battles , instituted a stock buy-back.
(emphasis mine)

Which antitrust battles have they won ? They're still ongoing globally last I understood (not that I follow, or even care about them, really).

Personally, I escaped Microsoft Hell in the 3.1 / i386/25 days (Slackware rules!), and don't even think about them apart from sheer hatred/disgust (which is renewed afresh each and every time I have to suffer through interaction with their crap for whatever reason).

Once I went to Target and bought a box of Sony floppy disks. Just for kicks I was looking through them before re-low-level-formatting them for proper throughput and found that most of them (I think it was 6 of the 10, but don't hold me to that) had Roman numerals inscribed on them with what looked to be a Pentel 0.5mm pencil. Those disks contained the Windows 3.11 system installation package. I'd thought that MS might be interested in hearing that, so I dropped the dime and called their headquarters, thinking that at least they'd offer to send me a hat or T-shirt, something, anything (not that I'd wear it anyway). All I got was utter indifference, so after raw-copying them for posterity, I dutifully performed the appropriate low-level formatting and better used them for other purposes.

Anyone want copies? I'm sure I can find them on some hold hard drive partition image somewhere...

Anyway, and I realize I'm preaching to the [educated] choir here, but MS sucks; hard. Always have and always will. I welcome their demise with open arms.

Goodbye, Bill. Remember: you can't take it with you. And what's more, anything you have in your possesion beyond what you came into this world with, on your way out, will probably work against you in whatever follows. I recommend an heart-felt apology and full rebate (plus damages) to anyone who's ever paid for any or your crap.

Re:You will be missed bill

[jcgf]

Now we know how you were made goatse.cx man.

Re:You will be missed bill

[rrhal]

Oh no there is a cost. Trust me, a terrible cost.

Re:You will be missed bill

[YttriumOxide]

70k is a paupers salary in Seattle. The three bedroom, 1900 sq ft house across the street from me in sleepy Ballard just went for 700k

70k USD sounds like a pauper's salary to me living here in Europe as well... however, I'm not quite sure I can follow regarding the house size - just because one can't afford a 3 bedroom 1900 sq ft (176 sq m) house does NOT make one a pauper! What's wrong with a nicely done out one bedroom apartment if you're single, or a 2 bedroom house with around 50 sq m (540 sq ft)?

I understand the US has somewhat of an obsession with large houses in many areas, but I doubt that people living in the centre of Manhattan have huge amounts of space either, so clearly it's not that hard to adapt - perhaps the people in Seattle should learn to adapt as well (or move somewhere else, at the sacrifice of salary/job quality/lifestyle/whatever else was keeping them there).

For reference, I get paid a bit more than 70k USD (currently on 58.5k Euro a year, which is around 90k USD at current exchange rates) and I am perfectly content RENTING my 30 sq m (325 sq ft) apartment, so that I can save up some money and buy a really nice place when I finally meet a nice girl and settle down. I honestly can't imagine needing or even wanting any more space than I currently have while I'm on my own.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Penguinisto]

At peak, Microsoft held $64,000,000,000 in LIQUID CASH ASSETS. Think about that. (source)

At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves.

So please point out where I allegedly said anything about the contents of MSFT's bank account. Paris Hilton has a massive bank account, but that doesn't mean she has the ability to dictate or control the tech industry either. ;)

Here, let me spell this out for you. In MSFT's heyday, it could dictate terms to the vast, vast majority of OEM's, App/Software vendors, and ultimately, users. Bill Gates' word was once treated as Gospel. You as a consumer could not buy a Dell or HP (or Compaq) without paying the Microsoft Tax. Microsoft could do whatever they wanted to with Visual Basic, and could do so with impunity. They didn't have to document their API set properly, and didn't have to care. They could literally determine what was going to happen in a given year to vast swaths of the entire Computing Industry. It had no real competition - Apple was still struggling mightily to keep what little marketshare they had, and Linux was still a mostly hobbyist OS.

Today? MSFT has been forced to extend XP (and likely will again come June) because OEM's are dictating to Redmond that they refuse to stop selling it in favor of the bloat-fest called Vista. What was once a 95% stranglehold on all desktops is now shrinking at a near-logarithmic rate, losing to Apple, Linux, Google, Nintendo, Firefox/Mozilla, etc etc. MSFT has been reduced to massive channel-stuffing and fire-sales of unsold stock (e.g. Zune) just to claim the sales numbers that they do in most of the markets they play in nowadays. Meanwhile, MSFT can't so much as put a new toilet paper roll in any of their campus bathrooms without compliance-checking by either US or EU government inspectors. Where MSFT once dictated standards, nowadays they can just barely buy one, but find the purchase to be empty. Where companies once evaporated in a fiscal belch into MSFT's maw? Now we see corporations (e.g. Yahoo!) openly telling MSFT to piss off... and mostly winning.

A once focused board is now scattered to the four winds, casting furiously about for new sources of income, but finding little-to-none outside of an increasingly directionless set of core products. Where there was once massive public enthusiasm for new products from MSFT, we now see customers going after new MSFT products with all the eagerness that one would with have when facing a catbox-cleaning chore.

Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't.

My paycheck doesn't rely on MSFT, so to be quite frank about it, whether they are "concerned" or not about my view is irrelevant. Now considering that the corp I work for (buried cozily in the Fortune 100) deciding to skip Vista entirely and hang around for Windows 7 (and not being anywhere near alone in doing so)? That may change things a bit. There is also the fact that MSFT is no longer the powerhouse it once was, and yes, it is demonstrably losing its grasp.

/P

Re:You will be missed bill

[Javaman59]

Are you so inept or so blind that you're unable to see the benefits that Bill Gates, yes ... ....rant.. ....rant.. But don't you now, or ever, even remotely blame Bill until ...

The post you replied to didn't mention Bill. Even indirectly.

Re:You will be missed bill

[YttriumOxide]

I'd thought that MS might be interested in hearing that, so I dropped the dime and called their headquarters, thinking that at least they'd offer to send me a hat or T-shirt, something, anything (not that I'd wear it anyway). All I got was utter indifference

That's interesting actually - I had a similar, but not identical experience once back when I lived in Australia. I called the "anti piracy" hotline number they had (it seemed the most appropriate contact) and while they seemed fairly uninterested over the phone, they took my details as well as the details of the business I mentioned, and to my surprise sent me a $5000 (AUD) cheque about a month later.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

the numbers are inflated.

8% money market is a bit optimistic, and certainly not risk free.

the current risk free rate in the US is 4.63% on 30 years bonds.

so that goes down to 17k a year per person... assuming there aren't any other costs...

yes $29b is a lot of cash
no it doesn't allow MS to just sit on its ass and pretend everything is fine

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not really true. Their first de facto monopoly is in the OS market with Windows. When Windows first came to the market, it was more of a GUI for DOS and they managed to screw DR-DOS. And with the de facto monopoly in the OS market, MS illegally leveraged their monopoly to gain another monopoly, this time in the browser market. In the meantime, they also tied functionalities of their Office apps to Windows and practically gained a huge marketshare. With this position of Office, they tried to bully Apple to "knife the baby", i.e. kill QuickTime.

All in all, judging from their behaviors to abuse their monopolies to gain more monopolies, you can't honestly said that MS avoids monopoly and that they like to compete. Competing means having better products, service, prices. Not FUD, stealing, screwing partners, blackmails etc.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Tom]

While you're right in the main point, your numbers are off.

First, you can't compare cash reserves (i.e. fixed amount of money held at time x) with GDP (i.e. repeated income over time).

Two, MS did not win all the antitrust battles. Almost a billion of those cash reserves went to Europe to pay fines, and there is still more to come because they still don't play by the rules. They got lucky in the US where while they lost the case, the punishment was ridiculously low.

Three, the numbers you mentioned are not cash. They are "liquid assets", i.e. cash, short-term investments, and anything they can turn into cash quickly if they have to. That's a bit of a difference, because it means for most of the money there is no additional profit to be made by investing it, because it already is invested.

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.

Re:You will be missed bill

[drsquare]

The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.

You're saying that Tony Blair learnt from Bill Gates?

Re:You will be missed bill

[Alioth]

Of course, the corollary is "Windows Server 2003 is only $3000 [0] if your time has no value".

[0] or whatever license fee is required for the edition you have.

Re:You will be missed bill

[pubjames]

It's depressing to see this rubbish modded as insightful.

You seem to have forgotten that Microsoft is a public company, with shareholders. They can't sit back and live on the interest from their cash stockpile.

Here's something to think about - Microsoft's cash assets have decreased by more than half in four years. Apple's cash assets are increasing rapidly, and are now nearly equal to Microsoft's. Would you care to apply your logic to Apple?

Re:You will be missed bill

[kmarshallbanana]

Can people please stop making these incredibly misleading comparisons to nation's GDP.
In this example, the comparison is even more egregious than usual. Those cash reserves are a one time stockpile. GDP is every year. You simply cannot really compare the two. Its meaningless.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

>a true cyberpunk.

So Jamie is a book genre?

Re:You will be missed bill

[gweihir]

Bill Gates is fundamentally coupled to Microsoft. He at least tolerated its current and past strategy. Saying he is not responsible for what MS does is naive. And if he gives a different impression when you meet him in private, that just makes hom either a good actor or deluded. Incidentially, I hear that some historic mass-murderers gave the impression of being pretty nice people.

Bill Gates did not put low cost PC's into the hands of the masses. IBM did that and it would have done it without Microsoft. Without MS they would incidentially have offered a better product as the competition was technologically superiour (yes, I have used both).

The main thing Bill did was to create, aquire and push mediocte technology on everybopdy and to ignore the state of the art, thereby slowing innovation sgnificantly. My beef is not with MS marketing. These people are scum almost anywhere. My beef is with the appalinbgly low quality of the MS ''OSes'' and ''productivity software'' and the inordinate amount of time beging wasted, when alternative approaches, that work better, are available. If you want easy, look to Apple. If you want powerful and cheap, look to Linux. If you want reliable, look to both. If you want slow, unreliable, expensive, unintuitive, complex to operate, full of stupid design decision in the presence of better alternatives, look to MS productes and Bill Gates was involved with these bad design decisions. With regard to technology, Bill Gates is, at best, a mediocre engineer with a hugely inflate ego, that is unaware of his true skill level. He will not be missed and his era has lasted far to long.

Re:You will be missed bill

[dmgxmichael]

What cost? They're Microsoft employees - they don't have any souls.

Re:You will be missed bill

[NickFortune]

Control of the market never has anything to do with it in Bill's eyes. That's what I call living the dream.

Or, as Bill prefers to phrase it, "trying to avoid another anti-trust litigation" ;)

Re:You will be missed bill

[Corporate Troll]

Europe here also, and ~51k EUR/year living in a 80sqm 2-bedroom apartment. Just to give you an idea. I'm not a pauper, but it's not always easy. However, that's not why I write.

so that I can save up some money and buy a really nice place when I finally meet a nice girl and settle down.

Pick your girlfriend well, because my 80sqm 2-bedroom apartment (which you claim to be sufficient for 2 people) became cramped once she moved in. Women take an ungodly amount of space. I threw out so much of my stuff (even all my Audio CD's!) and I now have pretty much 1 cupboard with books and a small space for my computer.

I just want to warn you, you may fare much better.

If I want kids, I'll pretty much have to buy or build a house. Of course, a small house here starts at 720kEUR, so with my salary I'm not going anywhere. (My wife does earn substantially more, but still...)

Re:You will be missed bill

[Call Me Black Cloud]

A true cyberpunk? So "cyberpunk" must be a fashion statement if dressing like a clown to appear in Federal court is the definition.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT. HTH. HAND.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Bastard of Subhumani]

At peak, Microsoft held $64,000,000,000 in LIQUID CASH ASSETS.

That should be enough for anybody!

Re:You will be missed bill

[Capt James McCarthy]

"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."

Not to nit pick, but I think IBM screwed themselves.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Capt James McCarthy]

"Are you so inept or so blind that you're unable to see the benefits that Bill Gates, yes he, made to the industry that you are able to take advantage of today?"

"and that I, of all the people here, don't now and never will, blindly make assumptions based on ideals."

I guess stating that Bill Gates is personally and individually responsible for the IT world today isn't making a blind assumption based upon your ideal?

Re:You will be missed bill

[something_wicked_thi]

I, of all the people here, don't now and never will, blindly make assumptions based on ideals.

Yes, you do. You may not know it, and you may try to fix it, but you, like everyone, does these things.

And you can't fully divest Mr. Gates of all responsibility. I've heard him spout the usual crap and lies about Microsoft, so, while he may not be fully responsible, he endorses it, or he's a hypocrite. Ballmer is likely more to blame than Gates, but Gates is still partly to blame, and he did choose Ballmer as his successor.

My point is, you are just being as biased as anyone else here. You just happen to swing the other way. The truth is that he's probably a better man than what everyone here assumes he is, but he's no angel like you make him out to be, either. All in all, from what I have to judge him on, I'm not a fan.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Zebra_X]

"Bill Gates did not put low cost PC's into the hands of the masses. IBM did that and it would have done it without Microsoft."

While I don't really care to weigh in on the Gate character issue, I will say I think this is wrong.

If a company owns both the operating system and the hardware - then the entire package tends to be more expensive - especially during that time period. There is no incentive to compete, and ultimately you end up comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended) as a consumer. We get stuck with computers that do good things over here (like graphics and things) and do other good (but different) things over there (games, spreadsheets, word processing).

I actually think that we could hold up Apple/Mac as an example of this. There were other factors associated with the cost of the Mac but overall - it took Mac much longer to catch up in terms of price competitiveness. Ironically when they finally made the switch to "mainstream" hardware we found out that the previous generation Macs were 4 - 6 times slower than the Intel versions. So not only were Mac users paying more for their hardware, they were also getting less, this is of course, specifically because we are tied to Cupertino's hardware decisions.

Keeping the OS separate from the hardware creates two markets, and creates a consumer demand to run the operating system on hardware which not just one, but many hardware vendors can then produce. The cost of PC's is a product of this scenario. It would be far different if OS's (thus applications) could not be used across multiple vendor's hardware. Apple's Mac shows that because there is no competition for Hardware and OS the overall price tends to be higher.

Thus, the stipulation that IBM would have automatically done right by us is false.

Re:You will be missed bill

[um... Lucas]

an 8% risk-free return is a pretty outlandish assumption.

Re:You will be missed bill

[bondjamesbond]

Well, gosh, then that means that NO software has ever been free in the history of software.

Re:You will be missed bill

[jrob323]

As someone who was around in those days (mid 80's) I can say that convincing business management to invest in PC's wasn't easy. IBM PC/XT's were very expensive, and it was yet to be established that you couldn't run a competitive business without one. Clones and DOS put a computer in every office, and ten years later NT killed Novell in the LAN setting and Windows 95 put PC's in lots of houses. Sure, it could have been a lot better.. and Bill would have loved to have sucked a lot more money out of it along the way. But it's difficult to overstate Microsoft's role in how ubiquitous personal computers have become.

Re:You will be missed bill

[homer_s]

If they do that, then they will have to pay taxes on the "income" from the sale of their own software to their own data center.

Re:You will be missed bill

[chrish]

He owns a nightclub (the DNA Lounge); he was just showing up to court in his "office" clothes.

Re:You will be missed bill

[ssstraub]

WHOOSH!

Re:You will be missed bill

[ssstraub]

Ah yes, the "Robin Hood" defense. Steal from the rich and give to the poor.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Gates is over 18 and not clinically insane, he is responsible for his actions.

Other people turned the company Gates started into the paranoid greed machine called Microsoft; Gates was just a useful cog as they grew. Gates participated in those decisions, and that evil business model wasted a lot of time and money that could have gone to productive research, business, or whatever other use computers were put to. Irreplacable time was wasted in the endless misery of failure and forced upgrades he helped create. We'd be a lot farther along if we hadn't had to spend so much time fighting our tools to get them to do what they advertised: and I mean simple things, like not crashing, not leaking data from every seam, not being magnets for malware, defense against which leaches significant amounts of processing resources.

Gates was useful, that is, until his social ineptness [dissociated arrogance, lack of concern or understanding for consequences] and non-credible "I don't recall" act made him look so bad on the witness stand [cf his testimony in the antitrust suit] that Microsoft had to pull him back from the public eye for almost a year to create Bill Gates 2.0 (fewer public appearances, very careul scripting of those appearances, new hair, new glasses, no necktie, usually posed with children, got him married, started the foundation).

There is a special circle in hell for Gates. He lives there with an 64K 8080 machine with two floppy drives, and every day the Devil brings him two floppies: one blank, one with a broken version of CP/M and by the end of the day, using only "toaster mode" and the blank floppy, Gates must produce a fixed CP/M version. The next day, the Devil returns with another CP/M version, broken in a different way. Until eternity.

I will believe this until Gates apologizes for his role in creating the monster he unleashed or admits that he has Asperger's and so is not responsible for his actions.

And save the flames: I think Steve Jobs is almost equally despicable; he certainly shares many of the unpleasant personal traits of Gates and has made equally boneheaded (if not quite so obviously evil) business decisions.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no there is a cost. Trust me, a terrible cost. yeah - Microsoft having to bow to OSS's well made, Italian leather whip when they find out that windows just ain't good enough :D

Re:You will be missed bill

[drsmithy]

IBM did that and it would have done it without Microsoft.

No, they did not. Compaq, et al, the companies who cloned IBM's PC did that. What enabled the PC clones to be viable ? MS-DOS.

Without MS they would incidentially have offered a better product as the competition was technologically superiour (yes, I have used both).

IBM's intentions were clearly demonstrated when they tried to close up the PC platform again with the PS/2. I'm not sure why this revisionist bullshit about how kind-hearted IBM wanted to give the world a cheap computer that anyone with basic hardware familiarity could slap together a copy of in their garage has suddenly started appearing on Slashdot, but it's exactly that - bullshit.

Re:You will be missed bill

[jvkjvk]

What got your panties in a twist? My guess it that you just don't like punk. And here I thought the majority on /. looked beyond outward appearances but calling him a clown seems to have got you mods so perhaps I was wrong.

Breaking down his qualities as a cyberpunk:

Cyber: "Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today..." obviously not into computers, so I can really see where you're going here...

punk: Multicolored mohawk and combat boots, classic punk. On noes! Only if his attitude and outlook are also punk! Well, that is a bit hard to call but his fashion choices certainly lends credence to it, don't you think? And unless you've met him personally I'm going to have to say you're the clown.

Perhaps you'd care to give an example of a "true cyberpunk" that happens to better fit the definition?

Re:You will be missed bill

[CrazyTalk]

Sure, modded as "funny" but if it wasn't for Bill I wouldn't have a job.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

What cost? They're Microsoft employees - they don't have any souls.

Wasn't it something like everytime you reboot a Windows machine a baby goat gets raped in Bulgaria.

Re:You will be missed bill

[meringuoid]

Jamie Zawinski, one of the most notable Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today

Really? I only knew him as the guy who hogged all the credits on xscreensaver...

Re:You will be missed bill

[zerocool^]

Oh, wow, you don't check slashdot for a day, and 18 people reply to your post =P.

All I meant was:

the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."

This, to me, and it's entirely likely that I misinterpreted, was a weasel-word way of saying "Microsoft is dying, open source will crush them". Now, while I make my living with OSS, and manage a network of over 800 servers, every single one of them running linux, I'm not under the illusion that some day soon, Microsoft will just go "Whelp," and close their doors. OSS is good stuff, and it's better than anything Microsoft puts out for a vast number of situations, but to imply that Microsoft-the-company is in any trouble (and really, the only trouble a company can be in is financial, when you get down to it) as a direct result of OSS is sort of disingenuous.

~W

Re:You will be missed bill

[zerocool^]

Here's something to think about - Microsoft's cash assets have decreased by more than half in four years.

Way to read the source. The reason the reserves have decreased is because they spent them buying back stock. kthxbai.

~Wx

Re:You will be missed bill

[zerocool^]

*sigh* it was a comparison.

Do you like it better this way?

"Microsoft holds 28.9 Billion USD in cash reserves. This is more than Liberia will pull in via GDP in 40 years."

Re:You will be missed bill

[Super Jamie]

jwz's had his thumb in a few pies. It never ceases to amaze me just how much software we owe to the development of so few.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Call Me Black Cloud]

If his "attitude and outlook" were punk, he wouldn't have appeared in court. Merely dressing like a punk to appear in court does not a punk make.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Tomy]

I completely agree with you. I told Steve Yegge (who was my boss for a short time at Amazon, and is now apparently a recruiting machine for Google), that I would rather work for a company I could sell to Google than actually work for Google. I can cook my own gourmet meals and get plenty of massages from my wife if I don't have to work eighteen hour days.

And if I sell my idea to Google, I get to spend five days a week on a new pet project instead of one.

Re:You will be missed bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and... if his dream was of openness, why didn't the Bill&Melinda foundation donate to OLPC? OLPCs don't solve a lot of third-world problems that need to tackled now . Just for example, hunger and malaria. Read up about how the foundation is maximizing the impact of every dollar donated to the third world. You might refrain from a smug one-liner like this next time.

Hate Gates and MS all you want. Don't be a myopic fuck about an organization whose mission is to eradicate third world hunger and disease. You owe that organization a fair shake before you criticize it.

OLPC-type projects are good -- but they are extremely far from being guaranteed to work, and even if they do help, it will be at a snails pace and in intangible ways.

Fucking myopic cunt. People like you make me sick.

Re:You will be missed bill

[SanityInAnarchy]

OLPCs don't solve a lot of third-world problems that need to tackled now.... Fucking myopic cunt. That's hilarious -- do you know what the word means? Here, read a fucking dictionary.

That's right -- it means nearsighted. Your whine is that OLPC doesn't solve problems that exist right now -- while a project like OLPC does quite a bit more in the long term than yet another dependency-inducing aid package.

Maybe the word you were looking for is farsighted? I guess "fucking farsighted cunt" just doesn't have the same ring to it...

Back to the topic at hand: A quick Google shows:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today $8.3 million in grants to help public libraries in 10 states provide quality access to computers and the Internet. So they can put "quality access" in 10 states (who wants to bet those are back home in the US of A), but not one cent for a project which would bring computers, period, to some of the poorest places in the world?

One guess what those library computers were running...

Can't track the article down right now, but I distinctly remember Bill G himself demoing some sort of cell phone crap that was meant to be an "answer" to the OLPC.

I'm not saying he's done nothing good for the world, but saying "his dream was of openness" is pretty moronic. His dream was many things, but it was not open.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, hi everybody.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, how are you my droog?

There building something

[geekoid]

they haven't thought of?

Re:There building something

[Anonymous Coward]

They are?

Re:There building something

[ElizabethGreene]

Mr. Gates, You get a lot of flack here on /., but one thing is undeniable. Without Microsoft the IT world would be a vastly different and poorer place. So long, and thanks for all the fish. -ellie

Re:There building something

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, it might run on BSD.

Re:There building something

[master_p]

Bill Gates has never posted to Slashdot, has he?

He should be a /. member.

Re:There building something

[SgtChaireBourne]

Without Microsoft the IT world would be a vastly different and better place.

There. Fixed that for you. Gates, via his company (now movement), have been running organized crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret APIs. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts. Now we also have the EU's word on the audio/video vandalism from MS.

We saw productivity go up in the 80's because of prevalence of standalone computers. We saw productivity go up further in the 90's because of the prevalence of the Internet and the WWW. We've seen productivity plummet in the 00's because of the prevalence of Windows and it's payload of botnets, viruses, worms and general poor usability, incompatibilities and high maintenance. The clean up costs for the MS malware alone runs in the double digit billions per year, for just the U.S.

The damage caused by Osama bin Gates extends far beyond the IT sector. His move into politics just means more of the same, but on a larger scale.

Re:There building something

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are absolutely correct, the IT would be vastly different, you would not need millions of help desk personnel and junior system admins if it weren't for Microsoft's piss poor desktop operating systems and abysmal security controls.

Nevermind that turd they call Microsoft Office, quite easily the most difficult product to troubleshoot ever.

Thanks for the job security Bill, WTG!!!

don't let the door

[Anonymous Coward]

hit you on the ass on the way out.

You won't be missed.

Re:don't let the door

[Darkness404]

Ummm... actually Gates made MS a decent company, it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil". Now before they were just a software company that made crappy software, now we have MS as a software company that produces crappy software with DRM/Trusted Computing and just about everything else to make your computer become MS's and the government's computer (with a bit of it devoted to the *AA).

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.

Re:don't let the door

[clang_jangle]

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

Re:don't let the door

[aweraw]

it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil". No, not really... MS was just as evil back then, they were just more covert about it.

What changed with Ballmer coming in as CEO was that they became more brash about it. Have you heard of the "frog in boiling water" experiment? Gates was like that - slowly turning up the heat, then before you realize it, you're cooked. Ballmer is more like, first boil the pot of water while cackling maniacally and pointing at you, then pour it directly on your head.

Re:don't let the door

[Maxo-Texas]

Microsoft was evil under Dos.

"DOS ain't done, til Lotus won't Run" was *well* known back in the 80's in my user group.

Windows 95 did it all over again by certifying Word which cheated and used invalid API's.

Re:don't let the door

[Mongoose Disciple]

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

If you've used Lotus, you'd know that's not evil. :)

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

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.

Which wouldn't have had anything at all to do with the abominable implementations on Windows at all, right ?

Not to mention, when 1995 rolled around, Word Perfect was well on its way out (and with good reason). The aforementioned almost incomprehensibly bad Windows implementations had sealed its fate. By the time the first semi-decent version of Wordperfect for Windows was released in mid-1997, the game was well and truly over.

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.

Indeed. Providing a free web browser - just like every other major platform of the day did - was the very embodiment of "evil".

Wordperfect and Navigator are textbook examples of bad products being displaced in the market by better ones (although the first few Wordperfect for Windows iterations were orders of magnitude worse than even Navigator 4.0).

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

"DOS ain't done, til Lotus won't Run" was *well* known back in the 80's in my user group.

Then you shouldn't have any trouble at all coming up with some documented examples of incompatibilities between 1-2-3 and DOS. Or even any evidence at all, really, that would support such an idiotic idea.

Windows 95 did it all over again by certifying Word which cheated and used invalid API's.

Evidence ? Even if it were true, what exactly is it "cheating" at ?

Re:don't let the door

[clang_jangle]

What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

Sane? If the decision makers at MS were sane, chairs wouldn't get thrown, the ISO would not have tampered with, and there wouldn't be millions (or is it billions now?) of dollars worth of fines on them.

Re:don't let the door

[colourmyeyes]

WordPerfect was the word processor of choice for lawyers. The "Reveal Codes" function was very well-liked for formatting legal documents. In some shops it is still the preferred word processor.

Re:don't let the door

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't about the abomination called Lotus Notes, but about the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

Re:don't let the door

[dhavleak]

"DOS ain't done, til Lotus won't Run" was *well* known back in the 80's in my user group. I call BS.

Everybody loves to trot out that phrase, but it's a complete myth.. Let me quote the relevant part of that link:

I first asked Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and his quote was "I've heard the stories over the years, but I don't have any specific recollection that there was a devious silent break of the kind you mentioned. I also have a bad memory." Kapor was kind enough to put me in touch with some old Lotus people he knew. And they all corroborated the story: "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

WordPerfect was the word processor of choice for lawyers. The "Reveal Codes" function was very well-liked for formatting legal documents. In some shops it is still the preferred word processor.

Indeed. But there are a lot more people out there than lawyers using word processors.

Re:don't let the door

[mrbluze]

What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ? Who you calling a sane OS vendor?

Re:don't let the door

[_KiTA_]

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

A: An OS Vendor who's also trying to sell a competing software to said 90% of their potential customers.

Re:don't let the door

[9InchRails]

Man, we're never gonna get anywhere if you keep bottling your feelings like this...

Re:don't let the door

[Anonymous Coward]

You were late to the party then!

I noticed MS being evil when they wrote BASIC interpreters that most of the major 8-bit manufacturers shipped with their machines; buggy, over-featured and bloated.

I'm sure someone else here will be able to truthfully claim that they knew MS were evil around about the time that Bill Gatus posted his now infamous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

appropriate captcha: colons

Re:don't let the door

[mrbluze]

Wordperfect and Navigator are textbook examples of bad products being displaced in the market by better ones. They weren't bad products.

Re:don't let the door

[kmac06]

What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ? One that would have such market domination that it could get away with it.

Re:don't let the door

[benwaggoner]

Well, if you're willing to believe what you read on Slashdot:

Re:don't let the door

[pdusen]

Yes they were. MS Word and IE aren't exactly the pinnacle of software achievement, but they were still better than either of those were.

Re:don't let the door

[Skim123]

Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?

In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!

Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.

Re:don't let the door

[gmuslera]

What about Windows 3.1 refusing to run specifically under DR DOS? That is a bit more documented, you will have to erase half of internet to cover that.

Re:don't let the door

[Zarluk]

In fact, it started earlier with DR-DOS and Windows 3.1 (as The Register says): 'David Cole and Phil Barrett exchanged emails on 30 September 1991: "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it,"'

Re:don't let the door

[Mongoose Disciple]

They weren't bad products.

It sort of depends on the version.

Wordperfect for DOS was the shit. Wordperfect for Windows was just shit.

Probably you can lay some of the blame for that at Microsoft's door, but most of it has to go to the folks managing Wordperfect at the time.

Personally, I just kept running DOS Wordperfect for a goodly long while and resisted Word for years, but most people didn't.

Navigator, same thing. I laughed at the first few versions of IE and avoided using them whenever possible. Then IE got way ass better. (Then, after it eliminated the competition, it stagnated and became terrible -- but for a while, it was the best thing going.)

Re:don't let the door

[Maxo-Texas]

It's amazing how well they are papering over this-- they even say it is a slashdot thing when it was in fact said DURING Dos 3.0 period historically.

Good discussion here.
http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html

As far as the Certification cheating API thing... a google link turns up this...

Slashdot | RTF Vs. OOXML
In fact, look up how it went down for Word95 and Windows 98. Word violated the api standards but was given the "approved" mark anyway. ...
slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/03/1347236 - 119k - Cached - Similar pages

Re:don't let the door

[mektronik]

One can't, ofcourse, refute a myth with documentation. Thats pretty hard. On the other hand, I, personally, HAVE NEVER NEEDED more than 740kB of memory ... Except to run m$ware...

Re:don't let the door

[IorDMUX]

Oddly enough, this 'rumor' has been investigated by a surprising source... Slashdot

Re:don't let the door

[Anonymous Coward]

Your signature is "LAME!"

base64_decode(base64_decode(base64_decode(base64_decode(base64_decode(base64_decode('Vm0xMFYxWXhTWGhWYms1VVlrWktWRlpyVWtKUFVUMDk='))))));

Re:don't let the door

[Maxo-Texas]

The problem with this "rumor" is that everyone in my user's group was saying this over 20 years ago.

They can convince those who were not alive or who were not there but it was viewed no differently than the Win3.11 failure for DR.Dos back then. It wasn't even refuted back then. It was just accepted that Excel would work and Lotus would not for a while when a new version of DOS came out.

It is really weird to see how effectively they are papering over history.

Re:don't let the door

[aweraw]

I see your study of base64 encoded strings has finally paid off. I have been bested. I honestly never expected anyone to ever figure my incredibly complex cipher.

Your masterful code cracking skills will one day prove instrumental in the continued survival of the human species... srsly

Re:don't let the door

[YttriumOxide]

My job relies on Microsoft's developer tools at present (Visual Studio), however after discussing it with my direct manager, he's said that everything I write (which is all C#) must also be tested under Mono just to be sure we're not stuck with massive re-writes should MS fall in to a lesser position in times to come.

I prefer Visual Studio to any other IDE that I've tried using, but if all of a sudden, 90% of our customers switched to Mac or Linux (not saying it'll happen suddenly, if ever, just "if it did"), then it wouldn't affect our business much at all, and very little indeed from my side as a developer.

When the decision was made, I found my current applications are all completely fine, and only had to do very minor tweaks to old applications (things like replacing hardcoded backslashes with "System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar" (from back in the days that I didn't know better))

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

They weren't bad products.

Since you obviously weren't there to experience them, let me assure you that both Wordperfect for Windows (especially until the late '90s) and Netscape Navigator 4.0 were, in fact, bad products.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

One that would have such market domination that it could get away with it.

In 1985, Microsoft didn't have anything remotely close to the "market domination" necessary to force a mass switch of application. Heck, it's quite arguable whether or not they've ever had it.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

A: An OS Vendor who's also trying to sell a competing software to said 90% of their potential customers.

Except no remotely intelligent businessman would expect that many people to spend the money to just up and switch platforms - and if there's one thing Bill Gates was, it was a good businessman.

What's particularly stupid about the whole "... 'til Lotus won't run" myth, is that - just plain common sense aside - historical behaviour demonstrates the exact opposite is true. Microsoft works very, very hard to maintain backwards compatibility, arguably to a fault. The idea they'd be deliberately breaking such a high profile and important application as Lotus 1-2-3 - *especially* back in the '80s when they were far from the only option - is just laughable.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

What about Windows 3.1 refusing to run specifically under DR DOS? That is a bit more documented, you will have to erase half of internet to cover that.

Windows 3.1 ran fine under DR-DOS. Even the much ballyhooed warning message during the Windows 3.1 beta - presumably what you were referring to - didn't actually stop it running.

(The weird part about that situation was not the warning message itself - perfectly reasonable for something that relied on specific implementation details of DOS as much as Windows 3.x did - but more the code obfuscating the check. Regardless, it didn't actually stop Windows running on DR-DOS.)

Re:don't let the door

[paving-slab]

Indeed. Providing a free web browser - just like every other major platform of the day did - was the very embodiment of "evil".

You lost me there, what other "major platform" provided a free browser in 1995?

Re:don't let the door

[mrbluze]

Since you obviously weren't there to experience them, let me assure you that both Wordperfect for Windows (especially until the late '90s) and Netscape Navigator 4.0 were, in fact, bad products. I was there to experience them. I used them (did MANY assignments on wordperfect and designed websites with testing on netscape) and I liked them. Yes they were buggy (netscape) and Wordperfect was a GUI'd version of the text based word processor that preceded it, but at the time they were good.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

You lost me there, what other "major platform" provided a free browser in 1995?

Windows didn't actually come with IE until 1996, with OSR1.

OS/2 had Web Explorer in 1994 (and from memory Warp came with Navigator, or had a direct link to download it on the desktop).
MacOS had Cyberdog in 1996.

Hell, even if Microsoft were the first to include a web browser, why would that be a bad thing ? Aren't people always complaining they never do anything except copy everyone else ?

Re:don't let the door

[paving-slab]

Windows didn't actually come with IE until 1996, with OSR1

Ok, I didn't equate provided with bundled, but it was still free in 1995, and included in Microsoft Plus.

OS/2 had Web Explorer in 1994 (and from memory Warp came with Navigator, or had a direct link to download it on the desktop). MacOS had Cyberdog in 1996.

Just for your information, OS/2 didn't include Web Explorer until 1995, and was replaced by Netscape in 1996. But it was "major platform" that I was querying, personally I would have said "alternative platform". But as I don't know how to define a "major platform" you may well be right.

Hell, even if Microsoft were the first to include a web browser, why would that be a bad thing ?

If they had simply provided a browser I don't think it would have been a problem, it was what they did after they provided it, i.e. trying to subvert standards so the web wouldn't work correctly without their browser that upsets people.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

Ok, I didn't equate provided with bundled, but it was still free in 1995, and included in Microsoft Plus.

Well, there's little difference that I can see between "provided" and "bundled"...

Just for your information, OS/2 didn't include Web Explorer until 1995, and was replaced by Netscape in 1996. But it was "major platform" that I was querying, personally I would have said "alternative platform". But as I don't know how to define a "major platform" you may well be right.

I was just thinking of the two primary competitors to Windows. Despite low market share in absolute numbers, I would consider it reasonable to call the three of them "major" platforms (in the context of the PC).

The fundamental point remains, however, that "everyone" was doing the same thing at the same time. Singling out Microsoft as somehow being "evil" for responding to customer demands and competitive pressure seems a bit... hypocritical. (Especially since the same people will then usually turn around and talk about how Microsoft is a monopoly who never listens to their customers.)

If they had simply provided a browser I don't think it would have been a problem, it was what they did after they provided it, i.e. trying to subvert standards so the web wouldn't work correctly without their browser that upsets people.

People making this judgement seem to forget some rather important aspects of that timeframe:
* The WWW was exploding. A time of rapid advancement. Why on Earth would anyone expect software vendors in that sort of situation to sit on their hands and wait for a "standards committee" to tell them what functionality their customers were clamouring for that they could and could not give provide ? Remember that whole "competition is good" meme ?
* Netscape were doing *exactly* the same thing. How soon we forget who came up with <blink> and HTML email. Their primary business plan was to leverage being in control of both the server and client.

Re:don't let the door

[Elbowgeek]

I seem to have a vague recollection that Lotus had to release updates every time a new version of DOS appeared. I don't know if it was Lotus' reliance on undocumented APIs which constantly shifted with new OS releases, or MS intentionally shooting down Lotus' products, but it sure was annoying.

Re:don't let the door

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates was like that - slowly turning up the heat, then before you realize it, you're cooked. Ballmer is more like, first boil the pot of water while cackling maniacally and pointing at you, then pour it directly on your head. And, of course, to finish this metaphor, the Jobs method is to convince you to buy the water from him, then boil it and pour it on your own head, then post on the internet about how awesome it was.

Linux gives you some twigs and a map to the nearby stream and tells you to make your own boiling water, but you don't have to pour it on your head. You could use it to cook with, instead.

Re:don't let the door

[paving-slab]

Well, there's little difference that I can see between "provided" and "bundled"...

MS provided IE in 1995, but you had to download Microsoft Plus to get it (or install it off of the CD). They now provide IE but it is bundled with the OS.

Why on Earth would anyone expect software vendors in that sort of situation to sit on their hands and wait for a "standards committee" to tell them what functionality their customers were clamouring for that they could and could not give provide ? Remember that whole "competition is good" meme ?

Well, I really doubt anyone was "clamouring" for anything, but if they have some useful additions to the spec then by all means implement them, but let everyone else implement them as well. The competition is in the efficacy of the browser, not who can lock competitors out of the most functionality.

Netscape were doing *exactly* the same thing. How soon we forget who came up with "blink" and HTML email.

I fail to see that pointing the finger at another company and saying they did it too is an adequate defense. (And no-one who was around at the time can forget the crime against humanity that was the "blink" tag!)

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

They can convince those who were not alive or who were not there but it was viewed no differently than the Win3.11 failure for DR.Dos back then.

Windows 3.1 worked fine on DR-DOS.

It wasn't even refuted back then.

Of course not. That's because the computer-using world was, on average, more intelligent and such a stupid idea was just laughed about.

It was just accepted that Excel would work and Lotus would not for a while when a new version of DOS came out.

Excel never existed for DOS.

It is really weird to see how effectively they are papering over history.

I bet you can't find a single reliable piece of evidence supporting your claims. Given how easy it is to find old versions of things like DOS floating, you shouldn't have any trouble at all finding some combination of DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 that doesn't work.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

MS provided IE in 1995, but you had to download Microsoft Plus to get it (or install it off of the CD). They now provide IE but it is bundled with the OS.

Plus! wasn't free. You had to buy it. I can't remember if IE 1.0 was freely available for download (probably not), but 2.0 was (not that anyone sane would have used either of them to do more than download Navigator).

Well, I really doubt anyone was "clamouring" for anything, but if they have some useful additions to the spec then by all means implement them, but let everyone else implement them as well. The competition is in the efficacy of the browser, not who can lock competitors out of the most functionality.

The competition is in who can give the users what they want, the fastest.

I fail to see that pointing the finger at another company and saying they did it too is an adequate defense. (And no-one who was around at the time can forget the crime against humanity that was the "blink" tag!)

The assumption here is that it *needs* defending. The point I'm trying to make is that the industry was proceeding in exactly the same way it (and numerous others) had previously. Competitively.

Re:don't let the door

[paving-slab]

Plus! wasn't free. You had to buy it.

What I was trying to get across is that you can provide without bundling, but you can't bundle without providing.

However, according to wikipedia (for what it's worth) "Microsoft originally released Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 in two packages: at retail in Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and via the simultaneous OEM release of Windows 95"

The competition is in who can give the users what they want, the fastest.

Within the framework that the competition is held.

The assumption here is that it *needs* defending. The point I'm trying to make is that the industry was proceeding in exactly the same way it (and numerous others) had previously. Competitively.

And the point I was trying to get across was that they actually proceeded anti-competitively. I believe there are court cases that add a certain amount of weight to my position.

Re:don't let the door

[Maxo-Texas]

http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html

which includes in part...

What about Microsoft Excel and Bill Gates?

The next milestone was the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Excel was originally written for the 512K Apple Macintosh in 1984-1985. Excel was one of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical interface with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse pointing device. The Excel spreadsheet with a graphical user interface was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. Many people bought Apple Macintoshes so that they could use Bill Gates' Excel spreadsheet program. There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.

When Microsoft launched the Windows operating system in 1987, Excel was one of the first application products released for it. When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3.0 in late 1989 Excel was Microsoft's flagship product. For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of 1992.

By the late 1980s many companies had introduced spreadsheet products. Spreadsheet products and the spreadsheet software industry were maturing. Microsoft and Bill Gates had joined the fray with the innovative Excel spreadsheet. Lotus had acquired Software Arts and the rights to VisiCalc. Jim Manzi had become CEO at Lotus in April 1986 and in July 1986 Mitch Kapor resigned as Chairman of the Board. The spreadsheet entrepreneurs were moving on ...

---

Regardless, these memories of "dos isn't done until lotus doesn't run" go back to the 80's when I was in my 20's. It is not from slashdot period and it was widely known that Microsoft played dirty back then.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.

Well, I'd never heard of a version of Excel for DOS (and mentions of it outside of that one document are, well, pretty much nonexistant), but I'm willing to concede it might have existed. It *certainly* wasn't common, if it did, however, as that quote shows.

Regardless, these memories of "dos isn't done until lotus doesn't run" go back to the 80's when I was in my 20's. It is not from slashdot period and it was widely known that Microsoft played dirty back then.

And, still, I await even the slightest shred of actual evidence that it was ever true.

Heck, I'd nearly be satisfied with even a rational argument as to why it would be true (arguments that rely on alienating ~90% of the potential customer base are not rational).

Since, given the prominence of DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980s PC world (probably for a majority, the only reason they had a PC at all), if new releases of DOS were frequently (or even infrequently) breaking 1-2-3, then it would be a well known, well documented and trivially demonstratable fact, not a vague rumor that employees from both Microsoft and Lotus at the time consider to be rubbish (indeed, the very opposite of reality) and people parroting it can never back up.

Re:don't let the door

[drsmithy]

In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility.

What do you mean "until" ? There's boatloads of stuff in Vista (large chunks of UAC, virtualised file and registry access, etc) that exist for no other reason than to allow old, broken applications to continue working.

Re:don't let the door

[Skim123]

I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft disregarded backwards compatibility with Vista altogether, but rather that their commitment to backwards compatibility went from "insane" to just "sane." :-)

Re:don't let the door

[QuietObserver]

Very true. Hopefully there are still some law offices that won't touch anything other word processor than WordPerfect; I personally use WordPerfect regularly. And it's not just the awesome functionality of Reveal Codes that gives WordPerfect its power; there are many other things like Center on Margin, Right Flush, Indent (single and double), the multitude of indexing and table features, the actual tables functionality, etc. There are also all of the simple keyboard shortcuts for doing practically anything useful.

So ends the era of Gates

[wal9001]

From now on, Microsoft's success will be due to their relationship with developers, developers, developers, developers.

Re:So ends the era of Gates

[Linux_ho]

It's the wave of the future.

Re:So ends the era of Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

man, fucking old stale jokes get modded up because a bunch of faggot fanbois can't do better? goes to show who understands the technology and who just caws on like a fucking moron.

MS reliability

[xaxa]

Five eights availability!

Re:MS reliability

[davester666]

5 out of every 8 days, their system is up.

Re:MS reliability

[flowsnake]

Heck, I'd settle for eight fives!

Re:MS reliability

[eclectro]

Imagine the size of the switch they're gonna need to reboot the data center!!

Re:MS reliability

[Serpentegena]

Don't you mean nine fives?

Re:MS reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they are committed to five ninths.

I am a MS Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Has MS done anything innovative in the past few years? Since windows.. it just seems all they try to do is copy other products, pump millions into marketing and watch it fail. I don't think they've had a profitable product since XP. And the choice before that was ME so who wouldn't purchase it.

Even though we all flame MS.. why do we still use the products.. in our home, our office and on our phones. Only within the past 2 years have better alternatives come out.. iPhone and Firefox..

Flame away!

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[Darkness404]

Even though we all flame MS.. why do we still use the products.. in our home, our office and on our phones

Err... All my computers have Linux installed as the primary OS and either use WINE to emulate any necessary Windows applications (which interestingly enough aren't made by MS). In most people's office they would rather be using Linux and free software but the people who outrank them (AKA: Those who don't have a clue what an operating system even is....) insist on spending money on MS's products to make the company look better and so the computer illiterate people don't have to learn anything.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[HermMunster]

Microsoft has created absolutely no products that weren't copied or predicated on someone elses work. So, it isn't that it has been that way for the past few years. They have never during their whole history. I wish people would just look at Microsoft for what they are--a copycat. They are destined to failure because they have become such a behemoth that they are bound to collapse in on themselves.

Not only that, when you consider how much money these guys are hoarding everyone should be questioning whether we want more of the same mentality that goes into this form of hoarding. Can you imagine a man with a trillion dollars to his name while most of the rest of the world starves and all this trillionaire can do is tell countries that he'll help them as long as they commit to buying his products?

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[adona1]

I was thinking about this the other day, and I honestly don't think MS can do much to be innovative and maintain their position in the market. Take Apple as an example - a few years back they were gasping for breath with a very small market share. They didn't have all that much to lose, and so were able to make a break with something new (OSX) and come up with something different.

Now, to put that against MS....they achieved a mindboggling share of the PC market, and were able to rest on their laurels for years. Now, they face competitors in a number of areas - OS, browsers, office suites - and their success is also what cripples them. They can't make a break with their software past the way Apple did, because if they do, they suddenly lose the connection with their established market. Think about it - if new MS products differ too radically from their old ones, or are completely incompatible etc, then suddenly the barrier between them and Linux/Apple etc is lowered dramatically. If you have to learn a new OS, for example, then there's as much chance of someone buying a shiny new Mac or picking up that free OS the kids are talking about as picking up the new MS OS and learning how to use it, not to mention the fact that MS and bugs/insecurity are a common perception...

So IMHO, they can have innovation or market share. Not both.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[grumling]

You just described the innovator's dilemma.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[Bonobo_Unknown]

of course selling turds of products never helps

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[drsmithy]

Has MS done anything innovative in the past few years?

Has anyone ? Without knowing your measure of what counts as "innovation", it's an impossible question to answer.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[lgw]

Most technological innovation is incremental. It's really hard to find examples of any successful product that wasn't just like some product before it (except, you know, for that little change which made it succcessful).

Microsoft did some quite innovative work early on, however. Windows95 is the most amazing and extensive backwards-compatibility solution I've ever seen. It would run 16 bit drivers in a 32 bit OS without emulation, even though the underlying kernel was radically different from the DOS environment they were written against.

The architecture of the win32 API was also a reasonably new idea: rather than being a set of system calls, it was a formal layer between the kernel "RTL*" functions (the real system calls) and the apps. You could write against the win32 system API, or against the POSIX system API, or against the OS/2 system API, or against the old 16-bit system API, all with the same kernel and no emulation/virtualization layer.

This level of impressive innovation seems to have ceased about 10 years ago, and while XP was a nice delivery, it didn't really break any new ground.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[CastrTroy]

I'm a big proponent of open source, but I have to admit. MS makes some good products. Their office suite is better than anything else out there. There isn't a whole lot of serious competition, but they do have the best. VS.Net is way better than any open source IDE i've ever tried, and I've used a lot of them. MS does have it's terrible products, like IE, Visual source safe, and Windows. But thay also make some really good ones.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

In most people's office they would rather be using Linux You, sir, are either on crak or have spent very little time in a typical office (or maybe both). Most people in an office don't even know what Linux is. Finding their program icons in the Start Menu is way too technical for a lot of these folks. You think they want to be using Linux? Not bloody likely.

Re:I am a MS Fanboy

[frank_adrian314159]

The solution to this is to permit new groups within your own organization to compete with your established products. Do not allow the established powers that be knife the baby with complaints of cannibalization. Instead, put the pressure on your established product to compete technically and, if they can't, let the baby take over. If managed poorly, this can lead to a fragmented and vulnerable market position. If managed well, it can lead to market dominance for generations.

Really?

[Darkness404]

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.

Are you sure that that isn't just what he says he will be doing and he is really trying to become the Debian project leader?

Re:Really?

[Darkness404]

Wow, the moderators must be really off today, I try for a +5 funny and end up with a -1 troll mod, whats next? A +5 insightful for this post?

Re:Really?

[Penguinisto]

Before a post can be considered funny, it must have one of the following memes:

• Beowulf clustering
• Hot Grits and Natalie Portman (pref. naked and petrified)
• The Soviet Union
• Korean Old People

(and many, many more... none of which were in your post. Sorry.)

/P

Re:Really?

[His Shadow]

Blame it on the Microputzes. For all their yakking about other OS supporters being cultists, the Microsftians can't help but adore Dear Leader Gates.

Re:Really?

[Enderandrew]

I have a plan that involves the following steps:

1 - A Beowulf Cluster (naturally, it answers the question "will it run Linux?") dedicated to rendering hot grits on a naked Natalie Portman.

2 - In the Soviet Union, Natalie Portman renders you!

3 - This only makes sense to Korean Old People.

4 - ???

5 - Profit!

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least people read yours--I'll be lucky to get moderated at all. Oh how I long for even a modest +3.

Re:Really?

[notinchargeofgundam]

Hey, you forgot to mention me! Insensitive clod.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

whats next? A +5 insightful for this post?

Wow, you got a +4 Insightful for that post, the mods must really be trying to fuck with your head.

Re:Really?

[The End Of Days]

If that's what you see, you really oughta get your eyes checked.

The opposite of Free Software zealots isn't proprietary software zealots. It's people who don't get emotionally involved in a machine.

Re:Really?

[clang_jangle]

Good job!

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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. Are you sure that that isn't just what he says he will be doing and he is really trying to become the Debian project leader? No it means he wants to goto work at Google.

IIRC, he'll need to take a year off before he can do that.

Re:Really?

[carps]

'Wow, the moderators must be really off today, I try for a +5 funny and end up with a -1 troll mod, whats next? A +5 insightful for this post?'

Or a +4 offtopic for this one? (I mean, lets give the mods at least little challenge en route to joke completion.)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

has anyone actually tried telling natalie portman that they'd like to pour hit grits down her pants ?

is she aware of the high esteem that slashdotters hold of her ?

Re:Really?

[His Shadow]

If it's your contention that Microsoft doesn't have legions of raving loon fanboys (we call them Mouse Clicking Solutions Experts) that are completely ignorant of the damage Microsoft has done to personal computing, you are fooling yourself. If another of your contention is that there are many people on Slashdot who are not emotionally involved in their machines or technology in general, you are delusional.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the moderators must be really off today, I try for a +5 funny and end up with a -1 troll mod, whats next? A +5 insightful for this post?

Well, the obvious answer is that your comment wasn't actually funny...

Last?

[Anonymous Coward]

Title seems a bit misleading. I thought he committed seppuku or something after he finished at first.
I can see it now. 'Well, sorry about Vista, hey, check this out!' SLICE!

Translations

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Version 1) They have to be huge to run Vista and get the same response.

Version 2)Let's pump up MSFT. I'm selling some.

followed by....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be back

Re:followed by....

[FuturePastNow]

I bet that 20% time to Microsoft will involve trotting him out for conferences and speeches. This isn't Bill's last speech by a long shot.

Re:followed by....

[colmore]

His last while his job is more than "spokesperson."

20% of time...

[Anonymous Coward]

So on leap years, does he round up to 20.01%?

Definitely the Henry Ford of his era

[Anonymous Coward]

for right or for wrong

AH-HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

So THAT's where the MSN Music Store servers went! Way to recycle, Microsoft. Go green!

Success

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.

Just wait...

[PhantomHarlock]

till one of these giant datacenters has an electrical fault like the one last weekend, and instead of 9,000 servers, it's 90,000 servers gone at once...

Re:Just wait...

[Tubal-Cain]

The difference being that the first datacenter wasn't taken down maliciously.

Re:Just wait...

[nurb432]

And that happens how often? And of course your office never loses power, or your home...

Its really not that big of a risk if you weigh all the issues..

Re:Just wait...

[aaarrrgggh]

An outage in a data center over about 2.2MW is a major hassle to re-start. Over about 5MW can be a 48 hour effort. When you get into these 20+ MW facilities, it can easily take weeks to get everything back up and running.

When a facility is properly compartmentalized, it isn't nearly as bad-- redundancies and fail-over mechanisms can continue to maintain most of the system operation, and hopefully extra load can be shifted to another site.

The problem is that historically data centers don't have fires. (In contrast, telco switch facilities have them all the time.) Electrically when we get over about 10-20MW of UPS in a single structure data center, the complexity of systems and maintenance provisions greatly increases the risk of fire. From a raised floor perspective, when we get over 20kW per rack, we have seen a couple small fires (out of thousands-- don't get me wrong, it isn't a huge widespread problem). With these changes brought on by the "mega-centers," it takes a lot to improve (electrical) reliability for the site.

So, in my book, it isn't the fact that you shouldn't be prepared for a data center to go down some times, it is that there is more concentration of facilities and they are being done at a larger scale which will impact the reliability in a major way. We advise most of our clients to keep under 6MW for a data center, and go for multiple facilities geographically isolated for the extra capacity. That approach isn't always commercially viable, but it is makes for a better long-term investment.

20% time

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the 80/20 principle doesn't apply here.

Innovation ProTip

[mrbah]

This can only reinforce my belief that the people at Microsoft have no ideas and no vision (whether they lost them or never had them to begin with, I'll leave to you) whatsoever. It almost makes me feel sorry for them to see them try so very hard to innovate. But ultimately they're just like the Chinese knock-off game console manufacturers, they see new products that are commercial successes and emulate them in every way but the one that counts. I liked Windows 2000, and I like Windows XP. Microsoft should stick to what they do best, not try to create the "next big thing".

Re:Innovation ProTip

[nurb432]

Its not about technical innovation anymore, its about them following the money trail as the world changes.

Most everything today is incremental improvements, rarely does true innovation come along now. Where is the Woz when you need him?

And, just to clarify, i wont be leasing my processing power thank you very much.

Re:Innovation ProTip

[Anonymous Coward]

"Where is the Woz"

Pointing a gun at your head for calling him THE Woz

Re:Innovation ProTip

[BrainInAJar]

"And, just to clarify, i wont be leasing my processing power thank you very much."

You won't? You mean you run a local copy of the entire internet? Wow, impressive.

Re:Innovation ProTip

[glens]

Sorry for not quoting. Jack Daniels is influencing me to be lazy...

Many years ago, just a few days after archiving an article about Douglas Engelbert (try the Internet Archive for articles from San Jose Mercury News' website), where he'd developed what was certainly the precursor to Web interaction, including even a 3 button mouse back in the late '60s, I came across some Microsoft (somewhere in Europe) website which claimed that they'd innovated the freakin' mouse!

Sorry, but, like I said, JD has got the better of me right now, or I'd dig up the pertinent info from some hard drive partition info I've got stashed somewhere, but am otherwise too lazy to do...

The utter gall those idiots in Redmond have is enough to piss off just about any otherwise-reasonable person to instigate another world war.

Re:Innovation ProTip

[nurb432]

While i know you are trying to be cute, its really not the same thing, viewing a free web page for OTHERS content or actually leasing CPU time to do MY processing out on the cloud.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is Slashdot going to change the Bill Gates/Borg image?

And why does this spell check not recognize the word Slashdot?

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Broken Toys]

If spell checking were a requirement, 98% of the Internet would be shut donw.

Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Anonymous Coward]

And with any non-utility or non-profit type public company that success is measured by stock growth.

Ballmer took over in 2001. MSFT's stock has been effectively dead in the water since that time:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT#chart1:symbol=msft;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Ballmer has been a complete disaster:

* The 7 billion dollar Xbox fiasco
* The Zune/digital music failure
* The inability to change the Microsoft culture to deal with the new realities of the EU business climate
* The total failure to handle the Vista release competently
* Search/MSN floundering

If Microsoft gets a competent and visionary leader it could rapidly turn things around and dominate markets like crazy once Ballmer gets dumped.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Anonymous Coward]

A new head of Microsoft would have a monumental amount of work to fix the company.

Step 1 - Kill off the Ballmer turds like Zune, Xbox, and maybe even search

Step 2 - Mass firings of everyone involved in those stinkers

Step 3 - A complete overhaul of the marketing, branding, and UI people

Step 4 - Wrap up everything DOS/Win32 into a virtual machine and move forward with a clean slate while still supporting the gargantuan DOS/Win32 legacy code out there

Step 5 - Start coming to terms with open source and open standards and figure out how Microsoft will fit in that type of world

Hell, why not go all the way and grab some BSD source and build on top of that with the DOS/Win32 stuff running in a VM on top of it.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[jcr]

MS has started their decline, just like IBM did before them. Even if they recruit the greatest CEO in the world, all he can do is stabilize them and maybe get 3-5% annual growth.

The question is though, is there a Lou Gerstner-level of executive talent out there who can turn Microsoft into an effective development organization? I don't think there is.

All that Ballmer is going to do is continue to piss away shareholders' money on his ego trip of the month club. He's desperate to show that MS's dominance isn't just from the sheer luck of catching IBM's fumble.

-jcr

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

Step 4 - Wrap up everything DOS/Win32 into a virtual machine and move forward with a clean slate while still supporting the gargantuan DOS/Win32 legacy code out there That would be a fatal mistake. Well, the win32 part - 16 bit DOS apps don't run at all on 64-bit Windows. Win32 is simple and it works, and hasn't changed much in over a decade. It's the stable API you can really code against. It's not object oriented, but it's just not that hard to wrap it.

Win32 is often confused with the steaming pile of MS APIs on top of it: MFC, COM, etc. Those indeed need to be exiled to a virtualization layer. .NET is the attempt to introduce a new layer to replace MFC, COM, etc. The problem is, it isn't a useful replacement for win32, and you really need to be able to code against win32 from time to time (and of course .NET is built on top of win32, it's not technically a replacement for it).

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[tyler.willard]

Win32 is simple...

Win32 only looks simple when compared to Win16.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

MS has started their decline, just like IBM did before them.

Uuuuuh? IBM? Decline?

Check out this (Year to date) stock chart of IBM vs MSFT (with AAPL thrown in for a reference point).

I'd love to be in 'decline' the way IBM is.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET is the attempt to introduce a new layer to replace MFC, COM, etc.....NET is built on top of win32 <embed sound="record_scratch.wav"/>
wha-ahw-what?

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

What API do you think the CLR calls to interact with the system? It's not written against the kernel interface.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

Really, the only place where win32 is noticably more complex to use than unix system libraries is the added security crap in just about every call. Oddly enough, adding security parameters to just about every kernel object has somehow failed to produce a secure system. Funny, that.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[pdusen]

A new head of Microsoft would have a monumental amount of work to fix the company.

Step 1 - Kill off the Ballmer turds like Zune, Xbox, and maybe even search

Step 2 - Mass firings of everyone involved in those stinkers

Seriously, dude? I can see search, but the Xbox and Zune have both had reasonable amounts of success. There is no reason to kill off either one of them.

Step 3 - A complete overhaul of the marketing, branding, and UI people

Step 4 - Wrap up everything DOS/Win32 into a virtual machine and move forward with a clean slate while still supporting the gargantuan DOS/Win32 legacy code out there

Step 5 - Start coming to terms with open source and open standards and figure out how Microsoft will fit in that type of world

Hell, why not go all the way and grab some BSD source and build on top of that with the DOS/Win32 stuff running in a VM on top of it.

I can agree with these.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Mongoose Disciple]

Step 1 - Kill off the Ballmer turds like Zune, Xbox, and maybe even search

You need to have a bit longer-term of a vision here.

Has the first version of any Microsoft product in a market ever been a success?

The first versions of IE were trash. Today it's the dominant browser in the world. (Will it still be in two years? Maybe not, but it's hard to call a product with a lock on the market for half a decade a failure.)

The first versions of Word were trash. Today it's the dominant word processor in the world.

You can argue about the methods that got those products to dominance, and I think that's worth talking about in other contexts, but not so much this context of talking about a company's financial successes or failures. If the combination of underhanded competitor-stabbing and an increasingly good product could work then, I think there's at least a chance it could work again now.

Will Zune have crushed the iPod five years from now? I doubt it, because I think Apple this time around is a little more savvy than the Netscapes and Wordperfects of the world in their day, but I wouldn't count it out just because Zune v1 wasn't great and didn't sell that well. That's just par for the course. Hate Microsoft if you disagree with their principles or lack thereof, but underestimate them at your peril. (Cue Godwin-inducing analogy.)

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[0100010001010011]

What a short sighted example, the AAPL reference isn't very good because they've been "back" since Dec 2007.

Here's a much better one if you want to toss AAPL into the mix:

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=1212545071321&chddm=48875&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:MSFT&q=NYSE:IBM&

IBM: 45%,
AAPL: 1965%
MSFT: 11%

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[nguy]

Win32 is simple and it works, and hasn't changed much in over a decade. It's the stable API you can really code against. It's not object oriented, but it's just not that hard to wrap it.

Win32, as well as the NT kernel, may look clean, simple, and well-designed compared to the rest of Windows, but they also have big problems.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[nguy]

Oddly enough, adding security parameters to just about every kernel object has somehow failed to produce a secure system. Funny, that.

But that's the basic problem with Windows: Windows is designed in the way that's "obvious" to a computer scientists. But a lot of design choices that seem obvious turn out to be wrong in practice. For example, ACLs and frame buffer-inspired graphics APIs sound so much nicer and more straightforward than UNIX's permission bits and graphics protocols, but it turns out that UNIX got it right and they got it wrong.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Erm?

1) Your link is the same as mine - you need to click the 'link to this page' button.
2) I have no idea what time period you're referring to, but 45% gains hardly points to a company in decline.
3) Yes, Apple has done well since 2000 or so, but it's really just regaining the ground it lost during the disastrous Amelio years.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[MojoStan]

MS has started their decline, just like IBM did before them. Even if they recruit the greatest CEO in the world, all he can do is stabilize them and maybe get 3-5% annual growth. I'm no financial expert, but how are you defining "decline" and "annual growth?" Just looking at their income statements (annual data), Microsoft's revenue and income is still growing in excess of 3-5% annually:

• Total Revenue
  2002: $28.365 billion
  2003: $32.187 billion
  2004: $36.835 billion
  2005: $39.788 billion
  2006: $44.282 billion
  2007: $51.122 billion
• Net Income
  2002: $5.355 billion
  2003: $7.531 billion
  2004: $8.168 billion
  2005: $12.254 billion
  2006: $12.599 billion
  2007: $14.065 billion

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[ArAgost]

You forgot: Step 0: Profit!

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[jcr]

IBM? Decline?

Perhaps you're too young to remember this, but there was a time when IBM dominated the computer business, getting 40% of the revenues and about 60% of the profit in the entire industry.

-jcr

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Alex Belits]

What?

Microsoft shills are really busy today.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Mikeytsi]

Kill off the Zune and Xbox? You're kidding, right?

The Xbox is a primary money-maker for Microsoft these days. The revenue stream from 360 title sales and Xbox Live memberships is outstanding.

The Zune is also doing well. The 80 GB units have been doing VERY well sales-wise, and a lot of the "Social" concepts are very innovative. Yeah, it's not doing IPOD well, but who is? It takes time to make serious in-roads against an entrenched market leader that's been around as long as the iPod has.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

Have you used both system APIs? of course, everyone thinks that the way they already know is best, but there's nothing hard about using win32 to write to a file, or wait on a mutex, or set an environemnt variable. Heck, you can even sleep/wait with a granularity of milliseconds, and critical sections are much faster than mutexes when you can use them.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Alex Belits]

Have you used both system APIs? Yes. Nothing that I ever encountered in my life was designed worse than Win32.

of course, everyone thinks that the way they already know is best, but there's nothing hard about using win32 to write to a file, or wait on a mutex, or set an environemnt variable. Heck, you can even sleep/wait with a granularity of milliseconds, and critical sections are much faster than mutexes when you can use them. Apparently you have absolutely no idea how much Unix design differs from Windows. Outside Windows in most situations you don't encounter mutexes because unless you really handle shared resource in memory (what you usually don't), you use multiple processes synchronized through interprocess communications primitives. This can't be done in Windows because of severely crippled interprocess communications, inefficient scheduler and braindead virtual memory. In anything unixlike multiple threads are one of many choices that are used when design requires it, however in Windows they are the only choice whenever program uses any kind of concurrency.

As for sleeping with granularity of milliseconds, you are not supposed to ever need that (you are supposed to wait for things to happen and react immediately, not go into blind-and-deaf state until a timer expires and then expect something to be changed while you weren't looking), however this is what you get by calling poll() with empty set of descriptors.

If you intend to program using Windows techniques, indeed no system would be significantly better than Windows -- because the whole Windows design is a massive engineering failure, and so is everything that ever comes from it.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

SQAWK! Windows Sucks! SQUAWK!

Damn, I remember the early days of /.. I'm sure Oog the Open Source Caveman agrees with you, but the rest of us have moved on. VMS-like kernels still beat Unix-like kernels. :p

Good luck with that "taking over the desktop" thing, I'm sure you'll win any day now.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Alex Belits]

So that were all seemingly-relevant arguments you had, and now you are back to genetic trolling?

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

If there's one thing I've learned from /., it's not to argue with a religious fanatic. But, yes, my trolling is in fact genetic.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Alex Belits]

Too bad, it was a typo for "generic".

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[lgw]

Yeah, my family tree grows under a bridge, what can I do?

But seriously your complaints all sound like objections to the long-defunct Windows9x kernel. When Dave Cutler wrote the VMS kernel the second time and called it "NT" he did a good job. While NT has evolved from there, and not necessarily for the better, your complaints seem completely trollish.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Sorry, I took decline to mean 'decline' rather than your definition (which appears to be 'growing, but not as much as they used to').

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[Alex Belits]

But seriously your complaints all sound like objections to the long-defunct Windows9x kernel. When Dave Cutler wrote the VMS kernel the second time and called it "NT" he did a good job. While NT has evolved from there, and not necessarily for the better, your complaints seem completely trollish. He did a good job creating a better environment for Win32 to run on. There is a Unix-like layer on top of it (OpenNT/Interix/...) and it's pretty terrible. Win32 remained being the crap that it is, and further development of the kernel more or less negated whatever supposedly sane ideas were introduced in it.

Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT

[jcr]

Do you imagine that you can alter reality by being snotty? If so, I think Hillary Clinton has a job for you.

Since the mid 1980's, IBM lost the personal computer business completely, and most of their mainframe business, and today they're a remake of EDS, so yes: they declined, and rather sharply at that.

-jcr

The Ballmer Bot

[D Ninja]

I love the end of the article.

[Gates] welcomed onto the stage a Ph.D. candidate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the "Ballmer-bot," a robot made to imitate and act like Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and Gates' long-time business partner, who is not attending TechEd.

"Developers, developers, developers, developers," the robot, developed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio product, repeated over and over, in an homage to Ballmer's famous rant. The robot also raised his arm, showing how he has the ability to "throw eggs," according to the MIT student controlling his movements. Throw eggs. Heh. Throw chairs is more like it.

Re:The Ballmer Bot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Microsoft; I think you mean throw egg-ceptions.

Re:The Ballmer Bot

[maxume]

http://gizmodo.com/391736/steve-ballmer-egged-in-hungary

Re:The Ballmer Bot

[9InchRails]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that! See you on the floor...

Re:The Ballmer Bot

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it was probably more a reference to this

Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

You're all a bunch of assholes.

49.88, two pair.
(five)

LONG FOOT

DOLLARS FIVE

$5

i'm thinking arby's

call 1 800 general now

Esurance's Erin E Surance is a whore.

The
wAiter lost my frog
but blasted my masters and ph.armacuticals for you you u u
sialis
sendenifil rapid colo cleanse

Re:Assholes

[sexconker]

I have invented a new smiley :~~~~~

the colon cleanse.

Re:Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be *~~~~~ ?

Re:Assholes

[sexconker]

COLON
:

Doomed To Failure

[HermMunster]

Microsoft isn't any good at anything and mostly they are not good at data. The end.

Who cares about Bill Gates. Good bye, and good riddens. I'd rather we had a world without his influences.

Take care of your charity, please don't predicate your charity on whether a country buys your products any more, and stay the hell out of the computer industry.

Re:Doomed To Failure

[sexconker]

The phrase is "good riddance".

Microsoft's biggest problem

[Anonymous Coward]

is that they have old people in charge. Gates and Ozzie in particular, know in great detail what the big technical and business challenges were in the '80s and '90s, and earlier in this decade. But that's where we came from, not where we're headed.

When Gates wrote his first "visionary" best seller back in 1995, the Internet was exploding around him and he didn't even notice. Neither did the team developing Windows 95, as it turns out. They had to scramble and buy rights to a graphical browser from Spyglass to compete. And they got rights to the Mosaic source from UIUC, I think (that was a consequence the famous IP feud between the university and their former CS stars).

Back in the early- to mid-90s, IIRC the PC pundits were talking up the wonderful future of content on CD-ROMs, and streaming video delivered from a LAN server. And analog TV signals delivered to the desktop via expansion boards on the VESA or PCI bus.

Now, of course, Gates knows all about the Internet, probably more than most of us here, but I don't have any confidence in his ability to spot the next New New Thing.

I'm reminded of Ken Olsen's quote around the time the Macintosh first came out: "There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home." At least not in his experience!

former texas governor causes worldwide mayhem

[Anonymous Coward]

makes fuddles look like a boy scout. the lights are coming up all over now. conspiracy theorists are being vindicated. some might choose a tin umbrella to go with their hats. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. there are still some choices. if they do not suit you, consider the likely results of continuing to follow the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn, whereas anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.

http://news.google.com/?ncl=1216734813&hl=en&topic=n
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?hp
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/02/nasa.global.warming.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/02/honore.preparedness/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01dowd.html?em&ex=1212638400&en=744b7cebc86723e5&ei=5087%0A

is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+manipulation&btnG=Search
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying

dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster. meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html

the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'. the creators will prevail. as it has always been.

corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7

as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way. the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable. some of US should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate to be among tho

"They" havent thought of it?

[alexborges]

Ah... microsoft's mentality, you gotta love it. When he says "we havent thought about that size before", he wants to convey "we, humanity".

Doesnt that kind of show what kind of reality distortion field this guy lives in?

Amazon thought about it, Google thought about it. Ah, they are not "we, humanity"... i see.

Re:"They" havent thought of it?

[jhines]

"they" are not using Vista or other MS products

Re:"They" havent thought of it?

[Zarf]

Ah... microsoft's mentality, you gotta love it. When he says "we havent thought about that size before", he wants to convey "we, humanity".

Doesnt that kind of show what kind of reality distortion field this guy lives in?

Amazon thought about it, Google thought about it. Ah, they are not "we, humanity"... i see. Actually, I read it as a genuinely humble admission that Microsoft has never thought about data centers the size that Google and Amazon have. I read it as a genuine admission of his company's short comings and a challenge for his company to rise to that challenge. Admittedly he stops short of saying ... "we haven't thought about that size before. Like Google and Amazon have."

The last bit I read as a desire to be able to compete with the larger data centers. Recognizing that Microsoft today is not one of the companies with a large reliable data center on the scale of Google.

A good commentator would have mentioned that, pointed it out as a sign of weakness, and seen Gate's parting challenge to his company as a "moon shot" type of declaration.

I don't know about Bill Gates...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but us slashdotters have been imagining these beowulf clusters from quite some time!

hosted services

[nurb432]

So we are returning to the very thing Microsoft fought to eliminate in the first place. Big data centers where you lease CPU time and have nothing but a terminal at your desk. ( ok, so its slightly different in actual practice, but same basic principles )

Anyone else find it as ironic as i?

Re:hosted services

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is merely recognizing where the market it moving towards (or has already started to move to).

They can't stop it, so why would they not try to own that market too?

Re:hosted services

[Anonymous Coward]

So we are returning to the very thing Microsoft fought to eliminate in the first place. Big data centers where you lease CPU time and have nothing but a terminal at your desk. ( ok, so its slightly different in actual practice, but same basic principles )

Anyone else find it as ironic as i?

Nope. What I find ironic is that they appear to want to eat their own dogfood!

Re:hosted services

[BrainInAJar]

McNealy, jackass that he may be, made some comment in a speech a while back about technology moving in a pendulum fashion.

computing machinery goes back and forth between local access ( abandoned pdp-11 in your local lab, PC, etc ) and the network is the computer ( university's central VAX with a bunch of terminals, google apps, etc )

Re:hosted services

[Conficio]

Absolutely,
I think that in 10 or 20 years we'll see the backlash against storing all our data in a space that can't be controlled by ourselves.

I'm a kid of the Personal Computer and I can't imagine to rely on shared assets like the cloud for all the stuff. While it is a theoretically scalable, the issue is the money you need to pay for it. A computer and its storage is a sunk cost, cloud services are a monthly expense.

8.8888%

[Anonymous Coward]

> Five eights availability!

It's not so impressive when you realize that they actually mean 8.8888%

where to put them

[AKabral]

i heard Microsoft signed a lease with the oil companies to build these new datacenters on the icecaps to accelerate global warming . . .

Re:where to put them

[rob1980]

That should make quite the ensemble with their automated puppy kickers and the ninjas they hire to rip the tags off of pillows before they're sold.

Datacenters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't we hear about datacenters already? Ah, yeah... Google, right? Looks like MS is innovating again.

Re:Datacenters?

[this great guy]

Yep... Who was, like me, counting the days (since Google announced App Engine in April) until Microsoft would announce something similar ?

I am surprised it took them 2+ months this time.

Devil's advocate

[Ethanol-fueled]

No, no, no!

If you're going to play devil's advocate than you have to play up Microsoft's strengths. Say what you will about Office, but it dominates for reasons aside of lock-in.

And what about Surface? I'd like to see the folks at apple come up with something as cool as that. There is a *nix variant, but it's not nearly as cool. And no, the puny widdle scween on the iPhone dosen't count! Sure, the cost of a Surface unit would be prohibitive to average Joe User but people may re-respect Microsoft if they get to play with a Surface coffee-table at their local Starbucks.

Disclaimer: I'm OS agnostic as long as all o' them are contribute to the idea pool.

Re:Devil's advocate

[theurge14]

"And what about Surface? I'd like to see the folks at apple come up with something as cool as that."

You say this, then you say

"Sure, the cost of a Surface unit would be prohibitive to average Joe User but..."

So you answered your own question.

But then you said:

"And no, the puny widdle scween on the iPhone dosen't count!"

Why not? How big of a phone do you need?

Re:Devil's advocate

[Ethanol-fueled]

That's the point, pedant.

Leave the small-time to Apple, and go straight for the big-time. Let Apple handle the smaller, more personal flashy gadgets. MSFT has a lot more money so they can invest in bigger stuff like tabletop kiosks. Everybody wins, and Apple and MS don't stick their fingers in each other's pie. Also note that -- surprise, surprise! -- at this point the iPhone and Surface both have their debut in AT&T stores! IF MSFT were smart then they'd move on to other ventures and not be stuck in an exclusive contract with big brother -- err, AT&T.

If Microsoft blows this whole Surface thing, though, then it's safe to say that there's no hope left. Oh, and this is Slashdot, so *nix still has nothing to do with big brother! Let's hope that it stays user unfriendly(that's sarcasm, trigger-happy mods).

Re:Devil's advocate

[theurge14]

"That's the point, pedant.

Leave the small-time to Apple, and go straight for the big-time."

Small-time? Apple has sold almost 6M iPhones since last summer at $399-$499 a unit. How many Surfaces are out there or are planned to be out there at, $12,000 a pop?

Re:Devil's advocate

[clang_jangle]

While I'm not a bit fond of MS or most of their products, even I can see that this Surface thingie could well be the beginning of something huge, at least among gamers and maybe for multimedia use as well. And high cost is pretty normal for the first iteration of any really new tech.

Re:Devil's advocate

[ppanon]

Probably about as many as there were Apple Lisas in the early 80's. Apple learned that lesson.

Re:Devil's advocate

[Tubal-Cain]

And what about Surface? I'd like to see the folks at apple come up with something as cool as that. I would bet they have something like that in the works, but don't want to tip their hand until it is complete and a market exists for it.

Tagged: finally

[terbo]

fixed that for ya.

pity they just annoyed the best developers...

[Anonymous Coward]

...with their OOXML standard.

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:Flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that this is not flamebait. It counts as truthful comment. Hence the reason it was modded flamebait.

Re:Flamebait?

[GaratNW]

All the companies you identify, were every bit as much to blame for their failure as Microsoft. Microsoft certainly didn't help them along the path to financial success, but that's what happens in a competitive marketplace.

As for products that never made it to market? I think you may be a tad confused? Tablet PC's are still available and brand new ones purchasable. They've never become a break away hit, because they frankly are a niche product, and the way the screens have to be built make them more expensive to produce than a standard laptop. But I still know quite a few people who own one. (Artists mostly.. plus a few people who spend inordinate amount of times in meetings and like products like OneNote for keeping track of tons of notes, doodles, etc)

Truth is in the eye of the beholder. Your truth is another man's slanted point of view. A Microsoft hater would clearly claim that as "truth".. someone who doesn't care either way would file it away as the flames of someone who can't see how those companies planted the seeds of their own destruction.

Re:Flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

No No no no no No no no g*ddammit NO.

Truth is objective. Empiricism is the test. You may want it true, believe it true, "see" it true in your eye, but if if ain't so, IT AIN'T TRUE.

Opinion is only valid if it is informed and based on facts, and facts are facts only if they are true, not because you believe them.

Wise up. And perception is not reality, either.

I don't care what side of the argument you're on, learn this fact: truth is objectively true or it ain't true. Opinions based on facts can vary, but truth cannot.

The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates has contributed more to modern computing than any other ten people together. Most people in IT owe a debt of gratitude because without his contribution most of you wouldn't have jobs. The open source community should consider that without Microsoft and it's dominant position created by Bill Gates incredible business savy there would be no open source movement as there would have been nothing to unite against. For those who would argue that he is not a great business man you would need to consider that he is one of the richest men in the world and you don't get there with luck alone. I have read these forums for several years and today is the last day I will bother. I have finally come to the conclusion that 80% of the MS bashers who write these comments are low level techy's who will never achieve a leadership role in any capacity. I jumped on the Windows band wagon in the early days. I rode the wave, made a million, sold the business, and started another. Everything I have done in IT has been based on Windows and MS products. My family has prospered because of this great man and his vision. So bash away you junior IT wannabe's, I'm going to miss Bill Gates. You will simply find someone else to blame for your lack of skill and influence.

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

100% with you there. Most of the hatred towards MS on slashdot is rooted in jealousy and rejection.

I was denied a job at Microsoft when I first graduated college, and instead of becoming another member of the slashdot horde, I worked on improving my programming skills. Several years later, I am now enjoying an interesting and challenging job programming with Microsoft products.

How many of the haters here work at Google? Apple? IBM? I'd be willing to bet that the actual employees at competing companies choose to spend their time actually doing work to, you know, COMPETE. Hating the competition is the domain of those who can't compete.

Don't like Microsoft's products? Don't use them. Better yet, implement an alternative. Seems to be working for Google, Apple, etc. Why spend your time and energy blaming and vilifying a successful company?

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[LibertineR]

Amen brother...

It would be a fun thread on Slashdot for all of us who made a million on MS products (Exchange Server for me, and about to make another on SharePoint) to list how and where we made our money.

Then we can contrast that with all of the Open Source solutions that are JUST ABOUT to overtake Microsoft (they are dying, ya know?) and how they cant innovate.

One of my great joys here on Slashdot is the yearly thread about the latest thing that is alllllllllmooooosttt ready to wipe out Exchange Server. Its always good for 300-400 posts. Look for it, it will happen, its almost time for it...here it comes!

Run, Bitches!

billg was good for me, and my time at Microsoft and after, doing my own thang, have been possible because, GASP, people use their products! While others innovate their asses off, basking in the glory of all their buddies who also gave up sex for software, others make money, have families, lives, and consume drinks from glasses rather than cans and cups.

Flame away, bitches! I've got karma to burn!

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[BrainInAJar]

Actually Microsoft typically buys technology rather than makes it. And you making money off windows doesn't mean that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, it just means that you found a market for your services.

Without Microsoft, some other comer would have come along ( probably Apple or Amiga ) and the world of tech would probably remain more or less unchanged ( since the innovation comes from Universities, all of whom typically ran some UNIX variant or another )

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how people who waste their whole lives chasing after money think they are so superior for doing so. And now that million dollars is worth about 100 Euros. All that work for what? So you can jack off in a Mercedes? Stare at it in your driveway maybe? Your time would have been a lot more productive if you had spent it pursuing a real dream, a real goal, creating something real, something with substance. Something that means more than just a large number in your bank account that lets you buy a lot of meaningless toys. But of course that takes imagination and intelligence, things that most people who chase after money don't often have in abundance.

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[blahplusplus]

"Bill Gates has contributed more to modern computing than any other ten people together. Most people in IT owe a debt of gratitude because without his contribution most of you wouldn't have jobs"

You over-estimate the impact of bill, someone would have come along. Many technologies are simply wiating in the wings for the right person to come along, as long as new people are born into the world, there will always be more bill gates. The fact is he is not the sole reason for his success, the early adopters and the population count for a lot as well. The culture of the population matters just as much. If we lived in a culture of strong luddites I doubt he would have succeeded.

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's funny how people who waste their whole lives chasing after money think they are so superior for doing so. And now that million dollars is worth about 100 Euros." - Sounds like an under estimate but I will let you know when I get back from Europe...

"So you can jack off in a Mercedes?" - Better than jacking off in a 74 Gremlin.

"But of course that takes imagination and intelligence, things that most people who chase after money don't often have in abundance" - Thank you Mother Teresa, and exactly what do you have to show for all your work? I am putting kids through college, contributing to charities, and making life better for others by providing jobs with good benefits and security. Your writing software in your grandmothers basement that you will never make a dime on. Others will carry your load for you to allow you to spend your life feeling smug and self righteous while being a drag on society.

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

"since the innovation comes from Universities"

That's just silly, most innovation comes from small businesses that come up with new ideas. These businesses are typically led by 30 somethings that have spent a few years at a larger business like MS or Apple. Most Universities are 3-5 years behind the rest of the planet which is why businesses have "entry level" positions. Students need to be taught how the realy world works after their college experience.

Re:The Father of Modern Computing

[Anonymous Coward]

GP here..

I think you meant to reply to the post after mine. My post didn't say a single thing about money.

I agree with you in that simply "making a million bucks" may not be that worthwhile of a life goal. But that doesn't mean money can't help you achieve your real goal, whatever that may be.

His last speech?

[Kingrames]

What, are they gonna kill him or something?

Ballmer: "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!" /chair

Good...

[Foofoobar]

does this mean he's gonna shut up now?

When is the last photo shoot?

[muniak]

I'm still waiting for the day when a sexy, white haired Bill gets up on his desk and poses for the camera again.

Thought it was *MICRO*soft

[maz2331]

Looks like Bill G has run out of vision, and is now moving back to the good old mainframe days.

That's innovation?

Re:Thought it was *MICRO*soft

[Giltron]

Things are moving into the "cloud". The mass market is already shifting in this direction. Microsoft has never been the first to innovate but you can be sure when they commit to something they will go at full force. Microsoft has been very good at one thing : business. They know how to make money well.

Excellent Comrade

[His Shadow]

"It's getting us to think about data centers at a scale that we haven't thought of before... [to create] a mega-data center that Microsoft and only a few others will have."

So we've come this far so that Microsoft can go back to building mainframes, after they made billions on the idea of every person and their dog having reams of processor power and storage space sitting under their desk just so they can get email and spreadsheets from application servers.

How in bloody Hell was this putz ever considered a visionary? Salesman yes. Idea man no. Unless you like bad ideas.

'Millions' of Servers

[miller60]

For those who couldn't sit through the 80-minute video (or don't have Silverlight), Gates said that in the future Microsoft's mega data centers will have many millions of servers". It currently has "hundreds of thousands" of servers, but expects to pack up to 300,000 into its new Chicago container farm. Gates also predicted that only a select number of companies (presumably including Microsoft and Google) will be able to compete on this scale.

Re:'Millions' of Servers

[Zarf]

For those who couldn't sit through the 80-minute video (or don't have Silverlight), Gates said that in the future Microsoft's mega data centers will have many millions of servers". It currently has "hundreds of thousands" of servers, but expects to pack up to 300,000 into its new Chicago container farm. Gates also predicted that only a select number of companies (presumably including Microsoft and Google) will be able to compete on this scale. Which is a "moon shot" style parting gesture. It's aiming squarely at Google and saying "we can not allow a server gap!" In a way this is a back-handed admission that Microsoft has totally missed it in the "data center race" and needs to catch up. It's as if Google (continuing my space race analogy) has done everything but land on the moon and Gates has just challenged his company to do just that.

Once Microsoft hits the million server mark and celebrates the world's largest data center... it will probably implode. Google will probably not be bated into this tactic since they probably don't even know how many operational servers they have right now. And, they probably haven't bothered to figure out how to tell yet either. Microsoft will trumpet the achievement with a week of press releases and conferences, get a stock pop, and about six months later in tiny un-noticed trade rags we'll find out that half the servers in the super-data-center are off-line due to an undisclosed flaw and it was covered up.

So I predict a data center race with Microsoft declaring itself the winner and nobody who knows technology well really caring that much. However, it will play great and get a nice stock pop. It will also stick in Joe Blogs' mind and that will be better PR than you can buy.

Re:'Millions' of Servers

[thewils]

Microsoft already has 'Millions' of Servers. It's called the Storm botnet.

Re:'Millions' of Servers

[Elbowgeek]

Well thanks to the security flaws in their OS's, they need only take control of the millions of bots out there thanks to virus-infected systems. There, millions of servers, all for free ;-)

Typical

[jayhawk88]

The "rock star" developers get Bill's last speech. And what are the tech guys going to get next week during TechEd IT Professionals? Probably another lame Back to the Future skit with Christopher Lloyd cashing a paycheck. Yeah, it's all puppies and roses when you developers are compiling, and it's cute when you do "compatibility testing" with a VM load. But then someone tries to actually run it on a real computer and a real network, and who do you call? That's right, the old neck-beards.

Does Microsoft pay for its own licenses?

[Ageing Metalhead]

One way to pump up the stock, is for it to purchase licenses for its own OSs. Some poor smuck has to go around and then type in all the product keys ;-)

Re:Does Microsoft pay for its own licenses?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Former Microsoftie here. The core development groups don't pay for licenses; we are usually testing on machines that are re-imaged with a more recent build long before the "trial period" expires, and when long term use is needed, we have internal resources to request the necessary product keys; no paperwork, no "sale".

Other groups within Microsoft do pay (e.g. the IT services division), not to inflate the license count, but to make those divisions operate on a level playing field with competing organizations outside of Microsoft.

Re:Does Microsoft pay for its own licenses?

[Ang31us]

There must be installation CDs and DVDs that don't require a CD key, right?

I'm not sure of the "level playing field" for competing organizations as a motivator for Microsoft, given their history (Nestcape browser).

Re:Does Microsoft pay for its own licenses?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

First off, we never use CDs/DVDs to install (except presumably in the installer team which tests them). We use PXE boot (for dev machines), ASI (Automated Software Installer) for test automation, and occasionally run installs direct from network shares.

Second, everything requires a key. PXE and ASI automatically retrieve a key from a central repository. Manual installs from network shares require you to retrieve a key from a key distribution webpage. Of course, for test purposes, we flash the machines rapidly enough that the key is never used for online activation (since we never hit the 30 day limit).

As for the level playing field argument, even if you don't buy that Microsoft is trying to avoid anti-competitive practices (it is, but every once in a while it breaks down, and I was always embarrassed by it), from a legal and corporate organizational perspective there are a number of reasons to keep the divisions separate. The level playing field isn't entirely out of the goodness of their heart, it's also to ward off antitrust litigation, to name one example.

Re:Does Microsoft pay for its own licenses?

[Ang31us]

Thanks for clarifying how MS makes it easier to install software that always requires a key.

On the level playing field issue, we were talking about Microsoft buying licenses for its own software. Isn't that kind of like me taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another? Given that the $$$ goes from Microsoft to Microsoft, I don't see how that levels the playing field for a competitor...if a division needs more $$$, Microsoft could use the same software sales $$$ to fund the work of that group, right?

WE?

[Serpentegena]

data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' Define "we".

Hey! What's one million minus 991730?

[Weaselmancer]

A: Only 8270.

When will /. change the Gates avatar?

[microbee]

Please let it be a flying chair

Re:When will /. change the Gates avatar?

[FoaadH]

let it be Master Chief head instead.

Why Linux is failing on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' and Linux's failure to do so is exactly what Jonathan Birge wrote in his essay on February 26, 2008.

http://scripts.mit.edu/~birge/blog/why-linux-may-fail-on-the-desktop/

Windows 7

[Parker Lewis]

Maybe his speech is related to Windows 7. Microsoft already told about how the user should save his data and recover it in another computer.

Bad summary

[felipekk]

The 20% mentioned is actually for the availability and reliability of the data center.

No.

[inTheLoo]

80% of his time will now be spent trolling Slashdot. Why not? Would you live like he lives if you had billions of dollars? The poor man is on some sick power trip.

Last Speech?

[failedlogic]

I guess this is being announced because after said speech, Gates will lose his voice. ;)

Re:Hey! What's one million minus 991730?

[ASCIIMan]

Kids these days...

And to stay on topic - Microsoft plays catch up in a lot of areas, but from what I hear their research divisions still put out some pretty neat stuff, some of which actually making it into their future products. Unfortunately (for the really neat stuff) most of their products are still encumbered by these giant backwards-compatibility or easy marketability things, or at the very least the illusion of them. These are also coincidently a large part of why so many people and companies still buy and use their products - compatibility with the status quo plus incremental upgrades.

Their developer tools tend to be less encumbered by this don't-disturb-the-status-quo thing, which is why they tend to rock - but these have another downside - then you generally end up tied to Microsoft platforms, which allows them to preserve keep selling their software and your software to continue to run in backwards-compatible mode on everyone's desktop without as much as being recompiled for a decade or so. Funny, huh?

New Logo

[Mr. Underbridge]

So when is Slashdot going to change the Bill Gates/Borg image?

And replace it with what, a winged chair?

That works. I'd totally make that logo myself but the GIMP's sleeping, and I don't want to have to wake him up.

His parting gift...

[Anonymous Coward]

A brand new i-touch and card signed by 79000 people.

Mod Parent!

[mrbluze]

At least people read yours--I'll be lucky to get moderated at all. Oh how I long for even a modest +3. Up or down or out, it doesn't matter, as long as in the end it equals +3. Have a bit of sympathy for our unimaginative anonymous cowards out there!

just a minor correction from the article

[sysgeek01]

Developers, developers, developers, developers," the robot, developed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio product, repeated over and over, in an homage to Ballmer's famous rant. The robot also raised his arm, showing how he has the ability to "Chairs" according to the MIT student controlling his movements.

If Microsoft is getting on board

[HangingChad]

If Microsoft is moving into the hosted application space, that must mean the rest of the technology world is already there and will be ready to move on by the time Microsoft can field any online services...that will still require IE and Office to be installed on the client.

The Zune of hosted applications.

Re:Hey! What's one million minus 991730?

[canuck57]

Unfortunately (for the really neat stuff) most of their products are still encumbered by these giant backwards-compatibility or easy marketability things, or at the very least the illusion of them.

Welcome to the real world. Poorly thought out, unstable APIs and legacy finally caught up to Microsoft, now the 20 layers of API are biting Microsoft in the ass. But now that someone has left, it is now all Bill's fault. Always blame those that have left, the corporate way. Long live corporate America.

URL issue?

[benwaggoner]

Hmm. URL didn't work. Trying again.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/2219208

Which is supposed to come out as: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/2219208

Whats Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Who comes out of this if MSFT does fall whats the next operating system so to speak??

Legacy/Impact

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I see it, he basically feels that he wants to do something else with the rest of his life. The 20% part is probably the loyalty he feels to Steve and others.

If you have been in the tech field long enough you realize that there is always something "newer and better" around the corner and whatever language/environment/OS version you are working in now, people will look back in 10 years and say boy didn't that language/environment/OS version suck, lets rewrite whatever was written in it. Doesn't matter if what you produced is good or not, it will be "outdated" in the minds of many. This isn't a Microsoft software specific observation, think Firefox for example. It is different than it was 5 years ago. It probably will be alot different 10 years from now. Doesn't mean the current version sucks, just means no one will be using version 3.0 in 2018. Sometimes people compare software to construction, but the analogy I think is weak. The Brooklyn Bridge was built in 1885? It will be interesting to see if any software written in 1960 is being run in 2080. Well interesting for my grandkids to find out I guess.

So if you had a choice between working on software and its short half-life or doing the work he is going to do, which could impact millions of lives for the better, and leave a lasting legacy on this planet, which would you choose? I'd take the latter, if I thought I had the managerial talent to do so. Or you could work on Quarterdeck DeskView, Turbo Pascal 3 or Norton Utilities. They don't seem so cool 20 years later do they.

A serious "Goodbye"

[TheDarkener]

I think Bill Gates is a brilliant man. Seriously, Slashbotters, listen:

Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding. I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. I *wish* I had the left hemisphere brain activity he did. But you can only GET that activity if the passion to do it drives you.

For that, I applaud Bill Gates, as he is like many of us - he's passionate about technology.

Business is a completely different arena, and we all know that big business eventually corrupts - that isn't most directly Bill's fault - he's just a bad business man, in that sense.

I use Linux every day. I absolutely HATE Windows (and most other Microsoft) products. I hate them with a passion. I avidly try to get as many people using Linux as I can - my grandma, my wife's friends, you name it. That doesn't mean Bill Gates wasn't revolutionary and awesome because his drive was to create software. If it were all him coding Windows, 100%, you'd have to admit it'd probably be a lot better than it is today. Too many chefs in the kitchen just burns things when the ultimate goal is profit.

I dunno, I just thought I'd throw that into a whole ocean full of flames toward someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st.

Re:A serious "Goodbye"

[Tom]

Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding. And you take that knowledge from what source?

One of Bill's very first public appearance was his "open letter" where he showed a great passion for money and business, and very little for software and coding.

I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. Your probably can, if you are studying computer science. Even back then, it wasn't rocket science. A lot of people wrote similar stuff. But most of them didn't have the connections, rich parents, or greed to turn it into a successful business.

You've got this guy absolutely backwards.

someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st. He's considered them thieves for at least 20 years. I see no indication of him changing his mind. If you have, name your source.

Re:A serious "Goodbye"

[TheBAFH]

I think Bill Gates is a brilliant man. I agree. That's why it is even more sad how he ended up...

Re:A serious "Goodbye"

[Elbowgeek]

You've already probably got your buns roasted over the assertions in your post, but Bill was reputedly a not very good programmer overall. And at the end of the day he really wanted to make money, and he did.

He did it the old fashioned way: He took advantage of opportunity when he saw it. Really, it was IBM's sales force at first who put his products into so many hands, then when clones took over he just rode the wave. He used a number of anticompetitive maneuvers to prevent manufacturers from experimenting with alternatives such as OS/2 and Linux.

Re:Salaries on interest

[wideBlueSkies]

>>Just with the interest they could make without any strategic investing, they could pay each employee at the company $30,000 a year.

Sounds like a pretty good salary for Delhi or Mumbai...

'relationship with developers'

[dgun]

success is 'due to our relationship with developers'.

Sounds lovely. Of course, the 'relationship' could be that they bully, intimidate, and beat them with whips.

Microsoft has a couple products to be proud of:

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Server Edition 2003, and the new Server edition 2008 (though I love how 2003 flys on my Windows partition of my Macbook Pro)

Really, these are by far the most usable operating systems they have churned out. If I was not a complete Mac/Linux user, I could see myself using them daily. As it is now, I keep my Windows partition for some school software and games I cannot get working well under WINE.

But I admit Microsoft has made a decent product with the NT kernel, and it does seem to be getting better. The only thing is they keep piling on the bloat and other crap for us, the consumer... If they would just offer the server edition as an entry level release I could see the vista complaints go down significantly... Maybe make something even less then server edition...

Now while I hate what is happening to the OLPC fiasco, we might see just that... Something with all the power and crap-free (well, crap-light) nature of WSE2K3, but cut down even more to run on basic hardware with a decent clip of speed... With hope Microsoft might decide to release it to the rest of the world and help end the bloat-fest...

TRS-80 Model 100 ROM Code Cleanup?

[Senor Wences]

I understand there are some bugs in the TRS-80 Model 100 ROM Code that Bill put together. Perhaps with time away from Microsoft he might be able to track them down and patch them?

So, why don't they split up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you rather have one 250 Billion dollar company, or several companies worth more?

What is wrong, even from a shareholder's point of view, to split off into MSFT-OS, MSFT-OSX-KILLER, MSFT-CONSUMERHW, MSFT-APPS, MSFT-???.

As totally separate companies, you can have your cake and eat it too, by competing with those-who-are-no-longer yourself.

Let's say on the day of the split, an owner of 1000 shares of MSFT worth $30,000 gets:

200 MSFT-a = $6000
100 MSFT-b = $3000
300 MSFT-c = $9000
200 MSFT-d = $6000
200 MSFT-e = $6000
Also worth $30,000.

Then, a year later:

200 MSFT-a = $2000
100 MSFT-b = $6000
300 MSFT-c = $8000
200 MSFT-d = $7000
200 MSFT-e = $8000
Now worth $31,000 - you win some, you lose some, but a net gain.

enough

[Anonymous Coward]

God damn, enough with the Bill bashing, jealous geeks.

Nuthugging much?

[Anonymous Coward]

>without Microsoft the IT world would be a vastly >different and poorer place.

If Microsoft didnt exist, some other company would have taken its place (and I dont believe that IBM would have been much better, no matter how much we love them now).
They didnt invent any new earth shaking technologies, their OS and word processor werent new paradigms. You could say that they killed a lot of promising technologies.

It would have been a different place but no necessarily poorer.

Re:Nuthugging much?

[ElizabethGreene]

AC gets the point I was trying to make, I think.. My memory gets fuzzy that far back, but wasn't IBM trying to bundle "that other GUI" (OS/2) on IBM only hardware a la apple? Whereas MS was whoring out DOS and Windows to all?

The original Microsoft idea, a single OS running on hardware from a variety of vendors was a _good idea_ that consolidated IT. That was the "Bill Gates" idea. Unfortunately everything turned evil after that..

-ellie

Wonderful but...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't think of it as a vast new web server farm. Think of it as a weapons dump for Chinese crackers to take posession of.

Not For Me...

[maz2331]

Under no circumstances will I ever use hosted apps and data for any business purposes. Our data stays on our systems in our facility - period.

Gate's Last Speech

[Wolfier]

I have this great speech to talk about...

Unfortunately, the margin of this paper only allows 2 minutes of talk time...

end of an era

[recharged95]

Let's face it, B Gates has done more than any politician (according to what news says today about the DNC race) in the last 20 yrs. Good luck Big B.

Now if MS would enhance foldershare to have a Microsoft "apps group", you could get all your software and updates through a P2P subscription model. Cool.

Doubt it will happen though.

You too can program like Bill Gates

[SuperKendall]

Buy yourself a basic interpreter, and then resell it.

He never was as much of a coder as a shrewd businessman.

The last words

[linuxIsLife]

Goodbye billy...

In other news ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news:

"Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for bogus services, and revealed that the company is planning Microsoft Bob centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its Bob-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. [...] On July 1, he will start spending most of his time with Microsoft Bob." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Rover, the rest of it to Clippy.

Cancel or allow?

Re:Salaries on interest

[KDEWolf]

Sounds like a pretty good salary for Delhi or Mumbai... Well, I believe that 30k a year for the sake of doing exactly NOTHING is a pretty good salary anywhere in the world. Way shortsighted.

A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Jane Q. Public]

... because apparently my patience for bullshit is even shorter than yours.

Props to Bill Gates and his company Microsoft, and his business strategies, which served to DRIVE software and hardware innovation for so many years, literally making the computing world what it is today.

Smelly farts (actually, big piles of shit) to Bill Gates and Microsoft, and his business strategies, for what they have done to the computing world and the market(s) AFTER they reached the top -- about the last 10 or 12 years -- and helping far too much to make the computing world what it is today.

I am referring to the underhanded monopolistic practices, the illegal deals, the stifling of innovation in the name of profits, and more... I could go on for a while. Hell, even just within the last year they were caught buying votes on an international standards question, and that is hardly the tip of their list of recent misdeeds.

So, yeah. Bill Gates has done these industries (computing in general: hardware, software, and even theory) some tremendous good. (Not favors... his motives were completely selfish... but good.) And then, when he was in a position to do even more good, to drive the industry farther... he took the selfish route instead and did the opposite.

20 years ago, I would have called Bill Gates a hero. And he deserved the title. Today, I would call Bill Gates a villain, and he has well earned the title. I can't wait to see him leave.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[KGIII]

Don't mistake Bill Gates for Steve Ballmer. Bill remained the vocal/public figure for a long time BUT remember that he was NOT the CEO, business leader, etc... Again, please, don't mistake Bill for Steve nor Microsoft (as it is today). Hate the company and their practices but, as for Bill, I honestly don't see much justification in hating him.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[PietjeJantje]

Props to Bill Gates and his company Microsoft, and his business strategies, which served to DRIVE software and hardware innovation for so many years I'd say it's the opposite. Software and hardware innovation were driven by the market to new heights in the eighties, not seen before and not seen after. Innovation was when a seemingly endless stream of 8-bit and 16-bit computers were on the market, battling it out. Innovation was the ZX Spectrum, the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga.

Wintel was THE DEATH of all that. With Wintel taking over the market in the nineties, competitive innovation was pushed out, and technological innovation has been hold back by the realities of financial and marketing forces ever since. In state of technology cycles, it was no longer important what could be done and how fast, but whether the previous cycle could still be financially leeched or had been excausted to such extend there should be innovation towards a new cycle.

Bill has set us back 15 years.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[gbjbaanb]

Hardly. Wintel was just the dominant brand of processor, we've not exactly been stuck with old single-core 486sx25 chips on ISA-bus mobos with 4Mb RAM now have we.

No, MS software has driven increased hardware power due to its ever-increasing demands. As graphics were given more dominance in the OS, so graphics hardware got better to satisfy demand from consumers. The same applies to buses, RAM, networking, displays and storage all the way to better webcams.

Wintel was probably a good thing for the industry as a whole, without a de-facto standard manufacturers advances would be diluted. With it, companies would know that there was a massive market that they could justify spending more money on.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Without Microsoft Windows would there be Linux? Without Microsoft Office would there be Open Office? I'd say MS has been driving innovation - when the bar is set high the competitors have to aim as high or higher.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[peragrin]

i hate to point this out but linux is almost as old as windows. and definitely older than any form of windows that was semi usable.

Open Office was star office, which was based off an older product, but in the end the spreadsheet was based off of lotus 123 older than both.

MSFT doesn't innovate, they let other people come up with good ideas and then implement it themselves poorly. or as the saying goes MSFT reinventing unix poorly for 25 years. While there are time when MSFT has been ahead in some departments. the infamous database filesystem(now winFS) was started because of the database filesystem BeFS way back in the mid 90's.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[pato101]

as for Bill, I honestly don't see much justification in hating him. Besides the money he has in his account, which I don't. :P

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[mgblst]

He seems to have missed the point of Star Wars. You are supposed to do all the evil shit at the beginning of your career, and repent at the end...only then are you a hero, fit to stand beside yoda and obi-wan.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[ssstraub]

Without Microsoft Windows would there be Linux?

Please tell me you're joking.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Elbowgeek]

In the 1980's we had Unix (I had the pleasure of using an IBM RT PC with AIX [correct me if I'm wrong]), Vaxen on minicomputers, etc. And the Amiga's OS was bounds ahead of most other consumer OS's of it's day.

So DOS was a pretty much a slightly tarted up CP/M with gross memory restrictions which begat the horrible dance of extended and expanded memory kluges. And lets not talk about TSRs.

No, MS and IBM got lucky, partly because of IBM marketing their PC as an intelligent terminal for their big iron systems, which could be used for word processing and the odd spreadsheet without having to bug the high priests in the data processing temple for resources. Having an expandable hardware design helped a lot too.

But neither the IBM hardware nor MS's DOS were in any way innovative or cutting edge; I'd argue that they held back the PC by flooding the market with their shitty MS-DOS product and, when they finally got round to creating a true multi-tasking OS, not adopting UNIX or a derivative as the basis of the new OS.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[tha_mink]

MSFT doesn't innovate, they let other people come up with good ideas and then implement it themselves poorly. or as the saying goes MSFT reinventing unix poorly for 25 years. While there are time when MSFT has been ahead in some departments. the infamous database filesystem(now winFS) was started because of the database filesystem BeFS way back in the mid 90's. You miss the point. If there was no dominant platform, more time would have been spent on developing platforms. I mean look at the linux space right now. 100's of distros with no particular one standing out. (Ok, lately Ubuntu has been rising but whatever) If there was one dominant distro, and everyone who spent time working on various other distros collaborated on *one*, think of where it would be now a days. Think of all the time wasted. (ok, wasted might be a little harsh but I think the point has been made) No?

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[BruceCage]

Ignoring the rest of your post.

but in the end the spreadsheet was based off of lotus 123 older than both. Lotus 1-2-3 was a successor of VisiCalc which itself was originally released in 1979, 4 years before Lotus 1-2-3. But even Dan Bricklin (co-creator of VisiCalc) states "The special thing about VisiCalc was not that it was the first row/column tabulation program. There were many such programs of various sorts prior to VisiCalc." and concluding "It was the combination of many things including its "programming by example" user interface and its influence on others that made VisiCalc special."

See Bricklin's Was VisiCalc the "first" spreadsheet?. Here's an account of somebody old enough to actually have used VisiCalc at the time. And while I'm at it be sure to check out the Computer History Museum's Software Industry Special Interest Group's Overview of the History of the Software Industry.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[meringuoid]

Without Microsoft Windows would there be Linux?

Interesting question, but probably not for the reasons you think.

Linus began his little hobby project in part because all the Unix distributions in 1991 were prohibitively expensive; the nearest thing at the time that an impoverished student could get his hands on was minix, a very minimal cut-down Unix used mostly in comp. sci academia. The GNU project existed to try to implement a free Unix-like OS, but at the time their Hurd kernel was not yet practically usable; the free versions of BSD were still a couple of years off. Linux filled a gap in the market.

Now, if Windows had never existed? Windows wasn't that much use until 3.0, which came out in 1990. It wasn't the monopoly at the time that it is today. We were all using Acorn machines at school here, with RISC OS; I remember being greatly disappointed in the first Windows PCs I met. Apple machines were terrifically impressive at the time, and Amigas were enjoying their heyday too. But before Windows was MS-DOS. If not for MS-DOS, would there be Linux?

Well, once upon a time there was an x86 Unix distribution called Xenix. Microsoft Xenix, from 1979 on. What if a version of Xenix had been the OS of the IBM PC, instead of MS-DOS? Would there have been a Linux, if Linus had had access to a cheap Microsoft Unix on his 386 in 1991?

As it was, Microsoft lost interest in Xenix and sold it off in 1987, to SCO... and we know how that story ends.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I'm not. It's like the old question, could you have God without the Devil? Sure, there's be Linux but without the polarizing effect of Windows would so many people be behind it?

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[sveinungkv]

You make one big assumption here: that the people working on one thing are interested in and capable to work on the competitors thing and that their work will be accepted. Perhaps someone had a great idea, but since MS did not hire him or let him implement it it was lost. Sometimes it is hard to know if something is a good idea before you try it in the marketplace. Competition also force people to innovate faster then when there is none.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

You probably came closest to my intent. I think Linux is popular not only because people want an alternative OS but they also want something not MS. It's like rooting against the Yankees just because they're the Yankees. Linux has qualities to rally around, but there also needs to be a reason to rally around it. I think MS provided that reason.

Re:A serious reply, but even shorter...

[Jane Q. Public]

I don't hate him. And you do make a good point about CEO. Nevertheless, I do believe old Bill was an instrumental force behind the whole "corporate lock-in" strategy (known, in part, in Microsoft circles as "embrace and extend"), as opposed to other software companies that at the time were being "good corporate citizens".

My first exposure to Microsoft "embrace & extend" was about 16 years ago. The company was using Harvard Graphics (as I remember) for making slides for presentations. It was cool because we could take graphics from other programs (like Corel Draw), and import them into Harvard, and vice versa. Then, one of the execs came in one day and said, "Here! Try this new Power Point software. It's cool!"

And it was cool, to some degree. But it wouldn't do everything that Harvard and Corel could do. The problem? PowerPoint would read those other graphics formats, but it SAVED only in ".ppt" files!

Suck it in, but don't let anything out. That's what Microsoft has been, in a nutshell.

copycats

[Tom]

is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' Aka "on a scale our competitors have been successful with for a while now, so we decided we should start to copy them now".

Would you please clarify?

[Gazzonyx]

Forgive me my ignorance (I'm a developer which necessarily equates to a crappy admin), but when you say that it takes a long time to get everything back up and running, you mean that you have to stagger the cold boots, right? I just lost a power supply on my SATA RAID box last week. OK, so I admin by proxy when I need a box for my source code... I had bought what I thought was a reasonably sized power supply, with what I knew about power supplies from a few years ago when I did LAN party thing in high school, and went about 20% above what I thought the box would need.

It only lasted a year, give or take a month. The RAIDbox has four SATA drives and two IDEs. I found out that, apparently, spinning up a bunch of disks from a cold boot requires a huge surge of current.

I can only imagine what a 48U rack of servers packing two 15,000 RPM SCSI (or one of those Sun RAID boxes... ok, I also have a thing for esoteric hardware and expensive toys) must do to a power distribution system when an entire rack goes online at the same time. And then the AC kicks it in to high gear (I'd assume... I've got two desktops, my RAID box and two servers in my apartment... my heat was broken this winter and I didn't notice.) about ten minutes later.

Or am I completely off base and that's not why it takes so long to reboot a data center?

Re:Would you please clarify?

[Anonymous Coward]

Staggered spin-up is pretty much standard on servers with SCSI/SAS drive arrays. Likewise, staggered rack/cabinet power-on is a necessarily common feature of larger installations.

The difficulty you run into when trying to restart a datacenter in the 5+ MW range is that at that scale you are pulling a significant percentage of the power on your local grid. Rapid (for surprisingly slow values of 'rapid') startup will overwhelm the power company's ability to balance the load, tripping safeties and forcing you to start all over again--hopefully without also causing a surge or cascade of failures that leaves your neighbors very, very unhappy.

Re:Would you please clarify?

[aaarrrgggh]

Mainly logistics and dependencies cause the delay. Hardware, software, and database failures must often be found before moving up the chain and starting the next system. Some functionality is usually capable of being restored within a couple hours.

Some of these things have been improved through automation, but the best-case example I have seen is reducing the time by 30-50%. We seem to have given up a lot of ground when you add back in virtualization.

But at the same time, there are fewer people tending to the equipment so you often have limited resources to recover when there are problems.

We usually don't worry too much about all the load coming back on at once from a power perspective, but standard operating procedure for many facilities is to do non-automatic restart for the power distribution units, so power must be manually restored in smaller blocks. It doesn't hurt to stagger things, and some of my clients prefer to switch each breaker back on one at a time with a little time delay.

Hrm...

[Gazzonyx]

Under no circumstances will I ever use hosted apps and data for any business purposes. Our data stays on our systems in our facility - period. Your backups, too?

Bill Gates' last words....

[jkrise]

I hereby hand over my chair to Mr. Ballmer.

Re:Bill Gates' last words....

[bibendum59]

"Rosebud..."

Why some people do lease it

[Moraelin]

Personally I'm under the impression that for a lot of companies, there is one damn good reason to lease their computing power: they lost control of their own IT department.

Let's face it, monopolies tend to not be great for their customers. (Their monopoly is one reason we're pissed off at MS.) And in a lot of corporations, their own IT department is, essentially, granted a monopoly for life on all things IT. You have to get your service from them, largely on their terms, and at their prices, or not use a computer at all.

Think about it. Some corporations have a bigger income than some countries' GDP. Granting someone a monopoly on IT isn't much different from granting someone a monopoly on a small country's IT.

The result is often:

- prices run out of control. It's not entirely unusual to have such prices per MB, for example, that it would be cheaper to burn a file on a CD and send it by taxi to the office in the next city, than use "their" network and servers.

- toxic personality types making it their duty to avoid doing any work. Or worse yet, to stroke their ego by being the ones who can prevent _you_ from doing any work. Just to show everyone else who's boss.

- bad service, including having to go through a baroque bureaucracy to get any service at all.

- incompetence, nepotism, corruption, etc.

- security theatre. Stuff that's largely insecure, but make you go through loops just to _seem_ secure.

Etc.

Sure, it's an upper management failure, but it happens. In a lot of places.

So when I see some companies where they have to deal with an incompetent, hostile _and_ overpriced bureaucracy just to get one mis-configured server, while they could get the same server and bandwidth and better service for 1% of the cost from a nearby ISP... I just have to wonder why don't they.

And again, the only difference I can see is that the ISP doesn't have a perpetual monopoly granted. They actually have to work to keep you as a customer, and can even be sued if they leave your data wide open to the world while just pretending to do something about it.

Well, nor does it have its hands tied by the whims and bad strategic decisions of upper management, but then that's also an argument to just go that route.

Actually not. Admins are expensive.

[Colin Smith]

It's fairly simple to scale Linux to 200,000 machines. It can boot and run from the network. No local storage and crucially NO LOCAL STATE required. You can boot a ramdisk over the LAN and run from that if you want. What this means is you only need a few people to run thousands of machines. It's a log increase. That is, Linux isn't your big problem when running 200,000 machines. Your big problem is space, racking, networking, AC, power etc.

On the other hand, Windows pretty much has to be installed onto a hard disk. This means there are thousands of configuration settings, hundreds of libraries of specific versions which all have to be kept synchronized on tens or hundreds of thousands of hard disks. This is a fucking nightmare once you get past a few dozens of machines never mind 200,000. There is at least a linear increase in admin effort with increasing numbers of machines, and with that increase goes cost. Active Directory and Ghost are pretty much de rigueur but don't really fix the problem. Notice that Ghost isn't even an MS product, but a bandaid to fix something the OS can't do (Yes, I'm aware of the MS deployment add ons).

The problem is location of state; on 200,000 hard disks or 1 boot server. Simple maths. Basically, Windows will have to be redesigned so that it can boot and run over the LAN or from a ramdisk or whatever. That's the point when it really becomes "Enterprise ready" rather than being a pretender.

Re:Actually not. Admins are expensive.

[daveime]

on 200,000 hard disks or 1 boot server Yes, ideal situation ... single point of failure that can disable 200,000 servers instantaneously. Viva OSS :-(

Re:Actually not. Admins are expensive.

[Colin Smith]

rsync, keepalived...

HTH.

Re:I am not a MS Fanboy

[Tomas_Bakke]

if new MS products differ too radically from their old ones, or are completely incompatible etc, then suddenly the barrier between them and Linux/Apple etc is lowered dramatically. Am I the only one seeing the connection between Windows Vista and the increased sales of Apple products ?

I think Vista did differ too radically and the barrier has in fact been lowered.
Not as dramatically as you picture, but enough to shift some marketshare balance.

William of Gates reads /. too ...

[JCWDenton]

Recently on /. : Google spotlights data center inner workings ( http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955184-7.html ) and now this from MS: "the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before'".

Surprising? I think not.

Wordperfect for windows

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of documentation (with the legal spat from Novell) about why WP for windows was shit.

MS gave API documentation to WP for their windows client. This API wasn't used by MS Word for windows (at the time MS fanbois said there were no secret API's, but these people didn't appear when MS opened up a lot of secret API documentation. go figure) and the API's given to WP were discontinued when the product moved to RC, requiring WP rewrite WPfW when it was released (because MS didn't tell WP the API they used was broken).

Re:Wordperfect for windows

[drsmithy]

MS gave API documentation to WP for their windows client. This API wasn't used by MS Word for windows (at the time MS fanbois said there were no secret API's, but these people didn't appear when MS opened up a lot of secret API documentation. go figure) and the API's given to WP were discontinued when the product moved to RC, requiring WP rewrite WPfW when it was released (because MS didn't tell WP the API they used was broken).

Wordperfect for Windows was utter crap from its very first version in 1992, to the first not-quite-so-crap version in 1997. Are you implying that, for five years, the only company who had sufficient API documentation for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 to write functional applications was Microsoft ? Because a lot of other third party applications released in that time period would suggest otherwise.

Wordperfect on Windows failed for much the same reason Lotus 1-2-3 on Windows did. They were implemented as DOS programs with a shoddy GUI grafted on top, rather than proper Windows programs in line with Windows UI standards, etc.

in case you missed the speech

[TTL0]

basicaly he said "so long and thanks for all the fish"

Gone to marketing

[nexttech]

It's sad to see a technical company handed to a used car salesman (Ballmer). Soon M$ will implode from the overwelming ratio of sales people to developers.

Re:Gone to marketing

[Locutus]

where have you been for the last 15+ years? do you really think developers made Vista what it is today? They have been predominantly a marketing company for a very long time.

LoB

One giant leap behind

[John Sokol]

They are just getting ready to move forward with this 1990's style massive centralize server model of services that Google and Yahoo now dominate.

But there is a small problem with this. It's already obsolete. Yes, Distributed "GRID" , P2P style will ultimately be the next generation and it's the place where Microsoft could easily upend Google at this point.

M$ will never catch up with Google by following them in the older game, Google is really driving a lot of new research in Parallel processing and threads in C++, Linux, computing platforms and in the community as a whole and so it not just competing against Google but the whole FOSS community at once.

They need to create something that will add value to the whole computer community and not just come in and try to take over and mess up something that is already working well.

I want a P2P OS where ever PC in my office and house add to each others ability seamlessly. forget backups, and having to manage files, everything should be a cache unless I am creating it. I am sure they would already love that. But a system that is a hybrid part way between google apps / VNC / X windows / Java and Current OS's.
My desktop session should be remembered between logins like VNC, but tied to a specific computer's running environment, Google Apps does this a little.
A PC should boot off a P2P system, based on a Micro Kernel. It's OS components should come in over P2P as needed and most of the Hardware will act as a Cache and part of the P2P network and computing node and 1/2 community property and 1/2 graphics terminal for it's user. In return us a user are given access to 1/2 of millions of other computers out there as a resource too.
At your disposal are CPU/Storage/Data.

Re:One giant leap behind

[GLOCK8]

Oh yeah, a wide network of linked P2P servers. Simple for every user, just pop on and your desktop is anywhere or everywhere and all you have to do is pay someone else a monthly fee (that they will dictate) and they will take care of you (like our government?) and no one will ever try to break it (like our enemies) or hack your grandma's files (like some young punk with too much time on his hands) and the world will be all spiffy and clean and well ordered. Of course all participants will be well behaved and we'll all be happy and the yoke of M$ will be lifted and the angels will sings.... Your notion is analogous to public mass-transit and will work in about the same manner.

Re:One giant leap behind

[John Sokol]

See, sounds great.

  On the surface the Google apps sound just as bad too. But when you get past your biases from really crappy p2p and bad software you will see that eventually the line between your PC and the network and other PC's will begin to blur.

Why not use some CPU cycle from some of the other unused PC in your home when needed, or even in your neighborhood?

  How about disk space? I have some codes and algorithms that can do this now, that will allow data to be spread out in such a way that it be more secure protecting it from theft, corruption and damage.

And with other things like data bases and large files like movies or other large data sets, it's a complete waste to for everyone to keep having their own private copies they almost never access.
It's in this last category there P2P has really shined, but P2P is too manual and painful. It's unreliable hit or miss right now, but it's doesn't have to be that way, it can be 100% rock solid, and transparant, and made to be as reliable as having the file on your drive RIGHT NOW!.

Think about it. Why do you want a file on your drive RIGHT NOW. Because you don't trust the system. You don't trust Bit Torrent or the web site that with that file that it will be there when you plan to use that file, let say watch the movie, in 6 month or play that mp3 for a friend some time in the future. This is why I want it have it on my disk NOW. Why I burn it to DVD. So I know I have it and it's not going to vanish and become ephemeral as so much of the Internet already is.

mod +1 clever troll? or -1 misinformative?

[reiisi]

The stock buyback was to make them less vulnerable to the stockholders. That has been mentioned by others.

Nations produce value.

Any time a company stops producing value (or at least producing the illusion of value), the rules change.

Remember, they have been one of the sources of income for the money market accounts that you suggest putting their assets in. If they quit making (the illusion of) money, that's one major input to the money market accounts that quits performing.

Now, go to your bank and ask why they wouldn't allow you to invest more than a few million in a money market account with them.

If you get your mind wrapped around the realities of that much, just to really take the wind out of your imaginative sails, go find out how much a salary of 30,000 a year costs a company in support and infrastructure.

Then go back and do the math.

There is no magic in having lots of money.

Microsoft has to start performing for real, or they will end up on the block for real. And with no buyers, because it becomes more and more clear that they have never had or sold anything of value. Illusions, all.

Illusions can only make so much money before they start disintegrating under their own weight, and Microsoft has hit that limit.

Microsoft is trying to googleize their company

[Danathar]

I find it hilarious that their answer to competing with Google is to out "google" Google by doing the BIG infrastructure cloud thing.

I hate to break it to MS, but Google is SO far ahead of them at this point that by the time they get anything in place that's even HALF the size of what Google has already deployed it will be far too late.

20% Time

[ROBOKATZ]

"20%" of someone like Bill Gates' time is probably equivalent to a European's full time job.

Alpha

[goldaryn]

After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft. I dedicate my 20% time to drinking fifths.

Ballmer-bot

[MrKaos]

and the "Ballmer-bot," a robot made to imitate and act like Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and Gates' long-time business partner, who is attending Chair throwers anonymous.

"Give.me.yor.chair.bill,,GIVE.ME.YOR.CHAIR" said the robot, developed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio product, repeated over and over, as it headed towards Mr Gates. The robot also raised his arm, and attempted to inject Mr Gates rescuers with nano-probes showing how he has the ability to "throw tantrums" like a true monkey boy according to the MIT student attempting to control his movements.

"I guess we still have some bugs to work out," Mr Gates said, smiling. "That must be why we're not shipping Balmer-bots yet."

of course its something MS never thought of before

[peter303]

They generally copy other people's ideas - BASIC, DOS, MacWindows, google-size data-centers, Apple multi-touch ... The list is as long as MS products.

How is that different?

[GameboyRMH]

when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..." How is that different to today?

"Oh no we have to write new drivers for this hardware!"

"Oh no they're going to introduce another proprietary file format!"

Slashdot Microsoft Borg Icon?

[skrowl]

Does this mean that slashdot will be getting rid of their petty and immature Microsoft Bill Gates as the Borg icon?

Yawn

[Locutus]

has anything he's said in the last 10+ years mattered? And it is not likely he's going to shut up and somehow become skilled at really figuring out what the next big thing is.

And if anything, the news that he's going to be spending more time making sure anyone who accepts the Bill And Melinda Gates money is locked into Microsoft Windows is the only thing he does which has my attention since it is blocking customer choice. Oh, and his "humanitarian" efforts in places like Egypt will probably lock them into becoming addicted to Windows for a very very long time.

Mark my word, Bill "the snake" Gates will still be doing Microsoft's bidding for a long time to come. He's not going to be quiet about it and it does not matter if he's wearing a Microsoft badge or not. IMO.

LoB

WhoTF modded this informative?!

[Anonymous Coward]

And WTF are you smoking?

WordPerfect was the de facto standard in college at the time you mention. Netscape was always superior to IE. Always. IE and Word were (and still are) a POS. I'll give credit to MS on Excel though, as that is the one part of Office they did get right.

It started long before Windows 95

[Phil Hands]

As you can see from emails released into evidence they set out to kill DR-DOS in 1991, by detecting it and then faking errors in Windows if it noticed DR-DOS beneath it.

Sounds pretty evil to me.

You keep on using that word.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Let me spell it out for you. Decline != Income steadily increasing. (How can you not understand this?)

Check out this chart of IBM's net income

It's gone up consistently since 80s with the exception of the early 90s disaster years.

Honestly. *shakes head*. The stupidity of kids today never ceases to amaze me.