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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.
You are a true American Hero
From now on, Microsoft's success will be due to their relationship with developers, developers, developers, developers.
Five eights availability!
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?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Version 2)Let's pump up MSFT. I'm selling some.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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...
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.
I hope the 80/20 principle doesn't apply here.
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".
"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.
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.
5468652047616D65
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.
NO SIG
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.
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.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
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?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> Five eights availability!
It's not so impressive when you realize that they actually mean 8.8888%
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
Looks like Bill G has run out of vision, and is now moving back to the good old mainframe days.
That's innovation?
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.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
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 ;-)
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
Please let it be a flying chair
If spell checking were a requirement, 98% of the Internet would be shut donw.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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/
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
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).
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 ?
I guess this is being announced because after said speech, Gates will lose his voice. ;)
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?
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
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.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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.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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Sounds lovely. Of course, the 'relationship' could be that they bully, intimidate, and beat them with whips.
FAQs are evil.
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.
Buy yourself a basic interpreter, and then resell it.
He never was as much of a coder as a shrewd businessman.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... 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.
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?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
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.
Deleted
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.
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.
"No power in the 'verse can stop me"