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Gates' Last Day At Microsoft
mrogers writes "Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft. After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
Your Linux box's GUI might look different but I doubt much else would change: Linux was inspired by Minix, GNU, and UNIX, not anything from Microsoft.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
MS products provided the competition that Linux needed to advance.
"What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Programming-Dummies-Wally-Wang/dp/0764508350
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Linux also benefited greatly from the fact that MS became de facto on the cloned PC market. All the other major vendors an the time had an apple like hardware and OS that were sold together. As IBM never got an exclusivity deal on MS-DOS, clones could run it, and thanks to this 'standardisation' the price dropped on the hardware thanks to the benefits of competition on the same hardware. Without that low cost of hardware Linux would not have taken off, and its extremely unlikely that as many people would have computers, internet access and slashdot accounts with which to slag off Microsoft.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Yah, right.
...). At least initially.
In the form of backlash, maybe. If you do something poorly in this industry and try to rape your customers for the privilege, there are a thousand nerds out there that will find a way to do it better for less (or free).
The real contribution is in that constant teasing of "You can do this" (as soon as our product stops sucking
Eventually, when there was enough of a "footprint" of computers in common culture, it was guaranteed to get out of MS control.
The thing about Gates is he's more a business nerd than a software nerd - at least that's what he's better at. Sure, he probably got his fingers into the OS after he bought the original version of DOS, but trying to put computers on every business desk, and eventually every home rather than just focusing on the back rooms of banks and big businesses is what got everyday folks looking for the potential in these things.
The truth of the matter is that none of us real software nerds (flattering myself again) would ever have thought of writing a program that lets you track your finances, write documents and typeset them, create elaborate presentations, etc.. Sure, we'd have come up with some neat games, but without computers in every home, there would be a lot less creative pressure on that industry, and it wouldn't be quite so big as it currently is.
We'd probably just be breaking out of our fringe culture status, and a good number of us would have chosen far different paths for our professions.
Or am I giving him too much credit? Probably - Gods, I sound like a Gates fanboy - (as I write this on my Mac, developing on Linux. Gah!). He was really only out to make a buck and take over the world after all.
Irving Gould is as responsible for the death of the Amiga as Bill Gates, maybe more so. As much as I adore my C=64, 128, Amiga 1000 and 2000 w/Toaster, Commodore never had the slightest clue as to how to market the Amiga.
In 20/20 hindsight, it was the first true multimedia machine, and could playback video at decent framerates (the DCTV add-on was truely amazing for its time), however Commodore tried to market it as a business machine. As if they had a chance of competing with IBM for that marketshare.
Only too little, too late did they make an inspired version, the CDTV (and later the CD32), which made the Amiga a component of a home entertainment system, (which only now are Microsoft and Apple trying to do), but, typical Commodore, they cheap'ed it to death, and then never threw any money at actually marketing it. As such, almost no one has ever heard of the thing.
Newtek sold more Amigas than Commodore did, by rebranding it as a 'Video Toaster System', and many of those toasters are still in use today (although to be fair, many are also being offloaded on eBay).
But to say that Bill Gates killed the Amiga is to distort history as badly as most people do when they think that Bill invented the computer. Or think that Windows is the only 'PC' there is.
(God, to think that I'm actually defending Bill Gates, a person I'd like to have shot out of a canon more than any other individual in history....) Look what you've done to me, damn you!!!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I would LOVE to see Ballmer on the way out instead of Bill. Most of what people really dislike about Microsoft is Ballmer's doing, Gates just didn't have the spine to stand up to him and reel him in.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Without MS DOS and later Windows, the computer world of today would look very, very different. I seriously doubt we'd have advanced anywhere close to where we are today without Microsoft. Though we might have gone even further, who knows.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an MS fan boy. But I have serious doubts that Linux would have ever been if Microsoft wasn't around. Would Linus have had the same exposure to computers? He might not have ever gotten that IBM PC, MINIX might have never been developed, hell the IBM PC might not have ever taken off.
Without Microsoft we might just be seeing the start of the personal computer right now, or Apple with the MAC might have taken over. Without Microsoft, it would be a completely different landscape and nobody can know what it would have turned out like.
I'd get him a 20" Intel-based Apple iMac computer installed with the last version of Office (not the newest one, but one before). That way, Bill could at least see that a decent-spec'd, moderately priced yet still well-designed computer CAN actually be a pleasant experience for the overwhelming majority of normal computer users. Maybe then Bill can realize that sometimes less is more and that a long laundry list of half-assed features is no good compared to a shorter list of features that work well.
Do you know how to read an income statement? I suggest you check out http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY08/earn_rel_q3_08.mspx#income. If by "run Microsoft into the ground" you mean grow revenue $7 billion from March 07 to March 08 and grow net income by $2.3 billion then I guess you must have very high standards. Or maybe you can't do math.
PS. Yes, I know there is more to running a company than revenue and income but that's certainly a good start.
And how did he do that?
Was it by making better products?
Was it by gaining market share?
Or was it by making Vista cost shitloads more money than XP?
retiring the stupid BillG as The Borg icon! ST:TNG has been in reruns since 1994, there isn't a Star Trek show in production, he hasn't been involved in the daily running of MSFT for years, and as of today he isn't even an employee.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the /. community consider updating their perceptions of the company for the last 10 years; to acknowledge that anyone who has gone to work for the company since 2000 has had any influence on the company's approach to business, markets, customers, or technology; or to suggest that the investment in software engineering practices, security tools and training, developer outreach, or a monstrous R&D spend could have any value what-so-ever to the PC industry, the software industry, or have improved any MSFT product. It does seem, however, like today would be a good day to update the thumbnail to something that at least reflects the cultural constructs of the 21st century.
The CBC has an article titled Bill Gates in Canada: a checkered legacy.
There are some choice quotes on anti-trust, Michael Cowpland (Corel founder and the WordPerfect debacle), recruiting from University of Waterloo, establishing a Richmond, B.C. campus, ...etc.
Worth a read.
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Actually, at that time, many people were doing things like this. I am not sure whether writing BASIC in the first place can be considered "uber-code". How does this compare to, e.g., the work of Chuck Moore of the Forth fame? Now that is a man who would deserve some credit for pushing the state of the art. Take a look at what he did at NRAO with just one PDP-11 - I believe the DEC people themselves would not push such a system *that* far.
Or what about microFORTH? A FORTH system written in FORTH (not in assembly language), capable of "metacompiling" itself (in the FORTH parlance) for several CPU architectures - CDP-1802, 8080, 6800, Z80 - with interactivity, multiprogramming, and you could even have a simple form of virtual memory when you felt that it was necessary. And with just a 1K basic nucleus. How exactly does that compare to a primitive dialect of BASIC?
Ezekiel 23:20
Really? I've heard many anecdotes about Bill Gates, but none about him kowtowing to anyone. In the Time magazine cover story on him some years ago, his father talks about Bill, known as "Trey" in his family, butting heads with his late mother (by all accounts an extremely strong-willed woman) when he was a young teenager, and refusing to give a millimeter. There are also many anecdotes about his own pig-headedness, and numerous variations of something he usually told people with whom found himself working: "I think you'll find we'll get along better once you realize that I'm in charge", or words to that effect. He was notorious for bullying subordinates in meetings, launching long tirades at them at perceived faults, but especially if he thought that they were bullshitting him. Microsoft insiders talk about the culture of paranoia he cultivated inside the company, forcing project managers to compete for his attention in an almost Darwinian struggle, and *EVERYTHING* that Microsoft did as a company, including their most egregious anticompetitive behavior, was either his initiative, or had his explicit approval. Ballmer was only his hatchet man, the loud-mouth bully stalking the corridors, threatening at the top of his lungs to fire everyone if a project didn't ship on time.
Gates may look like the stereotypical nerd, but his is very much a Type A personality, quite similar to Ballmer. Don't believe for a moment that Gates was some kind of dewy-eyed innocent who didn't know what was going on inside Microsoft, or that big, bad Ballmer could tell him what to do, much less bully him. From what I understand, friction between them only arose because Gates insisted on trying to dictate to Ballmer even after he was named CEO, and Ballmer naturally felt that since it was his call, he'd do things his way. Believe me, I don't think there's the person born yet who could bully him. Well, maybe Melinda, but that's the prerogative of wives everywhere.
Oh yeah, agreed. Developers are really really important.
But Ballmer seems focused on forgetting about end-consumers. He seems to be more focused on how to push the OS on the consumer than making a quality product the public want to buy.
~Jarik
Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA. Notice the Mac in the background, just above his shoulder.
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Disclaimer: I'm not against MS products, I use both Windows and Linux for different purposes, and I've used enough other OSes before to not give much of a damn about any particular one. By Slashdot standards, I tend to actually count as pro-MS, mostly by virtue of where the reference point is.
That said:
You're saying, basically, that by making people pay for hardware and upgrades they didn't actually need, it's stimulated and created a bigger mass market for the hardware industry. That's on par with saying that if you break enough windows, the glass industry will benefit greatly, and it might even bring down the price of glass.
What makes it a fallacy is ignoring the cost of all that, and pretending that only the good effects exist. It didn't just wave a magic wand and created money for an industry. It made a bunch of people pay for something they didn't need.
More importantly: money which otherwise would have been used for something else. We don't know what exactly, but it wouldn't be money stuffed under the mattress. (There's a federal reserve, or similar in other countries, which sees to it that money circulates at roughly the desired speed.) Maybe they would have been used to buy something else, and stimulated another industry. Maybe they would have been put in pension funds which in turn get invested in whatever companies are growing fast, essentially giving them more money to grow.
Broken windows or Windows don't _create_ money or markets. They just force a transfer from one to another. Every cent earned by the glaziers for repairing a broken window, isn't a cent magicked out of thin air, but a cent that someone else didn't earn as a result. Every cent earned by MS or the hardware industry because of broken Windows, is a cent some other industry won't see.
So you can't just say that it was good for hardware prices, as if the alternative would have been nothing at all. If we didn't spend our collective money on subsidizing hardware research and bringing hardware prices down, we _would_ have something else instead. Maybe better cars, or maybe HDTV sets would have dropped in price instead, or maybe we'd just have more pizza shops. It's impossible to roll back history and peek down the other trouser leg, so we'll never know exactly what we're missing, or if it's better or worse than cheap hardware. But we would have used those money on _something_ anyway, and _some_ industries would have benefited from it instead.
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