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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?"
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
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.
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.
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