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A Real Bill Gates Rant
lou ibmix XI submitted an
email written by Bill Gates a few years ago and turned over to the feds as part of the government's antitrust case. Great quotes like 'Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?' and 'The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.' We like to think of him as an abstract, but I think this is interesting stuff. Also, this might seem familiar. Oops.
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/26/026237.shtml
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
In some of those published emails, you can see Bill Gates:
-Asking to add Windows-specific quirks to the ACPI "standard", just to make Linux more dificult. "It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work [...] Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this
-Asking their teams to add IE-specific crap in the HTML code generated by Office, just to make harder for other browsers to display things: One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered well by others people browser is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPIETARY IE capabilities" (emphasis by gates, not mine)
-Lobbying Intel to get them to do all their design work in Windows desktops, not in Linux.
-A lot of other "fun" stuff.
And you wonder why people hates Gates? ;)