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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".
I don't understand all the hate for Bill. Unless if this e-mail was nothing more than a publicity stunt to make him look less evil, it shows that he wasn't happy with the way things were going. He clearly saw the direction the ship was going and he couldn't turn it in time.
Despite what you say about Microsoft now, Ballmer will always be funny to read about and watch on youtube.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
"'This is a shocking e-mail. Shocking!' And I said, 'What do you think I do all day? Sending an e-mail like that, that is my job. That's what it's all about. We're here to make things better.""
Apparently he either really sucked at his job, or it was the job of the people who worked for him to completely ignore what he said.
FTA: "In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations."
Finally, someone at Microsoft admits that you have to use magic to make Windows work right... I would comment more, but I am on my way to my daily Ballmer goat and bull sacrifice.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"Hey Bill, can you help me program my Zune? Ha ha ha, I'm kiiding, I have an iPod like the rest of the planet."
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Maybe had Bill been more hands-on in a Steve Jobs sort of way, the focus might have been more on usability and less on feature-lists. Bill gets what he gets. It's his fault that usability sucks, because he didn't cut into the bottom-line to make it better. It's also Bill's "fault" that Windows enjoyed a 95% market share for a decade.
I know it's a dupe, but I still love to see Gates say: "But that is just the start of the crap..."
It says it all right there. At least Microsoft knows about the problems with Windows. It is said that realizing there is an issue is the first step to resolving it :)
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
Oh, great. So you're reproducing.
Thanks.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
It's funny that he praises the add/remove programs control panel. Try opening it up when you have a file system mounted that contains a whole lot of files. Apparently this control panel, even though it has a cache of installed programs in some subdirectory, plus roughly the same info in a registry subtree, this sterling piece of software goes off and looks at every file on every device. That's the only explanation I can think of why the disks whir for like two hours before this control panel lists anything.
And even then all that work was for naught, because the items listed have not been even slightly vetted for correctness. You click on some of them and get an immediate "no uninstaller found" or even more cryptic messages, and no way to remove these useless entries. This control panel is a classic fail, with it doing slow and useless work several times over and still missing the whole point of what it should be doing.
Bill, you got real problems when you think this really crapalicious control panel is a shining star.
You know, composed of a lot of straight lines and sharp angles, both eyes on the same side of his head, lots of colors everywhere, that sort of thing.
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? ;)
You have to understand that the original poster was coming from the "my dream is that Linux becomes the only OS used in the world" perspective.
The idea that different software suits different people is lost on those with this mentality.
Amnesty International