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Microsoft's Lost Decade
theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you) explains why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, arguing that what most hurt Microsoft was BillG's decision to step down as CEO in January 2000: 'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.' And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots. So while Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
He developed an early version of BASIC.
Developers, Developers, Developers.
Even if that was true, he understood what other geeks needed. Plain business men probably aren't going to understand that.
And if you're ever read some book by Bill Gates, you'd notice he does have quite (interesting, I might add) ideas. Not just with OS and such, but with technology general and how to combine it with everyday life.
It must really suck to be a billionaire and yet realize if you had been smart you coulda been a trillionaire.
He may have not put a whole lot of development into windows in the later years, but he at least had more focus on the tech side than Ballmer plus, he did program alot in his early years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_. Did you know that? No, of course you didn't. If you were literate you'd be able to do a simple search and find out just how wrong you were.
Try doing a bit of reading, it might help. Or hey, go ahead and keep spewing out ignorance for all I care, it -is- Slashdot after all. You'll probably get more mod points for being completely wrong, as long as you're insulting good old M$.
Always blaming or crediting the CEO and never the techs, like Martha Stewart's husband.
Sure he is. He's even got a paper published on bounds on the Pancake sorting problem.
eclecti.cc
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
Like, uh, the rise of the internet, which Windows 95 was built for?
Oh, wait...
The people who own and run Microsoft know that they won't benefit from radical development in the product line. Not in their lifetimes anyway. So the engineering side goes business as usual. Marketing gets a boost. And profits go in the bank.
Its the same where I work. And its time to go.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Also like how Wikipedia article tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
Nice piece, but he probably got the idea from James Kwak via Gruber.
"Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results. Even when you don’t have the generational issue that Trillin talks about, the problem is that the sociology of corporations leads to a certain kind of CEO, and as corporations become increasingly dependent on complex technology or complex business processes (for example, the kind of data-driven marketing that consumer packaged companies do), you end up with CEOs who don’t understand the key aspects of the companies they are managing."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with .Net?
How much better would cellphones be if Microsoft had not bought, and slowly strangled, Danger?
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?
If Microsoft the company has lost a decade, it is Karma - for the world and our industry has lost so much more at their hands.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I certainly find the viewpoint of the article very appealing - essentially that just being a manager isn't enough to enable you to manage anything you want. That you need to understand what your company does at a highly intimate level to really run it well. Who wants to be pushed around by people whose only qualification is to manage others? What about the real folks at the coalface who know what the business is really like?
Question is - is it true? Certainly appeals to me. But has anyone done a study into this? It'd be interesting to see. Although really, the backgrounds of the CEOs and the records of their companies are out there for all to see. MS under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs - these certainly look like convincing individual cases. What would happen if you analysed the whole computing industry? What about other industries?
I would suggest that to a certain extent a really good manager could manage anything they choose - because a truly good manager will make sure he understands what he's getting into. But even then, everyone has different aptitudes for different things, so there's no way to guarantee that they'd be as skilled in any given job. You can probably adapt to that, as long as you're aware of it and don't assume that your previous experience will carry you. For CEOs, there's perhaps a requirement to be a good general businessman - maybe those skills do transfer well. But I think understanding the business ought to be pretty darn important if you want to run the company *well* as opposed to just keeping it ticking over. I don't think there should be any excuse for appointing a CEO who doesn't, can't or won't understand the business adequately. But hey, I'm not on any company boards nor am I a shareholder in anything *shrug*
Gates was a pretty good hacker back in the day. Even though I'm sure he hasn't flexed those particular geek muscles in a long time I don't much doubt that he knows technology about as well as anybody in the business.
What worries me is the direction he has always pushed software in. If those old ALTAIRs had the guts to do DRM you can bet his BASIC would have been locked down tighter than the iPhone.
MS's entire business model was doomed for anything beyond the first dip in the pool...BG or not. Let's not paint that horse anything but the original color....
Maybe if they rebrand the company and call it "Freedom Hero Baby Jesus Family Values Lower Taxes Soft" instead....
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I always thought that was required from *all* CEO's of multi-billion dollar corporations.
This also happened with eBay, and is likely to happen to Google should they ever chance the CEO.
Formula for failure:
Have the CEO drive a business into the ground by paying them in cash. Pay them the average employee's wage + bonus in stock, therefore they are only sabotaging themselves if they drive the company into the ground, or increase customer resentment. Maybe apply this to board members too.
In Microsoft's case, the Anti-opensource/anti-linux zealotry, and delivering incremental upgrades as "new operating systems" with only improvements made to the bells and whistles has made customers who even buy windows still refer to Microsoft (the company) as bad.
What could change Microsoft's standing, and stop eroding customer confidence is doing what they did with Windows 7, and open-beta each operating system for 90 days to get feedback on what people like and dislike. Had they done this back with Windows XP, we might never have seen the terrible Vista.
And Vista was not Windows ME. Vista was stable, ME was not.
eBay runs afoul of the not listening to customers, especially with the CEO change. It went from relatively listening, to completely ignoring. (As soon as John came on board, departments were getting outsourced left and right, and plenty of forced-use-of-paypal attempts were made.) The final straw on this was the giving discounts to bulk listers. In effect John in one year turned eBay into Amazon, stripping a lot of what made eBay good out.
If Google were to follow the same route, you'd see that 20% project time gone first, then innovations would stop flowing. Then ads would be stuffed into every part of the site until it resembles Yahoo. And we all know how well Yahoo is doing (not well at all.)
Bill Gates at least knew what direction to take things, Microsoft is a software company. Ballmer doesn't seem to know what direction to go, hence the "New version, now with shiny new bells and whistles." The moving of software into "Live" is a horrible mistake that is trying to encroach on what Google does well, that being "offering free usable services." Microsoft is trying to charge money and offer unusable services.
Microsoft only does Windows and Office well, and makes some slightly-better-than-average hardware for the PC. The Xbox/Xbox360 development must have hired the same people who worked on Windows ME. Pushed unfinished, poorly tested hardware out the door to meet some business agenda.
Microsoft's Windows Mobile is becoming increasingly irrelevant with the iPhone and Blackberry eating it's lunch. Again with the "move services online" aspect that is failing. If they can't do it right on the mobile platform, they sure as hell are going to fail to make paywalled office software.
What good did that do Jerry Yang?
Microsoft is a classic case of what you get when the problem is dictating the solution.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Considering Microsoft hasn't really ever been too much worried about piracy of Windows and I think Gates even said once it was good for it at some level, and that Windows (especially Windows Mobile, the only actually open kind in Mobile world until Android), I don't think he is that much for DRM. Piracy was dead-easy on the first xbox too.
This has happened in a lot of businesses. The pharmaceutical industry is in similar shape for the same reasons. Maybe even more so.
revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch....
56 / 23 ~= 2.43
Unless we're in some strange universe, Ballmer increased revenue almost 2 and a half times...or over two times. 3 is out.
Unless he's doing some fun rounding I'm unaware of.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The current CEO of Palm is the inventor of the ipod, not Steve Jobs. While at Apple Steve Jobs sent him out to find a hot product to make and he found the 1.8" hard drive at Toshiba that was considered a waste of resources and about to be killed. He made the ipod around it. iTunes came from a company Apple bought and they just renamed the software.
iTunes took off because Microsoft couldn't get their DRM strategy right and iTunes worked out a good deal with the record companies. the Ipod was one brand from a company everyone knew.
the iphone was a sales disaster until they cut the price and added the subsidies from AT&T. even then it was a slow niche seller until the 3G came out with the AppStore and Exchange support. the fact that you need a Mac to code for the iphone and the Vista PR disaster helped drive Mac sales. Otherwise they were flat for most of the decade since no one in their right mind would pay the premium for Apple's usually slower hardware. Now that the PC market is maturing it's becoming more vertically integrated like any maturing industry and Apple is there with a complete product while MS sticks to it's OEM model.
if you compare the specs than the iMac's are competative against Dell/HP and in some cases cheaper. the MBP will be competative once the next refresh comes. it's worth it getting a Mac since it's the only decent desktop ^nix and there is no crapware like on Dell's and HP's
While Microsoft has never been the most innovative company, since Bill Gates' departure Microsoft seems to have fallen into a "Me Too" mentality. Nintendo and Sony were making money in gaming consoles. Microsoft says "Me Too" and the X-box is born. Apple makes money with the iPod and "Me Too" here comes the Zune. And don't get me started onMicrosoft's obvious Google-envy. Microsoft has some of the best and brightest minds in the industry but they constantly seem to be playing catch-up with everyone else.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
and that was promptly replaced by GW Basic (of George Washington University) by MS DOS 3.x because it sucked.
They didn't develop BASIC, they wrote a compiler for the 8088, along with Davidoff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
Perhaps doing a bit of reading might help after all?
FTFA:
advanced...goto... ...does not compute...
The bean counters who manage Microsoft won't give two hoots that the technies within and without the company are disgruntled. Why should they? The article says that Microsoft's fortunes nearly tripled, and thats all they care about.
My web domain.
Steve Ballmer is a business guy and the CEO.
Ray Ozzie is the tech guy and the chief software architect.
Bill Gates was actually replaced by the two of them working in tandem.
Do these guys even research a little before they make these retarded articles about how an already huge company that tripled its revenue in 10 years is doing poorly?
In geek terms, that would be the same as measuring 'lines of code' to measure how great a peace of code is.
After all the spaghetti code and dirty workarounds I've seen, I think your analogy is a bit flawed.
But you are welcome to try with a car analogy.
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I had to look this up just out of curiousity.
--
In 1970, at the age of 15, Bill Gates went into business with his pal, Paul Allen. They developed "Traf-o-Data," a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle, and netted $20,000 for their efforts. Gates and Allen wanted to start their own company, but Gates' parents wanted him to finish school and go on to college where they hoped he would work to become a lawyer.
--
His acumen for not only software development but also business operations put him in the position of leading the company and working as its spokesperson. He personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, often rewriting code when he saw it necessary. As the computer industry began to grow with companies like Apple, Intel, and IBM developing hardware and components, Bill was continuously out on the road touting the merits of Microsoft software applications. He often took his mother with him. Mary was highly respected and well connected with her membership on several corporate boards including IBM. It was through Mary that Bill Gates met the CEO of IBM.
--
http://www.biography.com/articles/Bill-Gates-9307520?print
The point I want to highligh here is:
He personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, often rewriting code when he saw it necessary.
So, the man was a developer.
I thought he also wrote the fat file system, but I couldn't find supporting links for that.
Oh well.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Apple? Technological miracles? Care to name one?
Oh, there was a bit of an economic lift in the middle of the decade -- the housing boom triggered by Greenspan's one-percent interest rates. So, some software development work went into the mortgage industry. That's as useful, as exciting, and as enduring as granite countertops (which were just a waystation between Corian and compressed quartz). Then the Great Recession hit in 2007 -- back to no innovation at all (as least outside of cleared work).
What do we have to show for it on the desktop? Window bars that are blurry and hard to read. Faaaan-tastic.
Where the heck is end-user database/web development? It's like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes are living time capsules of their 1995 versions. Where is a unified naming system that treats e-mail messages, files, web URLs, and database records homogeneously? Where are agents? Why do I have to manually save every check images from my online banking? Why aren't these automatically downloaded to my computer by a software agent?
Also like how Wikipedia article tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability
Wait, when did this become about Steve Jobs?
The original article is too timid.
The problem is not just Ballmer. The problem is that Microsoft wasn't broken up. Ballmer is the symptom.
After the antitrust ruling was emasculated, Bill Gates should have said "OK, we won. Now we're going to break Microsoft up anyway. That's the only way to prevent us from turning into exactly what we despised when we founded the company: IBM."
They have many smart people working there but they are all Thralls, in service to the continued maintenance of the Windows Empire, whose first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Think Different.
I dunno, after reading this interview from 1986 I don't think he used to be a horrible guy. The interview seems pretty insightful, and Microsoft does look like a nice company back then, at least according to Gates. And some of his statements look geeky to me, especially in light of bloatware that's bearing the name .Net Framework.
Yes, but he's a wealthy flaming sociopath, and in our culture that makes it okay!
Not many people are likely to say it quite so plainly and openly, of course. But that certainly is the message here.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yes, Bill Gates did write code. As a matter of fact, Andy Hertzfeld (who was part of a little startup called Apple Computer) has a story about some code Bill Gates wrote.
#DeleteChrome
A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade?
Putting short-term profit over long term has been a standard policy for failing companies driven by short-sighted management.
Sure, Microsoft make a lot of money now, but over the last decade they've gone from being one of the most important companies in IT to 'so what?'. How many people really care about anything Microsoft does anymore? Does anyone get excited about a new version of Windows? Or a new version of anything that Microsoft produce?
So Microsoft may be making plenty of money today, but what will they be doing in another decade? Where are the new products they should have been developing since 2000 that are going to make them billions in the future?
Bill, is that you? Don't worry, I respect you as a fellow geek.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I think instead he appreciated the NDA he had to sign to gain access to the source(*), which coincidentally is how Microsoft operates. Except their recent open source offerings, but we can't mention those here, they're obviously a trap or something.
(*) Yes, this is pure speculation, much like the parent.
Since when?
My God, look at the man... I didn't know this was even in question.
Anyway, anyone who went as out-of-the-way as he did to get computing time back in the day is a geek in my book. I wasn't alive back then, so I can't say for sure - but I doubt I would have spent that much effort trying to get little slivers of mainframe time.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots
I don't think this is necessarily true. A company like Cisco has done great things with a business guy (Chambers) in charge. He probably gets it better than Ballmer, but he's proof that a business guy can be a good CEO of a technology company.
For Microsoft, it's both - Software and Company. They create software and they are a profit machine. I don't think that having Ballmer or Gates at the helm is really driving either culture.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Easy there, Bill.
- AJ
I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why was this modded offtopic? It's a direct response to a dubious claim made in the parent post
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
You are a symptom of what is wrong with /.
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.
"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."
The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.
If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.
Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.
Over 9 Billion in R&D spending during a recession is the long term thinking at Microsoft.
Everyone is excited about Windows 7 even if it is only because of the terrible reviews Vista got.
And everyone cares about what Microsoft does or we wouldn't be getting these articles every weak about how a company that grosses 50+ billion a year is irrelevant and dying and that their business model is antiquated.
It is pretty funny actually.
Wrong. He WAS. That's a *huge* difference.
Why do people always think in only one dimension... and then make that dimension have exactly two states: black, and white.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, he'll always be "the shill for SCO" to me and not worthy of the click-through.
I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
I read that quite clearly, thanks. I also read that prior to that arrangement, he and three other Lakeside students were banned for exploiting bugs in the OS. Presumably, his skill at doing so is what caused them to contract him. While he could have done this without source code, it certainly would have made that task easier. Furthermore, another Wikipedia article states that the users of the PDP-10 both shared and reused source code, so it's not unreasonable to think that Gates had access to it:
Over time, some PDP-10 operators began running operating systems assembled from major components developed outside DEC. For example, the main Scheduler might come from one university, the Disk Service from another, and so on. The commercial timesharing services such as CompuServe, On-Line Systems (OLS), and Rapidata maintained sophisticated inhouse systems programming groups so that they could modify the operating system as needed for their own businesses without being dependent on DEC or others. There were also strong user communities such as DECUS through which users could share software that they had developed. In some ways, this was one of the first open source environments, although the commercial operators tended to only take code from open sources, keeping their own proprietary enhancements to themselves.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think "miracle" is a bit strong, but I certainly felt that my first iPod was the coolest electronic thing that I'd ever owned... at the time everything else had either too little storage or was too bulky, and the firewire meant that you didn't have to wait for hours while it loaded up. Even later once Toshiba managed to release one about the same size, they f'd up the DRM so badly that the USB2 connection behaved like a USB1.1 connection on the hardware of the day.
I don't have one myself, but the iPhone really changed the game in that you now had a credible web browser in pocket-able form factor, and it even had a mediocre phone capability. Considering that I remember when a StarTac was really amazing, I'd say the iPhone was close to miraculous.
The Macs are mostly just computers. But even there they manage to do things like Time Machine, which is really, even now, the only backup solution worth a shit for the unwashed masses. And one of their laptops paired with one of their Time Capsules is pretty close to laptop Nirvana between the 801.11n and the automatic backup... all setup with a big "On" switch and virtually nothing else.
But miracles is still some pretty big hyperbole...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh come on how do you write a 4k BASIC interpreter and editor in assembly and not "know technology"?
I don't care how buggy Altair BASIC was, Bill Gates knew what he was doing back then.
"Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you)
Or more likely to be recognized here as Forbes Magazine's massive and unrepentant SCO shill.
(Unrepentant in that his excuse for his ridiculously one-sided reporting was the flaming he got on the topic in the first place).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah, because Wikipedia so totally equals truth... oh, wait...
I wouldn't rely on it* to research abortion or some other hot-button political topic, but for relatively non-controversial, easily-verified subjects like the early history of Microsoft it's really quite good. The same goes for most articles related to science and engineering, as these are dry factual topics that tend not to attract the interest of malicious editors (assuming that's what you're worried about).
* I hope the functionally illiterate can appreciate the difference between "wouldn't rely on it" and "wouldn't use it at all." Sorry to add this but some of the more reactive types on here just love to read things into what you say.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Cable switches were placed on a road. Traf-o-Data counted closures of the switches.
I have to disagree that it's about a tech-oriented CEO. MS's problem is that they are good at leveraging dominance of one market to conquer another. They are bundlers and package-oriented wheeler-dealers. However, the internet relies on open standards to function, and MS simply hasn't found out how to work smoothly among open-standards. Their instinct is and has always been to to kill them off via manipulation, and their reputation surrounding standards has hampered them. They simply came to the end of the leveraging-of-proprietary rope. This would have happened with or without Gates.
They would have to almost completely change company personality to get out of their rut, much like IBM did when they decided that services, not hardware, were going to be their thing. But IBM had to have it's face shoved into the boiling calderon of death before it realized it had to start over. MS is still a ways from that point.
Table-ized A.I.
Not in geek cred. But they can't hold a candle to him in business sense. He's got enough of both to be really successful.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
That Traf-o-data thing is an urban myth - it never made a penny, but like any good fish story, grew with time. Read some dead-tree books instead of the echo chamber that is the internet.
To be honest I'd take .NET over the piece of slow shit that Java is over any day.
I'll not say anything about speed either way, since that is not the point.
If you enjoy .Net now, wouldn't you enjoy an even more advanced .Net that was as widely deployed as Java and .Net (combined) are now? That's what we would have if Microsoft would have joined the open JCP Java community process and sought to improve that platform, instead of spending years duplicating Java.
I doubt Danger has had really any effect on Mobile world.
Of course they didn't. Microsoft bought them. But that's again the point, there was tremendous potential there very early on but it was left to languish because it was not Windows Mobile.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought Ballmer was a song and dance man: "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Seems like you're guilty of the same thing. He doesn't do anything overtly technological anymore, merely spending his days doing philanthropy with his billions of dollars, and that means he's not a geek. Never mind that you have no idea what he does in his spare, private time. Never mind his geeky, green house. Never mind his previous efforts.
If he's not publicly geeky, according to you, there's no shade of gray, and he must not be a geek.
He found a better way to get girls - become the world's richest man exploiting a monopoly. I think I just created an infinite loop of irony.
Regardless of how it got there, having a mass market platform to develop against surely made many projects feasible that would otherwise have cost too much for niche markets.
UNIX was handling that just fine before Microsoft came along. You also forget there were other perfectly viable user platforms until that point, like Amiga or the Mac, or for that matter even OS/2. Any benefit gained was lost in the terrible issues we have resulting from a security monoculture.
Java is a tragic missed opportunity.
Given the number of jobs and active server side development going on, and the fact that Android is based atop it, and the fact that until now mobile programming such as it was was J2ME, and the fact that Java is in the Blu-Ray menuing system... I'm almost afraid to see what an un-missed opportunity looks like (apologies to Strunk & White for the numerous "fact that").
Buying up experts and stuffing them into R&D is always hit and miss. Generally you'll take a lot of misses to get the one big hit though. It takes time and even with the recession Microsoft is still spending over 9 billion on R&D this year..
The ultimate Ivory Tower, that doubles as a dungeon - despite all that money spent they have very little usable output to point to compared to Google or Apple or just about any other company that does R&D. It's more a place to try and keep smart people AWAY from other companies than it is a productive force.
I can honestly say that I don't think anyone cared much that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD.
It's not about you or I caring. It was all about Microsoft financially backing the format, and the companies that would have leapt from the sinking ship staying about because Microsoft was still there. It's a shame they didn't do further study on the fates of other Microsoft partners or many billions might have been saved (not that I shed any tears for the movie studios)...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All this furore over Jobs, Gates and Ballmer. It's as if these guys are working 6000 hours a week, making every minor decision. There are lots and lots of talented people working "behind the scenes" to advise on the right technological directions to pursue.
Furthermore, whoever wrote this has obviously never come across a geek-ran company, strangling under quite significant business blindspots. As a company gets larger, wIth the right advisers, the guy at the top should be the business man. Sure, if he's a complete technological disaster, there's a problem, but I don't think there's too big of an issue when you've nearly tripled in net worth.
Articles like these, they're just the business version of a "music critic". Another version of the gossip column.
I record my sleeptalking
Over 9 Billion in R&D spending during a recession is the long term thinking at Microsoft.
Customers don't give a crap about 'R&D spending'; they care about products. Where are the new products that will be making billions for Microsoft in 2010-2020?
'Microsoft Bob' was R&D. Clippy was R&D. Vista took up nearly a decade of R&D and was a total piece of crap.
Gates is a poker whiz first, and a computer whiz second.
As far as "true geeks are honest", we'll, that's a tricky one that's hard to swallow. Very smart people can also be very evil people.
Table-ized A.I.
Hey! Stop interfering with the revisionist history! Next you will complain about the Gates Borg Icon and the Broken Windows icon for stories.
This space for rent.
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS.
Well, MS did develop Amiga Basic and I thank them for that.
Amiga Basic was so horrible that made me give up programming in Basic and switch to Pascal, then C.
Actually Gates knew the 1960's and 1970's technology. His mother paid for time on a mainframe for him and his school mates for the first computer club in his school. Bill Gates learned FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Assembly, etc.
Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that. Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft.
Bill Gates learned from his father who was a lawyer that the best way to make money is to pay people to invent new technology for you, or buy out your competition if your employees cannot do it. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates is a manager with a little about a technical background, but more into marketing, sales, and hype (or propaganda), as well as public relations. Steve Wozniac was the real power behind the early Apple, and Paul Allen and others where the real power behind the early Microsoft (later on Tim Patternson as well).
I wouldn't say that Gates is not knowing how technology works, but his knowledge comes from the 1960's and 1970's technology, and then management of 1980's to above as he directed others to create the technology even if he didn't write the code himself. Gates gave the vision, and the design, and the ideas and other things to drive others to create Windows, and other projects. Yes Microsoft did indeed copy off competitors and bundled technology in an effort to drive competitors out of business. While Lotus had the Lotus Symphony as the first bundled software, eventually Microsoft bundled Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and even Access as Microsoft Office for Windows and eventually wiped out Lotus (IBM bought the corpse of Lotus) and weakened Wordperfect, and drove Aston Tate out of the DBase database business with Access and SQL Server.
Microsoft always has had a BASIC product, from MS BASIC to GW-BASIC, to Quick BASIC, to Visual BASIC, to Visual BASIC.Net, the BASIC keeps on going and upgraded to new operating systems and frameworks, now with the Dotnet Framework built into Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Dotnet Framework put a lot of Visual BASIC component makers out of business as Dotnet did what a lot of third party components for Visual BASIC did before it was developed.
It takes at least a basic understanding of technology to pull all of that off. Baller is the typical Pointy Haired Boss, but Bill Gates was like the Wally of Dilbert at least, and expert on ancient technology but knows how to drive his team to get results.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Are they? Or is it just another shitstorm of astroturf and payed for reviews that is pretty much the trademark of Microsoft?
Bingo. I knew plenty of people who couldn't wait to get Windows 95 to replace 3.1. I even knew people who were just as eager to get Windows 98 even though it was basically just Windows 95 SP3. I don't know anyone who wanted Vista or anyone whose attitude to Windows 7 is anything but 'well, I guess it will be on the next PC I buy'.
The only reason why I keep a Windows PC in the house is to play games and to run the video software I have which only runs on Windows; other than that, what Microsoft do is irrelevant to me. There's no way I could have said the same thing ten years ago.
So what's Microsoft's alternative? Compete with themselves?
Apple? Technological miracles? Care to name one?
Don't ask me ... ask Bill Gates.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Or is it just another shitstorm of astroturf and payed for reviews that is pretty much the trademark of Microsoft?
Yeah I'm sure they payed off Cnet, PC World, PC Magazine, and even Engadget... You're an idiot.
And technically astroturfing is payed-for reviews since I'm pretty sure most companies pay their employees.
.NET is way better than Java in many respects. In fact, now Java is implementing many features of the new C# version. And I thought competition led to better things and a single language led to stagnation?
Competition within the framework of a standard is better. Competition around competing resources is inherently wasteful.
To use the beloved Slashdot car analogy, would the competition among automakers be as good if everyone needed different roads or kinds of gas?
What I am saying with this is not anything about the quality of .Net or Java. What I am saying is, imagine if both camps had not wasted time working on the same parallel tracks and instead everyone had worked to define a better base Java, and then competed around the JVM's. Microsoft would have had a kick-ass JVM and probably a lot more people would be using it. Microsoft even started to do that but then decided to enhance the JVM outside of the community framework, and that was that.
Danger is that big of a deal? huh?
They were, if you were paying attention to feature phones at the time. They were on the road to becoming just as much of a success as Blackberry, they had a great mobile OS (for the time) and really well done UI. The fact you think so little of them proves my point.
R&D with no pressure to create real world output can give freedom to academics instead of always concentrating on the almighty dollar returns.
Or it can also lead to academic masturbation. Even in profitless universities, you have the pressure to publish which drives research to publishable results. Microsoft R&D doesn't have to publish. They don't have to do anything but deliver the equivalent of a $10k table computer once a decade or so.
They were pushing HDDVD how exactly?
With millions of dollars in backing? With a huge push to publish menus for HD-DVD using the Microsoft defined standard? By continually proclaiming to the press that HD-DVD had the "full backing" of Microsoft? By producing an HD-DVD player for the 360 (though actually that was a moment of weakness for if they had included it in every 360 the format may well have won, and it certainly would have meant there was even a fight at all).
How did they NOT push HD-DVD? Go back and read the news articles man, Microsoft is in every other story on HD-DVD.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers
Well before Microsoft made computers "standard and cheap" (and I am glad you used the term "cheap" instead of inexpensive as it is so much more fitting) I was paying far less than $3k for a computer. Apple? Amiga? AtarI? Even around the time of Win 3.1, you had OS/2 and computers were not much - and they could run Linux easily too... There's a reason they were actually declared a monopoly, and the fact that unhealthy monopoly was never addressed has been a huge drag on the industry.
The world has lost too much time at the hands of Microsoft to claim there was ever an overall benefit. You can see the proof of this in how healthy competition is finally occurring on the web thanks to XHTML and the rise of alternative browsers, and how much more vibrant the world of smartphones is with Web OS, iPhone OS, and Android now that Microsoft is not stifling competition in the sector out of fear of what they might do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He wrote the MS Basic interpreter in 8080 Assembler. What marks in the belt do you have?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Nomad.
Opera on a whole plethora of devices - possibly most importantly Opera for Symbian 60. Heck, the inbuilt web browser in several models of the Communicator.
Time Machine? Done earlier and better by a dozen different corporate backup solutions.
No miracles here; nothing new here either.
Reading the disassembly and critique of Commodore BASIC by gurus like Jim Butterfield and Rae West reveals Gates to be quite a hacker. A hacker's hacker if you will.
POKE 36879,8
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
Who is John Cabal?
Look at the guy. I think there's a fair chance he's definitely more of a geek than Ballmer will ever be.
Microsoft dominates in the office space because it understands the office worker and the office as a working environment.
Or it is because, as the Justice department and the EU courts both found, Microsoft abused a monopoly position to keep themselves in power longer than they should have been either from technical or non-technical reasons alone.
Microsoft enjoys a level of success from providing business solutions that people need. But having worked in a very large company before, I have seen better solutions passed by because Microsoft cut some other licensing to get a foot in the door in some other area - even though the eventual millions of dollars sunk into the alternative were eventually lost when the whole thing floundered anyway.
I understand succeeding on non-technical merits very well. It's just that I have seen so many cases where that is not so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Get your facts straight. Learn about the snubbing by JAVA which forced MSFT to develope their own languages since JAVA would not license to MDSF.
That's bullshit.
Go back and re-read your history. Microsoft tried to implement custom extensions to Java without going through the JCP, so Sun sued them saying they were not compliant with the standards (which they were not).
Microsoft COULD HAVE joined the JCP too, just like IBM and Sun and HP and Oracle etc. etc. etc. They were invited. But they didn't want to play where they could not be the driving force behind a "standard" like .Net (gee, a "standard" defined by one company! That sure must be non-proprietary!). But Microsoft did not, and so they split the whole virtual machine development community.
JCP was the official standards body, so it was up to Microsoft to join that or not - not for Sun to come crawling to the MDSF (which they cou;dn't do anyway because unlike .Net Java is a STANDARD with many companies that would have to agree).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What was the last innovative thing MS did, where you got order-of-magnitude coolness for upgrading? 3.11 to Win95? Active Directory? Other than driver support, new themes, and building more applications into OS-level stuff (hello IIS) where are they?
Where is a real volume manager? Where is virtualization? Where is workload balancing?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Gates was a big fish in a small pond back in the day. Try reading the code of that BASIC interpreter. BG can't hold a candle to Woz or Chuck Moore or Dennis Ritchie.
How many people of that era CAN hold a candle to them?
Yeah! Geeks don't cheat! We settle for no less than murder!
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
"He developed an early version of BASIC."
which Kemeny and Kurtz, creators of BASIC, tended to refer to as "gutter BASIC."
But seriously, Anonymous Coward, Bill Gates is solely to blame for *only* the flaws in Windows? And the fact such flaws exist hurt his "geek cred"? So - I'm presuming that all the good things in Windows, you don't attribute to him, and thus don't help his geek cred.
Tell you what AC, as soon as you put out a superior operating system, I'll agree you win your imaginary geek competition.
Too hard? Yeah.. ok - as soon as you contribute code to the Linux kernel.. the geek cred's all yours!
Still too hard? If you can cobble together a working version of NOTEPAD without using Microsoft APIs, you win all my internets! ....
Truth is, he is a geek, and a far more knowledgeable one than AC could ever hope to be.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Microsoft mission statement under Bill Gates:
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software".
Translation: we want world domination!
Microsoft mission statement under Steve Ballmer:
"Help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
Translation: none: no meaningful information conveyed; incomprehensible marketspeak.
Everything else is just following from that, really.
The fact that Gates only knew 1960's and 1970's tech doesn't change the poster's point. What languages does Ballmer code in?
I do wonder whether BillG was showing the world the basic lesson in business (that they don't teach you at university) that firing the founder of a company isn't usually a good idea.
-- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."
The author has it all wrong.
Now, to preface this, if I had my choice I'd go back to composing my documents in latex, reading my email in mutt, and doing my number crunching against a real rdbms, but at work I don't have my choice, so I use Microsoft software.
In the world of business, the combination of Microsoft Office and Exchange is unparalleled. It's the de facto standard for productivity and collaboration in small, medium, and large business. It enjoys that position not just because it has momentum, but because it really is very good at what it does, which is providing powerful publishing, collaboration, and number crunching tools to people who don't know a lot about software but do know a lot about their business. There are successful small and medium businesses whose back offices are built on this suite.The problem with would-be competitors like KOffice, OpenOffice, Evolution, and now Google Docs isn't Microsoft's monopoly; it's that they plain just aren't anywhere near as good. Microsoft may not be the model of efficiency, but these would-be competitors continue to underestimate how many man hours it takes to build a fully-featured, competitive office suite.
And in the world of games, the Direct X platform is immensely powerful, popular, and drives development of cutting edge graphics and gaming hardware for the entire industry. Apple is years behind in this regard. If Apple took a majority of the OS market tomorrow, game development shops would be hurting.
MIcrosoft makes a lot of money because they spend a lot of money. People drastically underestimate how rich Microsoft offers are in business and gaming, and just how expensive it is to compete on that level.
So that would be like a Microsoft hiring somebody to fix bugs after he showed he was able to find and exploit many of them by searching though one of the periodic Windows Source Code Leaks? Sounds possible, if the exploiter clearly did not have malicious intent, which these days would be much harder to show, since exploiting Window bugs is not likely to result in free internet access or the like.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
But his greatest innovations were in MARKETING, not in the technology itself.
Microsoft was a dinosaur since the 1980s.
They only thing they were good at was getting in bed with the OEMs, and marketing.
For a technology company they've always been behind and their implementations have always been shit.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch.
And this was a "lost decade?"
General Motors had a lost decade. Microsoft did not.
what you're saying
Noooo... but I think we know what you are saying.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They wrote their BASIC interpreter in assembler or machine language specific to one Intel chip. Although they may have gotten algorithm ideas from other implementations, they still had to hand-code every part.
Table-ized A.I.
Nomad.
Was enormous, as it used a full sized notebook drive.
Opera on a whole plethora of devices
Yup... that's what I use on my Sony Ericsson. But it is not as pleasant as the browser on the iPhone on similarly-sized devices.
corporate backup solutions.
A place where until recently, it was hard to find an Apple machine. What about the home user? Time Machine is amazing for a "typical" user.
nothing new here either.
How can you even say that? You seriously picked up an iPhone 3 years ago and didn't think it was different than everything else out there?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Windows also has open-source components. The one that pops to mind is the BSD IP stack used up through XP.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Predicting the future and how people will react to new technologies is difficult, and often has more to do with psychology than technology.
Table-ized A.I.
I think that Daniel Lyons just doesn't remember Bill Gates or what Microsoft did. I mean, sure, in the 90's Microsoft controlled the OS market. Windows 95 ruled. And then came 98, 98SE, ME. Yes, that was really visionary. And it was Bill Gates who ignored the internet, and let other browsers control the entire market. On the other hand, it was on Ballmer's watch that the Xbox appeared, and grew into a real success.
And now to contradict what I said above, because Daniel Lyons made an even bigger mistake. Gates continue to lead Microsoft's product strategy until 2006, which makes it silly to blame Ballmer for most of the 2000's.
On a final note, I heard Bill Gates talk over the years and read what he was saying. He had technical vision, but it was often at odds with the market. IMO he was bad at understanding where technology was going. Microsoft has always been a follower, rarely an innovator. It just won because it knew how to get into a market and continue to improve its products to the point where they were good enough.
Thrown chairs.
Writing an interpreter for BASIC is 70's equivalent of writing a phonebook application in PHP. It may sound difficult because modern geeks are unfamiliar with assembly and interpreters, however this is merely the result of the area being too far outside of the current range of practically useful problems.
Not that I would ever recommend against studying assembly, languages and compiler theory (the latter two still beyond what Gates knew as all BASIC implementations are mostly ad-hoc) -- this knowledge is always useful, just does not automatically translate into an immediately useful project.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Now that he has resigned from Microsoft, there is no need to fight. He should get a /. account too, then we can all bash M$ together.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Hey its you again. The guy with the low UID that seems to have fallen asleep in '99 and just recently woken up. It has been said TIME AND TIME AGAIN, that Apple is usually not an innovator as far as the basic spec/language/GUI. What they succeed in is making poeple care passionately enough about their tweaked product to pay top dollar for it. I bought a MBP and I know it was overpriced for its config, damn right. But I also know that in 3 years when I flip it on eBay I will get 50% of my money back, whereas the Vio I was eyeing will be worth peanuts. Plus I know it will likely work for 10 years after that. Apple overcharges, but they deliver the most reliable HW on the market as study upon study have shown. For me innovation lies in usability. If my computers last longer it is certainly more usable in the long run.
Of course Daniel Lyons is the boy that cried wolf a lot about SCO and wrote vast amounts of bullshit on the topic from the sort of viewpoint you would normally only see from someone getting direct financial benefit from repeating the lies of the time. I'm not sure if that makes him a zealous fanboy or the recipient of bribes.
He is also the one who gave us the "freetard" expression to describe users of open source software.
Keep such things in mind when you read his stuff. It appears that his motive is not to inform but instead to influence.
IMHO he's lying scum as likely to be correct by fluke as a stopped clock.
Well, let's think about the development cycle...
Ballmer throws chair at programmer ...
Programmer writes source code and calls compiler
Compiler writes binary
Seems to me like Ballmer might be programming in a way more abstract than Java's silliest concepts.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Speaking as a guy who learned on AmigaBasic, I can verify that it was an unstable piece of shit and the best thing you could do with it was replace it with something like ACE Basic
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Altair BASIC and Microsoft BASIC was initially implemented by Bill Gates himself. Microsoft BASIC was licensed to numerous platforms.
Now you may scoff at BASIC, but many developers got their start on home computers running some form of BASIC, many of us on a Microsoft BASIC. And my opinion is that most slashdotters lack the technical prowess to implement even a primitive BASIC interpreter in assembly language or even C.
(I refuse to use Microsoft products, especially Office, and primarily run Linux, OSX and Solaris at home. So I'm not some Windows fanboi)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
BASIC would never have caught on over LOGO if it wasn't for Bill Gates. Kemeny & Kurtz likely felt pretty inferior once they found out about LOGO, which is far more flexible and expressive than BASIC ever could be. You could actually extend LOGO with new functions and data types and natively supported lists (being a derivative of LISP). Yet LOGO programming was considered so easy and simple that young children were usually introduced to LOGO before BASIC. Too bad most people didn't know that there is more to LOGO than Turtle Graphics.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
He developed an early version of BASIC.
No he didn't. Like everything else he's been involved with, he "persuaded" someone else to develop it for him, and then he claimed the credit! Paul Allen did some of the work, but it was based on the work of a couple of grad students.
Just like all other "Microsoft technology", the developers weren't paid (their work was stolen), it didn' t work properly (because an incomplete version was released), and it was outrageously expensive (so anyone who wanted it, copied it).
Later, Bill G went to a lot of meetings inside Microsoft, but the actual work was done by others. Almost all technical design discussions were way over his head. This goes some way to explaining the fundamental insecurity of Windows - Bill didn't understand the problem, and just kept insisting that it had to be "easy to use".
Gates has never really understood computing, but made his money by lying, stealing and cheating - he would have made a great politician!
Remember - it'll all be fixed in the next release!
As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work
And what exactly is the job of the CEO in contrast?
He didn't write code, but being a software geek, he could tell if his employees actually knew what they were doing.
I find it a big rewrite of history to call Bill Gates a geek. If anything he is a cunning, soulless strategist who stop at nothing to bury you if it gives him the upper hand. A techie is to me someone who feel pride in delivering good products and the best solutions.
Historically i dont know about any product he has done or been involved in himself.
HTTP/1.1 400
Windows also has open-source components. The one that pops to mind is the BSD IP stack used up through XP.
It's still used in the latest pile of rubbish. The original NT kernel, thrown together in a matter of days (for demonstration purposes, not for official release) by Dave Cutler is still there in the middle of their Windows 7. Gates decided that it was good enough and that no further development was necessary.
Game Over!
Apple doesn't just make UI tweaks, they often create new UI conventions, with the end product being easier to use than everybody else's. I bet you think usability is for pussies, right? :p
Yep, remember MITS Altair? The S-100 bus? How Altair BASIC pricing was reduced if bought with it's memory card? How that card had problems, forcing pricing to be reduced? Tiny BASIC?
Nope that doesn't sound geeky at all...
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
It is funny because it is true. Disregard of ethical principles helps, especially if everyone else plays by the rules.
Factoid: Microsoft BASIC for the TRS-80 Model 100/102 was the last version of Microsoft BASIC that was personally developed by Bill Gates.
Also, I believe it's not *quite* correct to say Bill Gates wrote Vic-20 and C64 BASIC... he wrote PET basic, licensed it to Commodore in Perpetuity, then Tramiel had someone hack at the raw machine language code to make it work on the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 so he wouldn't have to pay additional licensing fees. THAT was the REAL reason why nearly everything significant had to be done with PEEK and POKE... it was really a ~7 year old implementation of BASIC written for a computer with a fraction of the RAM & ROM, and generally devoid of anything resembling color graphics and sound. On the other hand, it was an incredibly tight, optimized implementation of BASIC. Anyone who grew up with a Vic-20/C64 remembers that Commodore BASIC's PRINT command was almost fast enough to use for full-screen animation. By comparison, PRINT on other popular 8-bit computers (and 16-bit, and early 32-bit, for that matter) was somewhere between "annoyingly slow" and "utterly glacial" (TI-99/4A)
From what I remember, the biggest problem with AmigaBasic wasn't so much the language itself as the fact that it encouraged you to do things that relied on slow system routines. For example, AmigaBASIC had a major fetish with BOBs, and didn't really like Sprites. The problem was, if you read the AmigaBasic manual, it gave you the impression you could do something utterly insane, like write a version of "Centipede" that used a Bob for every mushroom. In reality, it would collapse and die from the overhead somewhere around Bob #20. The other problem was the fact that in many ways, AmigaBasic was the pre-alpha version of Visual Basic, and it was the first language I can remember that was event-driven rather than procedural. For late-80s teenagers (and probably older users, too), event-driven programming was a *major* mindfuck, and few Amiga programmers *really* "got it" until they'd been using it for a year or more. At the end of the day, AmigaBasic still sucked (I ended up using Assembly and GFA Basic for everything, though I had copies of Lattice C and True Basic as well), but its suckiness wasn't *entirely* Microsoft's fault. Anyone who thinks AmigaBasic was the worst obviously never used ABasiC ;-)
"Steve Jobs belonged to the Homebrew Computer Club."
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
Maybe you missed the part where he benefited himself at the expense of others. I think perhaps he took that lesson to heart as well as the lesson of IBM's foolishness in not more tightly licensing MS-DOS.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
The attitude that mere "ui tweaks" aren't innovative or important is the reason why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will forever be a joke.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ok flamebait first, People seem to rate geeks a little too highly! Lets face it the guys who made money are the guys who were either lucky or the guys who knew how to make money. Being geeky had nothing to do with it. It probably did with the field you were in but thats about it. Secondly before anyone actually talks shit about anyone, am pretty sure Microsoft did more for the US than GM in the past three decades. More number of jobs and technology have been actually created because Microsoft was in business. If i weren't Microsoft it would have been something else. The reason Microsoft became such a successful company is because they filled a gap which existing solutions didn't or couldn't fill. Saying Bill Gates would have done better because he was a geek is just plain stupid and basically brings to light the ignorance of the writer. He may or maynot understand technology, but he definitely dos not understand business.
I'd say the competition of .NET made Java progress.
See the comment just below with the username Orion Blastar.
Quoting: "Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that."
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft failed to recognize the importance of the internet long after it became important to myself and people I knew, like a friend at Tektronix. I remember downloading something from a computer at a university in Japan and being hugely impressed. Remember that there was an internet long before there was a fully public internet.
Next sentence from the comment below: "Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft."
That program was very limited. It was, of course, NOT a "traffic control program". It only counted switch closures and recorded the data for later analysis.
Consider the history of Windows, as recounted in the books about Microsoft, such as Hard Drive. Microsoft had supplied DOS, an OS originally bought from someone else. According to that book, Microsoft stopped competition by announcing Windows long before it was ready. The first version of Windows was worthless, in my opinion. The second version was a toy. The third version was the first that was actually useful. It crashed a lot, and handled fonts badly. Windows version 3.1 was the first acceptable product.
First, since when has MS EVER promoted standards?
They didn't write the basic compiler, it was copied and badly copied at that.
And then there is the real joke that shows you have no clue whatsoever about computer history. It was Compaq that created the IBM-clone. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next time you read up on history, don't do it at microsoft.com.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
MS Office is hurting, not from competition but from the fact that old versions are good enough. Countless very large companies simply no longer bother to upgrade. It is even worse with governments. MS Office competes with its older versions, it is a unique thing about software because software doesn't degrade like physical products.
The newer office versions simply have no compelling features that people MUST have.
As for DirectX, that must be one of the most poorly run businesses in the world. MS constantly is shifting its focus from Windows is not for gaming, to pushing its console and back to Windows. As for doing it for the entire industry, I presume you are leaving out the PS3, Wii, DS and PSP here? Oh and the biggest PC game, WoW runs perfectly fine on the mac, where there is no DirectX.
Sorry mate, but try again.
This article is not about MS doing badly but not doing as well as they could have done. MS could have pushed the envelope, and they didn't. That products like Open Office and KDE even come close to a billion dollar company says it all.
Just how can it be that Firefox, Opera, Chrome AND Safari are ALL better, faster and more capable browsers then IE? Where is all that R&D going?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The original NT kernel, thrown together in a matter of days (for demonstration purposes, not for official release) by Dave Cutler is still there in the middle of their Windows 7.
If that's true, it is really impressive. XP is quite stable... not bad for a hack! But I suspect that a lot has changed in NT since 1988.
The TCP/IP stack has apparently been re-written - but a lot of BSD still persists in Windows. I was just using that to refute the grandparent's argument that Bill Gates is being hypocritical by exploiting an open source system and then going on to create closed source. In fact, he exploited a mixed open/closed source system and has gone on to create a mixed open/closed source system.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in
technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
For the sake of all the paperclips in the world, whether they're not yet made, holding tight in sea containers to be shipped off into a new future, being used in office for good or bad, and even the rusty ones waiting to be dissolved in stinky sewers - STOP BASHING CLIPPY!
He was the first paperclip to make it into the real world, even though he was not real. For paperclips, he is like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. He gave them a voice. He gave them a face and a very friendly one. Have mercy. I say no more.
I think you're forgetting that an interest in technology must also be married to 'vision'. Thirty years ago, I worked for a relatively bright guy (physics trained, ran his own computer shop), who was convinced that the computers of the time were as fast as they would ever need to be. He laughed at my suggestion that 3d graphics might be cool in a gaming context, He made the mistake that many geeks seem to make in assuming that because things are thus, they will always remain thus. He had no imagination whatsoever.
Gates may or may not have an interest in technology, but he doesn't appear to have unusual amounts of imagination.
come out of the woodwork. MS has a market cap of $246 billion as of Oct. 30. The biggest company in the world, Exxon Mobile, has a market cap of $344 billion.
So "the company became bureaucratic and lumbering", not because it was big and lumbering, but because Ballmer is not Bill Gates? I don't buy it.
I agree with your statement. However, it doesn't apply in this case.
The internet existed long before it became a public utility. By a different name, it was available to big companies and universities. When Bill Gates decided that the internet was important, it had already been a very popular public service among technology enthusiasts for perhaps two years.
Another issue: I asked Vint Cerf by email if it was true that Al Gore was influential in creating the internet. He said it was. He said Al Gore created the circumstances in the U.S. government by which ARPAnet became the public utility known as the Internet. (I don't mean to imply that I know Vint Cerf. I don't.)
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
He just wrote a compile in machine code? Just?
Do you realize that *that* is a lot more than most of the self-proclaimed "geeks" in /. have ever/will ever accomplish when it comes to genuine geekiness (installing Linux to run gcc to complete homeworks and posting on /. does not count as geek ingenuity, at least *productive* geek ingenuity that is.)
Hell, that's more than the average CS senior student has done in the last 2 decades <rimshot/>
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
Can you identify some companies that produced "innovations" _without_ employees ?
Actually, perhaps it would be better if you could first define "innovation" and offer a few examples of same.
But he is still evil :)
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The original NT kernel, thrown together in a matter of days (for demonstration purposes, not for official release) by Dave Cutler is still there in the middle of their Windows 7.
Now there's a version I've never heard before. Source ?
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive very carefully. I adjusted for the fact that Jennifer Edstrom is not knowledgeable about technology, and that creates some confusion in the story. (She is the daughter of the woman who ran Microsoft's P.R. agency at the time. That agency told Bill Gates to shower and wear nice clothes.) Jennifer's co-author was a former Microsoft manager.
Many people have become enthusiastic about computers when they were young. The differences in the case of Bill Gates are that he had rich parents, and that he wanted to start a business.
The later chapters in the book give a better understanding. If I remember correctly what was in that particular book, it was quite clear that Bill Gates was not particularly knowledgeable about technology. That's something he apparently has in common with many technology company managers.
The Road Ahead is typical of the thinking of Bill Gates, it appears to me. He was one of the authors, so it should be.
Google, Apple and others are making those things happen
What "technological miracles" are you attributing to Google and Apple ?
Somebody step in and remind us which "inside Microsoft" tell-all book it was where the guy said Gates went through a period where he just couldn't figure out why his programmers were having such a hard time in the lab trying to make the PC a universal computer -- run PC programs _and_ Mac programs on the fly.
I'd go in the basement and look for the book but I'm too comfortable on the sofa with my laptop running Debian with wireless, temp control, etc. etc. working just fine. Not that that takes away any of the glitter of Microsoft's technological amazingness or anything.
And I love how essayists can make history with brief comments:
"[H]e led the campaign to destroy Netscape. In those days Microsoft was still nimble enough that it could pivot quickly and catch up on a rival. Since then the company has become bureaucratic and lumbering."
The good old days when the monopoly was at it's height if that's what he means by "nimble". Any web developers like to comment on how the technological excellence of Explorer has augmented their professional happiness ever since?
I think IE also uses the zlib-library for gzip- and deflate-decompression. Their was a bug-report for zlib Unix-like systems and shortly after an IE update with similair sounding description. I have some doubts they follow other vendors security updates that closely, so most likely they have they use the same library.
New things are always on the horizon
If Microsoft had done its business an an 68000 platform, the computing world would be vastly different today, and we wouldn't have lost the 80s and half of the 90s with the 16 bit nonsense.
In this decade, MS improved their development tools (.NET), database tools (SQL Server) and O/Ses (WinXP, Win7). That's what MS did the previous decade as well. What should MS have done differently in order to not "have lost" this decade?
The original Apple computer.
Hey. you're AC, so I'll be blunt and just stop at one.
Gates: Buys out your company if he perceives you as a threat. Your employees might be screwed but you're set for life.
Ballmer: Throws chairs out the window and shouts death threats "I'M GOING TO F$^@ING KILL YOU"
-
Gates: Works with developers in a cooperative fashion, making feature suggestions and helping architect back ends
Ballmer: has for years been trying to turn Microsoft into a cult, much like multi-level-marketing companies, what with his stomping around like an orangatan while chanting "developers developers developers" although he couldn't code his way through a batch file
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Gates: is actually somewhat friendly and down to earth even though he's cutthroat in business
Ballmer: Douchebag to the core
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Perhaps, but it doesn't compare with "A Unified Approach to Program Optimization", which is cited by 161 papers and books, including, BTW, the Dragon Book.
FFS, the Microsoft trolls and astroturfers are out early is the only reason Commodore is modded down. Look, fanbois and fangirls, Bill Gates was NOT the developer of much, if anything. Not even freaking WINDOWS!! Gates BOUGHT WINDOWS, just like he bought almost everything that ever worked for him. Well - he bought what he couldn't steal by one means of another.
Get the sticks out of your asses, moderators.
If you're so sure that Gates was a developer, provide links to refute Commodore's statement.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
Can you identify some companies that produced "innovations" _without_ employees ?
Actually, perhaps it would be better if you could first define "innovation" and offer a few examples of same.
For example, Xerox PARC's innovation was the GUI. Both Apple and later Microsoft licensed/stole the innovation after Xerox failed to understand its importance - once of the biggest mistakes in computing history. Microsoft has no equivalent; they have mostly bought out other companies that did innovate and claimed they did the innovation instead; or stole an idea from someone else that did innovate. What the GP was asking for was for a specific example of just one innovation that actually came out of Microsoft - a single original idea from Microsoft. (Note: Event Clippy and MS Bob were stolen ideas that Microsoft implemented.)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
This is not a troll, folks, it's a dead accurate description of Bill Gates' business method. Now, I'm not saying that's wrong, in principle ... it's how money is made. Some of what he did was wrong, was criminal and a Federal Court said so. But that's another story.
But Bill Gates is not primarily an engineer, a scientist, or other creative type: he's a master dealmaker who built his empire on the backs of a lot of other smart people. That's how it's done: he just did it more successfully than his competition.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Many of the posts here seem to assume that innovation is the goal of business. In fact, the opposite is often true. Microsoft may have the goal of simply cashing in on their earlier investments for as long as possible. If they can delay innovation (and changing revenue streams) then they can make more money off of their old investments. Any new product might bring in less revenue than an existing one, so delay is perfectly acceptable. Media companies are fighting the same battle. I don't see why this should be panned; this is the natural evolution of capitalism.
It is funny because it is true. Disregard of ethical principles helps, especially if everyone else plays by the rules.
Worse than that ... a lot of American corporations have been hiring foreign-born CEOs, presumably to eliminate any vestigial sense of patriotism or concern for ones fellow citizens. Pepsi Corporation is a good example.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I always heard the GW was "Gee Whiz" BASIC.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Why was this modded offtopic? It's a direct response to a dubious claim made in the parent post
Gates made the claim, not me, and the point (which you seem to have missed in your haste to pick nits) is that Microsoft isn't doing much of anything new. Not that they ever did, but Microsoft talks about "software as a service" and lots of other things ... but outfits like Google and Apple and others are actually developing and selling those things. Microsoft is still primarily a vendor of Windows and Office, and it's likely they'll always be that. They've essentially failed at everything else they've tried.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah, it was, and on the amiga it was horribly broken for any cpu smarter than the original 68000. Microsoft was so concerned about memory usage, both on disk and in the limited ram of the day, that fixed constants were stored in the upper 8 bits of a 32 bit memory word, and the instant you put a faster cpu in, one that could address all 32 bits of ram, it was explosion city. We asked commie and they said that M$ had went against their guidelines for software building in doing that. They were sorta sorry, but didn't have the clout to mkake M$ redo it properly. So we all wrote our toys, and some of them were damned good, in arexx, or bought a copy of sas C-6.51, which I still have on the shelf above me even though the amiga is dead in the basement. Dead is relative, its a full blown PP&S 68040 cpu with 64 megs of dram on the accelerator card. But to get all that going, it had to do 4 soft reboots in getting booted because with only 2 megs of dram, and a kit that put 2 megs of 'chip' ram off the agnus chip, there wasn't enough ram to mount all the hardware and drive sources.
Then I discovered a huge problem with amigados and backup software, when the main 30GB ide hard drive upchucked. The problem? amigados, when opening a file, puts a lock on the file and never releases it till the program is finished and exits. A lock that prevents reopening the file in even read-only mode, and When the program is amigados, that means, among other things, that the lock on the startup-sequence, and any files it calls in to do the bootup, are locked, AND CANNOT BE BACKED UP! Since all that amounted to nearly 10 megabytes of hand carved OS related stuff, when the new replacement drive arrived, I found to my intense anger, that none of the files required to boot it existed in the backups.
Since by then I was also playing with linux, I didn't want to have to rebuild that 20 room mansion's worth of software by my bare hands and aging memory, so its now stored, as is, on a shelf in the basement. And that monitor has long since gone to its heavenly pasture too.
The amiga was a fair machine in its day, breaking new ground that put the PC's to a rout for a while, but that OS fault was its death knell to me. Between that, and the eternal scsi problems due to the lack of proper terminations from most vendors, and even from Commie itself, one would have to have the guts of a proper prophet to be able to call it good. This is one pilgrim who, when it became obvious too many shortcuts had been taken, found a new church.
I might even have considered putting linux on it, but the one time I tried, it was crippled beyond usability because linux had no idea there was a 68040 & 64 megs of dram to play in, and apparently was trying to run in the original 1/2 meg of chip, and the 2 megs(IIRC) on the A2091 scsi card. Even 10 years ago, that was not enough to run linux.
Maybe that has changed now, I should ask on lkml. But first I'd have to find my round tuit. :)
--
Cheers, Gene
Nomad.
Opera on a whole plethora of devices - possibly most importantly Opera for Symbian 60. Heck, the inbuilt web browser in several models of the Communicator.
Time Machine? Done earlier and better by a dozen different corporate backup solutions.
No miracles here; nothing new here either.
Stop making this about Apple. It's not. I'm trying to make the simple point (which you just did for me, thank you very much) that Microsoft isn't doing anything particularly cool, in fact, they never really have outside of Windows and Office. Other companies have taken the lead.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think the keyword is "understatement".
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you?
[emphasis and link added]
Although developing a hacked-up personal computer implementation of a language with a publicly available spec (note the date) unencumbered by copyrights or patents was better that Ballmer could do, it wasn't exactly a great achievement in computer science.
iirc BASICs Syntax is LL(1), so writing an interpreter for it is really simple... arithmetic expressions may be a small bit outside of LL(1), but hard-coding them is still easy...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
as i already replied in another post: iirc BASICs syntax is LL(1), so writing an interpreter for it is quite simple (look up "recursive descent parsers"). arithmetic expressions may be a bit outside of LL(1), but they are still easy to implement using 3 mutually recursive functions...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.
Gates understood technology a bit better than Ballmer. In particular, Gates understood technology just well enough to know what to steal from whom. Gates also understood technology just well enough to know when to get out and let somebody else take the blame for the inevitable decline of Microsoft.
Wooooosh!
That's the sound of sarcasm as it passes over your head.
The last link in TFS itself shows that Gates is seriously interested in technology and was intimate with the detailed intricacies of atleast MS Excel, if not all of MS's product suite. Which non-geek would care to read 500 pages of specs if they're not interested in technology and don't have to answer to their boss? Not to mention realizing that date functions would need special handling in VBA.
MS missing the internet boat has nothing to do with this. Technologists make mistakes all the time, all the more so because they tend to be more opinionated than others. Contrast missing the boat with the internet with licensing the Windows OS to Compaq making IBM clones. That was a brilliant move that we're all reaping rewards till today. Even Apple switched to x86 hardware.
This space for rent.
The TCP/IP stack has apparently been re-written - but a lot of BSD still persists in Windows.
Care to back that up? AFAIK, only a few programs like FTP etc. had code from BSD. That doesn't qualify as a lot.
This space for rent.
Microsoft bought hotmail in 1997, and had a heck of a time moving it off of FreeBSD (still using it for some functions as late as 2001).
The original HoTMaiL was first of its kind and was quite revolutionary.
I don't really get why everyone is all "Ballmer sucks, Gates was a real geek" in this thread. WTF are you people smoking?
Gates was responsible for the Win9x OS releases, most notably including Windows ME, but also not excluding the poor hack jobs which were Win 3.1x and Windows 95 and (to a lesser degree, 98). Windows 2000 was arguably a misstep, as it was neither a thorough migration from the old NT4 and win32 'legacy' APIs/code bases, or a step forward.
Balmer has overseen the move from XP to Vista, which did have some problems... And yes, he did do 2k -> XP, which was arguably ME mk2, but it wasn't half the disaster that ME was, either.
But now we've got Win 7, and Ballmer (or those he supervises) are largely responsible for it not sucking. It is the first release of Windows I have used which I think is actually well-considered from a technical standpoint in most criteria (as opposed to a purely marketing/sales standpoint). It runs well on pretty much anything, including hardware which is well below the threshold of what it should run on.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers, especially if IBM or Apple was at the helm. There might not be even Intel today.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the price fall in personal computers, IMO. If I remember correctly, that was a result of the price war that Compaq started back in 1993 or 1994. And fat lot of good it did them because look what happened to Compaq. Microsoft's OS costs MORE than it did back in 1994, and Windows 7 is more expensive, once again. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, it's probably not changed much, but I don't think that Microsoft has ever reduced prices on its software unless there was serious competition, such as with browsers, or with its terrible MSN service.
Microsoft R&D has been around more than ten years now, so where are these fabulous long term results?
I fully support real R&D, but I think Microsoft has been particularily bad about producing nothing useful from the R&D facility they have. Google, Apple and IBM are producing far more real world results from long term research than Microsoft is, and that is my complaint - not that they spend that much on R&D, but the fact that they are sucking up all these intelligent people and then not really producing much in the way of output for all the money they spend and brainpower they sequester. I just feel like in the hands of a company like IBM (who certainly does not shrink from long term R&D) you would see so much more progress come forth...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Considering that .Net basically *is* Java with all the stupid fixed, I don't think "server side" would be any "further along" without it.
You totally miss my point. Without .Net, Java would be .Net because Microsoft would have been there driving the standard, adding the same features.
If you like .Net you should be fuming right beside me, because instead of all the Java installations everywhere now you'd have .Net equivalents all over. If Java annoys you so then why are you happy that Microsoft split off and left Java to grow to a larger size?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
GW-BASIC is an evolution of MS-BASIC. IBM didn't remove BASIC from the PCs, it was included in ROM even in the IBM PS/2 (I know because I used it a lot). BASICA is the IBM-branded interpreter that relies upon the in-ROM BASIC and adds disk, graphics andsome more "features". GW-BASIC is the MS "version" of BASIC for IBM-compatibles that has all of the interpreter in the file, so it doesn't need the one in ROM.
As for who invented what, I think we'll never know for sure but if they didn't create the interpreter (history says they did, but it has a tendency of reflecting the opinion of whoever is writing it) at least they introduced "pirating" into the PC field (if we conveniently ignore that it was "prior art" on other platforms already).
Now that Windows Seven is out, maybe it's time for a new Borg icon....
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"spending his days doing philanthropy"
Of a kind, yes. I'm reasonably happy with his disaster relief and vaccination - but I'm not entirely sure that genetic engineering is in the long run philanthropic. It centralises food and medicine in large corporate interests, props up the artificial scarcity regime of 'intellectual property', and locks small players out of the market. In many ways the Gates Foundation could be doing as much harm as it's doing good.
If he were to focus on truly free and open solutions, and not partner with IP industries, then I'd be a lot more charitable toward his charitable works.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm pretty sure he's being sarcastic there, dude.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
Man, how often have I read here that Bill Gates really IS a geek, because he wrote an early version of BASIC (hooray!)? yes, he did that, but BASIC's syntax is LL(1), so it is extremely easy to write a compiler for it (even easier to write an interpreter, which it was). Look up "recursive descent parsers". The only thing that might be a bit outside of LL(1) are arithmetic expressions, but they can be parsed easily with 3 mutually recursive functions either... at my university we learn this stuff in semester 2.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
YES!! I love slashdot - it's comments like these that keep me coming back for more! "You're an idiot" - Brilliant! Bravo!
That's some hard evidence you have there. If Microsoft had the leverage you claim, then Vista would've received the same glowing reviews as well. Not to mention the fact that Windows 7 IS drastically better than Windows Vista.
And as much as I hate to get into an argument about semantics, you're still wrong. "Astroturfing" is a much broader term than you're trying to make it. It covers both of the scenarios you're describing.
And quit posting AC... if you have a serious argument, claim it. People don't hide under anonymity unless they know they're wrong.
Xerox understood the importance of the GUI but they invented it too early to incorporate it into a consumer product. Even the Lisa was too early and thus too expensive to be a successful product.
Nevertheless the fact that the leaders at PARC didn't perform much of the real innovation didn't mean that they were clueless about technology.
Yeah, that's the same thing that I read. The networking stack and all of those utilities like rcp, ftp, and rsh. I guess "a lot" means different things to different people.
For what it's worth, my sentence should have read like this to be more clear as to its intention:
"The TCP/IP stack has apparently been re-written - but a lot of the BSD code still persists in Windows."
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For example, Xerox PARC's innovation was the GUI.
If that's your measure of "innovation", then it's hardly unreasonable that Microsoft hasn't "innovated" - neither has nearly everyone else, because most "innovations" in computing were over and done with 30-50 years ago, before they were in any position to.
Microsoft has no equivalent; they have mostly bought out other companies that did innovate and claimed they did the innovation instead; or stole an idea from someone else that did innovate.
Just like everyone else, then ?
What the GP was asking for was for a specific example of just one innovation that actually came out of Microsoft - a single original idea from Microsoft. (Note: Event Clippy and MS Bob were stolen ideas that Microsoft implemented.)
With the bar set so high, then no, Microsoft hasn't "innovated" - but that's hardly a stinging criticism in that context, since neither have Apple, Google or, indeed, pretty much anyone in the last few decades.
No shocker here, put an MBA-type in charge of a tech company and watch it make more money in the short term, but fail to innovate. Of course, to make more money you invest less in R&D. After all, how many stockholders truly care about investing in R&D, because if the money is going into R&D, it's _not_ going into _their_ pockets. Eventually, this strategy will fail in the long run and the company will then be too far behind to compete. It will get gobbled up by a larger and more successful competitor and will disappear...
Apple is the exception that proves the rule. And Apple's innovations are limited to providing sexy interfaces to technologies that had been established by multiple competitors 2-3 years prior to Apple's entries: MP3 player and smartphone.
"it was on Ballmer's watch that the Xbox appeared, and grew into a real success." I guess it's a success if you don't count the fact that it's losing money for the company. The x-box is a non-profitable product line for MS. Like Zune. Like Plays for Sure. . . . etc. I can't think of any product that Ballmer has introduced in his reign that is making money for the company. They are trying, but failing to branch out in new directions. Windows and Office are their entire existence and both are being rendered less powerful by an emerging Apple and an open source movement. Microsoft has peaked and is on the slow decline downhill.
I don't know anyone who wanted Vista or anyone whose attitude to Windows 7 is anything but 'well, I guess it will be on the next PC I buy'.
Hi, I'm quite looking forward to upgrading my machine to an SSD based Windows 7 machine. And yes, Vista was shite. Then again, so is XP64...(crappy drivers, software that...sorta works, stuff like that).
Nice to meet you.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Google is a CIA front operation. Google's search was nothing special in the beginning, and only years later caught up to some of the technologies used by its competitors of the era, such as Hotbot. In my post I excluded Google from consideration as a "black ops" company.
So, clearly you are insane.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
talking about signature, hasn't the mac pro mini come out already in this iteration?
The latest Mac Mini is not meaningfully different to the previous Mac Mini (or the one before that, or the one before that, et cetera back to the original).
"Everything else they've put out sucked...but, this newest thing they've released has been really great for the two weeks I've used it!!"
I've been listening to this deluded line ever since I ditched W3.1 for OS/2 so that I could get some DOS programming done. Microsoft has single-handedly done more to hold back the advancement of personal computing than IBM, AT&T, Compaq, HP, and a dozen other proprietary, half-assed crack pushing corporations combined. It is there ability to market their "geekness" to an unknowing, uncaring populous that makes them popular, and has worked against interoperability standards that would allow a host of solutions to flourish and interoperate.
Go worship Ballmer for giving you Vist 2.0. I still look forward to the day when the populace wakes up to how much damage they've done, and the whole company becomes as relevant as DEC.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Wait! You want to give street cred to Bill Gates for developing...BASIC? The one language credited with destroying the future hopes of a generation of computer programmers. Heh, look how great an architect Hitler was! He developed gas chambers!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Unfortunately they (the populace) will never wake up! Why? because Microsoft's products conveniently there, ubiquitous, and the problems are never completely make or break. Yes, Microsoft is so incompetent, they can't get their problems to be effective. (Before I get a troll or flame-bait mod, the previous sentence is tongue in cheek.) I don't personally like Microsoft's products because they are always almost good enough (occasionally making it!) but never quite bad enough to get rid of.
It is like the cheap drill bits one can buy anywhere. They do the job, but tend to break just as you really need it. So to get around the problem you buy the cheapest drill bit you can find on a Sunday afternoon in a sleepy town. The 2nd or 3rd bit sees you through the job and you put the tools away thinking "I'll have to get a better bit for next time I use it..." Cycle continues. Of course cheapest in the computing sense isn't money, but time. It would take massive amounts of time to change everything to a new way of thinking.*
* I know that it isn't nearly as hard as what is made out. However, (God, another analogy? BadAnalogyGuy, can I get a job with you?) like starting a job that requires loads of setup/organisation before hand it seems too large. Break it down into small parts and often the job takes less time than you expected.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
C# is one of the most significant IT developments this decade? I'm flabbergasted. I don't know which product to pick up and throw at you.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Or become a hacker in your free time.
I wrote a PDP-11 assembler emulator in BASIC. Those were the days.
Of course having Roman numerals in your last name really helps, but doing some things are not as daunting as you think they are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It was standard practice when you were studying Computing Engineering, even in places so far detached from cutting edge tech as Mexico City .....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you achieve it in an ethical manner, it must feel great.
If you don't, you may need to look for ways to pacify your conscience.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots.
Just like putting non-engineers in charge at Boeing, eh?
Of course, that was done by the same group that drove McDonnell Douglas into the ground.
... banks and other companies handling millions per transaction use mostly Java.
But what do they know.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
On what dumpster diving meant to Bill Gates:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
"""
Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong.
"""
Previously posted here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837517
following up on:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837221
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm not even capable of being a low-level dev at Microsoft, but if you want answers, you need to edit (yes, repost...) that post for readability. Particularly, who is saying what. I could read it, but not figure out which 'source' you were referring to or if it was your own questions being asked.
That said, I'd be interested in seeing answers (rather than responses like my own) to these questions. They, if true, are baffling.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
PowerPoint.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?