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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 $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
He developed an early version of BASIC.
Even if that was true, he understood what other geeks needed. Plain business men probably aren't going to understand that.
And if you're ever read some book by Bill Gates, you'd notice he does have quite (interesting, I might add) ideas. Not just with OS and such, but with technology general and how to combine it with everyday life.
It must really suck to be a billionaire and yet realize if you had been smart you coulda been a trillionaire.
He may have not put a whole lot of development into windows in the later years, but he at least had more focus on the tech side than Ballmer plus, he did program alot in his early years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_. Did you know that? No, of course you didn't. If you were literate you'd be able to do a simple search and find out just how wrong you were.
Try doing a bit of reading, it might help. Or hey, go ahead and keep spewing out ignorance for all I care, it -is- Slashdot after all. You'll probably get more mod points for being completely wrong, as long as you're insulting good old M$.
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...
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.
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.
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
This has happened in a lot of businesses. The pharmaceutical industry is in similar shape for the same reasons. Maybe even more so.
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.
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.
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!
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, 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?
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.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
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.
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.
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
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
Does this
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.
.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
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
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?
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
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
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?
Are you sure? I'm getting 60 / 20 = 2.9999999175
Try checking your math.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Plus the fact that Netscape fucked up and turned their browser into that bloated, bug-ridden net suite called Communicator.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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").
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.
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 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/>
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.
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
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)