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Gates: "Linux will have Limited Impact"
tomas writes ""Addressing an audience of information technology professionals in Houston, Gates said there was clearly a
market for free software but this was mainly confined to relatively simple applications such as word processing and spreadsheets".
Get the full story and read the full comments. Geez-someone wrap him in asbestos, methinks.
For US (not U.S but for us geeks) Gates is irrelevant, he would be relevant if he had SO much power that he could control protocols.. but that will never happen. MS will be split up, or not.. it doesn't matter cause Linux and the Free BSD's will not die. And for all those poeple whining: "Welcome to the Real World, where commercial software development blablabla..". I just don't care about your silly "real word". I know it, I live in it, doesn't mean I have to like it do I?
Don't you get it? There's NO WAY Windows will ever outpower Linux/BSD because it's decisions are based on marketing instead of pure technical issues, making Linux unbeatable.
So please, stop posting stuff about anti-Linux FUD, about misleading Benchmarks etc. Peace Slashdot brothers and sisters!
Well, there you go.
In the 80s, they said that free software was OK for simple stuff, but it would never come out with anything "production quality".
Then gcc came out, and it was production quality.
In the early 90s, they said that it would be limited to hacker tools, and nobody would ever make things for real users.
Then gimp, kde, enlightenment, gnome and the rest of them came out, and real users started using them.
Now they say free software will be limited to simple applications, and it'll never be able to make anything with more than a few features.
*yawn*. I'm off to hack Mozilla some more.
Yeah, I've been following that story for a while, and submitted it to /. a week or so ago. Apparently, despite its repeated protestations that /. is not a Linux-only site, "Bill Gates makes fun of Linux" is somehow more nerd-news-worthy than spamming through amateur radio satellites. I also haven't seen anything here about the recent FCC rule changes making it a crime to scan cell-phone frequencies (instead of making cell phone manufacturers implement secure communications).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whatever happened to John Locke's 'informed public' that is able to 'do the right thing?'
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAA
If spreadsheets and wordprocessors are such simple apps that can be developed for free than why does MS charge such an insane price for Office (which is one of their biggest money makers)
;)
If they are so simple, maby gates should make them open source... Im mean after all, they cant be worth much and it would be a great pr move
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I thought the microsoft stance was that while linux is very good at doing difficult tasks we were lacking a gui and desktop apps?
Now we've got the desktop apps and 5 window managers and the FUD is claiming what exactly?
Bill G. is just covering his own ass. He Plainly Just Don' Get It.
Let's just hope he continues to have this attitude in public as well as privately, so the full guns of the Microsoft Juggernaut are not brought to bear on our asses.
-- adr
Let's take this article apart:
Addressing an audience of information technology professionals in Houston, Gates said there was clearly a market for free software but this was mainly confined to relatively simple applications such as word processing and spreadsheets.
Like Office 97, which costs more than Windows 98 and is MS's cash cow? It sounds to me like MS thinks that Windows' best applications don't come from Microsoft!
The Microsoft chairman noted, for example, that early Internet browsers had been distributed for free, but said that modern browsers were far more sophisticated and could no longer be developed in a noncommercial environment.
So what's Mozilla, then? It sounds like he's saying that Mozilla doesn't count as a "modern browser". Oh wait, didn't he mean to say "browsing technology"!?!?
``Today the browsers have gotten rich enough that it's not the kind of software that you can develop and test in a university-type of environment,'' he said.
He's trying to make people think that Open Source software is written only by college students. What a crock.
Gates said Microsoft took Linux seriously but felt that most customers would continue to favor Windows because it was a more homogenous product than Linux, development of which is in the hands of a diffuse band of programmers.
Ha! As if MS's own programmers were any less diffuse. Since when has a corporation's programmers had any direct accountability to the users? Say you find a printing bug in Excel. Can you call the developer who wrote that code at Microsoft and ask him why he screwed up? Of course not! Besides, John Dvorak wrote that a lot of ex-MS programmers have said that the build environment for Windows is so confusing that there isn't any one person in charge of it all.
Gates said, for example, that there were five different windowing systems that run on Linux.
And every version of Windows has a different look to it! I wonder how much money those corporations spent on retraining their employees when they switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
``The fact that you don't have a central testing point to control ultimately how to build these things probably means that the impact will be fairly limited,'' Gates said.
Testing!?!?!? Did I just hear Bill Gates tout the testing of Windows 98 as an advantage?!?! If those people really tested their software, would it be as buggy as it is?
``People really do want something that's been tested against all the different applications, so that they know exactly what is out there,'' he said.
The only time MS tests with other vendor's applications is when they want to find a way to break them.
This has led some industry observers to suggest that the system, originally created by a Finnish college student, could one day challenge the supremacy of Microsoft's Windows.
I don't use Linux since OS/2 is my OS of choice, but I think Linux is already challenging Windows. That sentence should read "could one day defeat the supremacy of Microsoft's Windows."
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
I have noticed the sudden increased advertising for the company. The benchmarks, the claims, the coop advertising. Its getting thick with FUD.
It will be interesting to see what about to happen. Usually, a company starts spending massive amounts of marketing money when it or a competitor is about to push something through the door.
Although what you said is probably true, i have a nice pII 350 linux setup right now; even if the kernels stopped coming and everything ground to a halt, i'd *still* have a nice linux setup.
.. just avoid them.
mp3s, netscape, wordperfect, gcc, nice window managers, endless customizability and stability: it's good enough for me.
There will always be hardware available that linux can run on. it's like winmodems
ziffie.
---
"Colors blind the eye
Desires wither the heart."
-- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"
Want to see a real story? Check this out. Big corporation steals, walks all over the law, and when confronted about it shows only contempt for the accusers, mouthing bald-faced lies about what it is doing.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That's not entirely true. Linux needs a sufficiently large installed base to get the hardware verdors' attention. The code may very well be free, but what good is it if all the hardware you can buy is proprietary, and requires you to sign an NDA to develop drivers for? Free software needs the market share, because market share is what hardware vendors care about. If we can convince them that by supporting Linux they'll sell more hardware, Linux will continue to be a viable option.
You realize that it doesn't matter what Gates says, right? I mean, the man was on a roll for a long time, but he and his company are losing credibility these days. No...let me rephrase that...they're hemmoraging credibility. The main stream press reports what He says, and the main stream press also reports what He does. They also report all the DOJ shenanigans, etc etc etc.
What Gates does or does not say will have Zero impact on this movement. Nothing Gates can say will impact the quality of Open Source code. Nothing Gates can say will stop people who know what they're doing from turning to Linux and Apache for their file server and web server solutions. Nothing Gates can say will stop the growing throng of people who are turning to Linux and Open Source Software.
People who know computers know that Microsoft stuff sucks. Nothing Gates can say can stop that. There are more computers out there than ever before, and the number is growing. There are more people out there using computers. There are increasing numbers of people who understand computers and are experienced with them.
Gates/Microsoft continues to try to keep users from becoming skilled computer users by hiding all the "hard stuff" from them. This is in their best interest, of course, because people who know computers know that Microsoft sucks.
Nothing Gates can say or do can stop this. His company's success in making the computer more prolific is dooming him where it should have created a Microsoft world. You know what their failures are:
1) They make crappy software.
2) They market to the lowest common denominator.
The second anyone tries to do anything with their computer that is outside of M$'s narrow little definition of the "average user" they realize just how horrible and limiting and frustrating MS products can be.
Anyhow...I'll wrap up by repeating myself: it doesn't matter what Gates says. He cannot stop us, so ignore him. Not even the main stream press really takes him seriously anymore...not with everyone in the world launching a lawsuit against 'em.
- dria
Yah! I smiled at this one. Doesn't Microsoft pride itself on the casual "campus" environment up in Redmond?
I also found it hilarious that Linux is only good for word processing and spreadsheets. According to the what I read in the trade press, Microsoft's revenues would be significantly lower without MS Office9x. I doubt that Visual BASIC is what's paying for Bill Gates' new house.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Well maybe Gates knows something not many other people do -- Microsoft Office has gotten pretty much every feature that could be possibly be devised. Pretty soon, someone is going to come up with a reasonably good enough clone, and then their cash cow is dead.
The long term plan for Office is to turn it into the front end for a client-server document management/groupware/web publishing system. Microsoft has found out that the network is the profit center and may be ready to ceed the 'simple' word proc and spreadsheet market.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I think a good part of the idea behind free software is having freely available applications like word processors. Think about: since the 8088 people have been using pc's for the same thing: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and a few other odds and ends. And that has been the MAIN use computers have gotten, until the recent advent of the net. And businesses are similar, the only have a few actualy applications they run, mostly databases. Sure, the apps have come a long way from what they used to be, but really, sometimes the functionality isn't all that different. With every generation of computers there has been another generation of word processors and databases, etc. But these programs can only evolve so much more... why should people have to keep shelling out to microsoft for them? It would be much better for everyone to have a freely available program that did all these things. Along with a freely available OS and freely available web browser, and a nice freely available gui, free software would take most of the business from companies like Microsoft. Hell, you wouldn't even need a PC, just an "appliance" with a microprocessor to handle these applications.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
I think there will be more money to be made in spreadsheets and wordprocessors than in OS's for a long time coming. I have yet to see a "free" (read non-commercial, open-source-software (OSS)) spreadsheet or wordprocessor that was acceptable.
Further more I'm convinced that in the future (say 10 to 20 years) money in software will only be made on HIGH priced, but small market products. Things where the user base isn't big enough to support a good OSS project. Or in very limited time projects (Tax software, with a 3 month window of usefullness).
5 windowing systems? Last I saw, there was only one windowing system on Linux and that's X11 ( Berlin doesn't seem to be going anywhere in the near future ). There's a dozen or so window managers, but I haven't met an app yet that cared much about the window manager. Some of the desktop environments might be a different matter, but even there it looks like apps are going to be relatively independent of the desktop. Worst case seems to be that you lose things like drag-and-drop between apps if you aren't running a desktop that supports the right protocol.
Bill, get a clue: Linux isn't Windows and we don't have to live with a tightly-bound mess like the one you created. So we have multiple window managers, so what? They all talk ICCCM and similar standard protocols at this point, so from the app's POV it's irrelevant which one is running.
And if Linux is only going to have limited impact, why's it growing 8 times as fast as NT?
I think your missing a very important factor that is vital to the success and life of Linux.
:)
It doesn't matter what Microsoft attempts to do to Linux. Linux is not just some corporate entity, burdened with the rules enforced by some CIO. Linux has existed for years without any corporate recognition or support. Although Linux does have support now, it could be taken away and Linux would still live.
Linux doesn't play by Microsoft's rules, and it never has. Let MS bring out the full guns, they can't destroy Linux
I think web browsers provide possibly the best illustration of how wrong he is. Yes, they started off free and open source, and then a couple people decided to try to make money off of it and they went commercial. But now look at the state of things. IE is being given away and Netscape has gone open source. It is worth noting that the open source version of netscape appears to be vastly superior to the old version upon initial impressions. So this doesn't hold true at all.
Linux vs. Microsoft is another good example of how wrong this notion is. Certainly an OS is one of the more complicated things somebody can develop and yet Linux is far superior in every way to Windows NT where it even attempts to compete. Linux may lack in the GUI department but that's because the GUI is a completely seperate project (which by all rights it should be). Without a GUI, the ease of use issue is somewhat hard to compare, but I've generally found Unix much easier to deal with than DOS.
Ironically the things that Bill indicated as being simple (word processing, spread sheets), are the things that he makes the most money on.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'm fairly disgusted with the complete obliveration of the free market and public good that is rampant in modern capitalism. Whatever happened to John Locke's 'informed public' that is able to 'do the right thing?' As long as economic might makes right we shall forever be held in the gripes of mediocrity. The jaded view of the American public destroys any hope for an objective judgment body that would be allowed to represet any consumer 'truths'. Such that even if the 'truth is out there' we would not be willing to listen, for the most part. The recently posted WinNT over Linux/Apache web serving is an extreme case in point. Bleh.
What are the five windowing systems? ;)
:P
KDE, Gnome, Afterstep, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, FVWM, FVWM95? Oh wait, that's MORE than five!!! But I think his point was we're all slack-jawed mouth breathers, and choices confuse us. He is so right. That's why I have the LiteStep shell replacement on my Win95 (gag) machine at work.
What exactly is a "university-type environment"?
One that supports the open exchange of ideas, I guess. Can't have that. Problems might get solved that way. Then how do we charge for support and fixes, if everything runs right?
Oh, and who is charging for their browser now?
Opera and, according to some, Microsoft. Though M$ doesn't do it directly. Because they're so complicated they have to be sold, apparently. My IE browser at home was so complicated I removed it, and now I have 98lite (used only for Quake2, thanks to nVidia). Much less complicated. Much faster, too.
I also find it interesting (as did AC) that now Linux, the mega-hit per day server, the firewall, the router, the mailserver, the Beowulf cluster monster, my desktop at home, blah blah blah is really only a very simple product, because it is free. I'll have to remember that tomorrow when something hangs on my machine here at work and takes all of Win95 with it. I, as a consumer, asked for that level of integration, of course. It's not instability, it's innovation.
FUUUUUDFUDFUDFUDFUDFUDFUD!!!
Good thing this is all such blatant bullshite only the pointiest of PHBs will buy it.
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Actually, I think Billgatus was saying that the only good free programs are the simple ones like word processors and spreadsheets. And Linux, the Little Toy OS(tm).
What I want to know is, if word processors and spreadsheets are simple, why do some of them require 100+ MB and cost umpteen bajillion dollars?
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
"Who them? They don't worry us here at MS."
Another way of stating this is: Marginallize it until we do it.
It's part of the "never let 'em see you sweat" school of thought.
Many of the early RDBMSes didn't do record level locking. When pressed, they'd say users didn't really need the feature [marginallize it]. Then they'd implement it, and charge extra for it [until we do it].
I once had the please of listeneing to an Oracle sales/marketing type discuss the archetecture of their Release 1.0 Oracle Web Server.
"Release 1 is a single process architecture, because that's more performant [sic].
Release 2 will be a multiprocess architecture, because that's more performant [sic]."
Remember: Marginallize it until we do it.
My Heart Is A Flower
He plainly does get it. Comments like this are not to discourage the people who have already discovered Linux, nor the companies (hardware and software) who have started to see Linux as a viable market, but those 95% of the people who really don't know, really do think that his judgement is the best, and are going to do according to what they read in the WSJ, USA Today, and other various sources for thier computer news.
And, if you think this doesn't affect us, that is where we could all sadly be mistaken. It's the slow migration and discovery of Linux by those 95% that is getting the money to start backing Linux. That is what allows mainstream, polished distributions, major hardware vendor backing, and more and more applictions written for linux. If that flow of people toward linux, even as a secondary OS, then the support will fade away, becuase believe what we want people, but the software, hardware and distribution backing really comes from money, and money is from market.
Comments like this are not for those who have discovered Linux, but those who are just starting to hear about it. And the last thing we need for them to hear is Big Bill telling them it's going to be nothing more then the next Pet Rock or Rubiks Cube: nothing more then a passing fad.
Didn't I remember Netscape charging for Navigator until some other software "company" started giving out their browser for free?
:p Yuk!)
Oh, wait, I forgot. The browser is now so complicated that it is indistinguishable [sp?] from the operating system and therefore we have to pay for it as part of the OS? Sheesh! (man I love that little 'go' button on IE5
Answer me this....
Does the population of computer users who truly excel in the field prefer Linux or Windows?
How quickly is that population growing?
(I should be a reporter)
Central Testing Point huh? We all know how buggy windows is and how long it takes to get fixes. If Microsoft's testing works so good, how do you explain all those bugs? What will ultimately make Linux superior is the fact that the testing environment is far larger than anything that can be commercially developed. Linux has thousands of developers who are using, fixing and updating the OS on a everyday basis. And Linux is not actually free! You are paying the developer in something that is much more important and valuable than $$.
Anyway what does Bill Gates know about software and QC? He had to buy DOS. He is a darn good CEO. He shouldn't don the image of Tech guru. Let someone at MS Research do that.
Many was the time, as I struggled through the process of really learning to use Linux as my primary operating system, that I felt like handing #linux a large chunk of my mind. Why is it that a politely worded, if somewhat naive question seems to garner scorn and derision from so much of our community?
Why are we so quick to ridicule the uninitiated for the unpardonable sin of daring to try and enter our sanctums? After all, was it so darned easy for _us_ to learn?
The fact is this: Linux has important advantages over Microsoft in all areas _except_ PUBLIC RELATIONS. Just as the Linux development community is collectively responsible for the code, the Linux user community is collectively responsible for the public perception of this OS, and we have not been doing our job. As Linux users we have a responsibility to be more polite, more civilized, better spoken, and, most of all, more helpful than the unwashed baboon hordes of Microsoft. If we lose the battle for public perception, we lose. Period.
There seems to be an attitude prevalent in the community that there is nothing which can be done about M$'s FUD. FUD only works because it contains a grain of truth. Those the media mistakenly calls "hackers" are a noisy, unruly, rude, loutish bunch. Linux is more difficult for a new user to learn how to deal with than MS Windows. But those facts are _our_ fault. The annoying kids populating IRC are our fault. We haven't done anything about it. Where are responsible channel operators who are willing to kick someone for being rude? After all, we're talking about #linux, not #teenchat, and the free speech of adolescent boys is _not_ a big concern of mine. Linux is harder for a newbie to pick up on because we haven't made a concerted efford to make it otherwise. Where is the network of volunteers contributing their time to help people who've just gotten the word?
That's really all I have to say. We can criticize Gates for this all we want, but all he's really doing is being clever and hitting us where we're weakest--PR. As with everything about an open OS, it is up to us to change that.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
Did I miss something, here?
"The Microsoft chairman noted, for example, that early Internet browsers had been distributed for free, but said that modern browsers
were far more sophisticated and could no longer be developed in a noncommercial environment.
``Today the browsers have gotten rich enough that it's not the kind of software that you can develop and test in a university-type of
environment,'' he said."
I got Netscape 4.5 and IE 5.0 for free. Since when has _anyone_ charged for a browser???
The poor boy is obviously delusional. Somebody give him a smart pill, please!
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan