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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.
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."
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Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
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.