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Review:The Plot to Get Bill Gates
Aside from Daddy Warbucks, billionaires aren't very popular. Beyond the obvious reasons - envy and resentment - they tend to be a strong-willed, arrogant lot. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan - don't generally get to be billionaires through sensitivity and thoughtfulness.
Still, even by billionaire standards, Bill Gates seems hard to warm to. For one thing, he's the richest billionaire ever, topping more than $50 billion at last report. He seems almost lug-headedly arrogant, building a shockingly ostentatious digital place outside Seattle, practically mooning the judge during his recent anti-trust testimony, and of course, bludgeoning, acquiring, cutting down and stream-rolling innumerable competitors over the years.
Almost nobody seems to love him, not even other rapacious, slash-and-turn tycoons.
Gates is also personally elusive. He is not charming, charismatic, or appealing. His best-selling business books are vapid and cold. The carefully orchestrated interviews he gives - always in friendly, even adoring environments -- are banal. They reveal little vision or daring.
And for the many entrenched individualistic, Libertarian elements of the Net and Web, he is a nightmare: monopolistic and greedy and the purveyor of over-priced, ever obsolete, buggy software that exploits consumers and promotes computing ignorance.
Yet there he is, firmly atop the digital heap, a colossus who engulfs, devours, co-opts or buries wave after wave of competitors. Who now has so much money and power that he's become an icon rather than a CEO, capturing our imagination no matter what his gargantuan conglomerate does. Gates has nothing left to prove. And it's way too late to cut him down to size.
According to Gary Rivlin, author of the new book "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," (Times Business, $US 25), the people who hate Gates and are out to get him - the likes of Scott McNealy of Sun, Marc Andreessen and James Barksdale of Netscape, venture capitalist John Doerr, various anti-trust lawyers and government officials have become a culture all their own.
This book is the story of these idiosyncratic, sometimes rabid cabal of Silicon Valley muck-a-mucks known within Microsoft as "Captain Ahab's Club" for their obsessive pursuit of Redmond's own contemporary version of Moby Dick. (And that's not counting the nerds and geeks working in the open source and free software movements.)
For many of these people, says Rivlin, Gates has become an obsession. They talk and think about him constantly. He is always looking over their shoulder, the invisible man at every business meeting. What would Gates do? What does he think? What is he up to? They dump on him behind his back, then swoon at the sight of him.
At some point, writes Rivlin, Gates ceased to simply be a powerful computer industry figure, and instead, "infiltrated the world's dream life." A small universe of talented, driven people are working night and day to cut Gates down to size. But Rivlin's book suggests it may be too late for that.
Instead of tracking Microsoft software, Rivlin's mission is to track the various reincarnations of its CEO, "Gates 3.1", and the grievances - some substantial, some frivolous and ill-informed - that so many have against him.
This is fertile ground. Media coverage of Gates has been shallow. Gates is typically demonized or lionized, and neither stereotype seems quite right. Rivlin's notion - to understand Gates through his many adversaries - may offer the most telling insights yet into the reasons he's so successful, perhaps the best insight into Gates that we're ever going to get.
Rivlin presents a fair, intensely researched and direct account of the people who have taken Gates on, the generally losing struggles they've waged, and the insanely overheated business climate in Gates and his foes have been operating.
Gates inspires much stronger emotions in his adversaries than among the general public. Many of plots against him not only fail, they sometimes do more damage to the plotters than the target.
In fact, "The Plot To Get Gates" is as much a business history about the rise of Microsoft and the computing industry as it is a conspiracy story.
Amid much Gatesian hype and hysteria, it's refreshing to encounter some history and facts and a linear account of Microsoft's intricate battles and strategies.
Gates has prevailed mostly because he is a monomaniac, concludes Rivlin, because he believes he can and must win every time. He believes he is smarter, tougher than anybody else. He might be right.
According to Rivlin's chronicle, Gates is an indestructible life form: Chop off one leg and three more grow back; knock him over and he get gets up taller. Every effort to best him seems only to make him stronger, richer and more ferocious. Even the most savage assaults seem mostly to annoy him, like the original Godzilla swatting down those pesky jet fighters.
If you can judge a man by his enemies, Gates looks better. Rivlin doesn't show us anyone more agile or noble.
Still, this account comes at an odd time in Microsoft's history which may finally be doing to Gates what all of his many determined detractors couldn't.
While there's no sign that his company will totter and fall anytime soon, one has the sense that the history of the Net and the Web are moving past the man. Microsoft and its software are still pre-eminent, but the company no longer seems to be at the heart of the action.
The open source and free software movements - the literal antitheses of Microsoft and it's business philosophy -- have gained a strong foothold on the Net, demonstrating at a minimum that one can live digitally without turning over money to Microsoft, presenting the business world with its first real alternative. And stunningly successful new business platforms -- eBay, MP3, e-trading sites, ICQ and Hotline messaging systems - have sprung up entirely apart from Gates and Microsoft.
His company's many expensive lunges into the media world - Slate, MSN, MSNBC, the Sidewalk sites - are all struggling, sold, or on the block. It isn't Gates? new ideas that keep him so flush; it's the old ones, so durably profitable.
Rivlin's saga of the many, mostly unsuccessful efforts to challenge Gates and Microsoft are compelling for what they reveal about the man, especially since he (despite the media that swarm around him) has revealed so little about himself.
Gates is ferociously tenacious, competitive and - at least when it comes to defining his own role --- fleet-footed. He has an amazing capacity to re-engineer himself - thus his company -- no small skill in so fluid and brutally competitive a marketplace. Like the late Chairman Mao, he does business with a revolutionary fervor, zero tolerance for competition, and a continuous sense of (sometimes brutal) upheaval and renewal.
There is, nonetheless, an unyielding blandness about the man that makes it as difficult to hate him as to like him.
If we know more about Gates than we do about Onassis, Rockefeller or Morgan, it's sometimes tougher to care. Stacked up against history's billionaires, we have to struggle not only to understand him, but to remember why we want to.
Buy this book at Amazon.
This article alludes to the 1 reason Bill Gates has so much money:
"the purveyor of over-priced, ever obsolete, buggy software that exploits consumers and promotes computing ignorance. "
and
"His company's many expensive lunges into the media world - Slate, MSN, MSNBC, the Sidewalk sites - are all struggling, sold, or on the block. It isn't Gates? new ideas that keep him so flush; it's the old ones, so durably profitable."
Bill Gates owns that software that all the world's ignorant computer users think that they need. Basically, something that's still compatible with DOS. Fear of something different among the ignorant is what keeps him rich. It's not his ability to make new products or new businesses.
this guy is commenting that the article is boring, and you moderate it down to offtopic???? please explain the reasoning to me
Well you have a point but ask yourself this.
If his enemies did remove these (percieved) deficiencies would people indeed move emass over to their products and services? Or would the more likely outcome happen. Because of inertia, apathy, vendor-lock, monopoly, etc people would stay with what they're using. Therefore assuring Bill Gates place regardless of what they do.
> If we know more about Gates than we do about
/. readers may also enjoy this book for the same reason.
> Onassis, Rockefeller or Morgan, it's sometimes
> tougher to care.
It's interesting that this article should come
up just as I have started reading a new book on Rockefeller. Riveting. This fellow, at least, can no longer be placed on the above enigma list.
I bought it to read about a Gates-like figure without being affected by the distorting emotions that comes when contemplating contemporary figures. Other
It is: `Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.', by Ron Chernow.
Joe
Show me a secretary thats ready to tar -xvf somefile.tar, or an executive thats willing to chmod 700 whateverfile and I'll shut upReally?
Who taught secretaries to use PKZIP -r -P dir1\*.* ? Was it microsoft? That whole right click thing to change permissions is real hard too.
This soapbox commentary - there wasn't enough REVIEW to call this a review - doesn't really even get its facts straight. All the examples of things that have sprung up apart from Microsoft - eBay, most e-trading sites, ICQ particularly - use Microsoft products fairly extensively. Although eBay's database might be on UNIX, their web servers (at least when I last checked) ran WinNT. Most e-commerce sites I've visited recently seem to have embraced ASP - which means IIS and consequently WinNT - over any other scripting type to sell their wares. And ICQ? It isn't owned by MS, but its first and most popular OS is Windows. Regardless of whether MS is good, their products have entrenched themselves in many places. As for MP3s and Hotline, I'm pretty sure more people run these on Windows than on all other OSs combined. Other than die-hard techies, I meet very few people who complain about windows because it can't stay up for 27 days.
Thank god! It's about damn time some geek became a sex symbol. :)
This, I think, EVERYONE could benefit from.
oh dear . . . if you think Cato is a libertarian organisation, my friend, you must be one of those other-wordly software geeks I keep hearing about.
Cato are corporate flacks pure and simple. They'd be perfectly happy in a totalitarian state, so long as that state doled out enough corporate welfare to keep their paymasters in clover. There was a time when Cato produced the odd decent libertarian tract, but they've just been the "Privatise Social Security" people for a couple of years now.
And there's nothing particularly libertarian about a con game.
jsm
Boy, now I'm depressed. I can imagine Bill in 30 years; dropping his snow globe and uttering...
rosebud
if you're worth 90 something billion dollars, and dont get mad pussy, there's definitely something wrong.
hi. i'm the original poster - i agree fervently with everything you've just said. java is a total letdown.
I think at least in the software server market this would occur. Linux is an example. The new 4.x Netscape servers look a lot better, but the documentation and support is still lacking. Even if you cannot get direct support from Microsoft for a product, their knowledge base is outstanding and there are a lot of alternative sources (newsgroups, third-party and MS Press books, etc.). It is a lot harder to find alternate sources of information for Netscape products, which means that they *have* to provide good support themselves. Instead of doing that
they waste time whining about Microsoft. It does not help anyone!
As far as browsers go, the browser king title was Netscape's to lose and unfortunately they dropped the ball. Lets also not forget that Netscape
was giving their browser away for free before MS
ever did (even if it was only to academic institutions). What they did not grasp was that
once you give something away for free it is very, very hard to start charging for it.
Not attractive looks. It's the money that they only see, is so beautiful.
There is way too much truth and sanity in the above response. Will someone please remove it from our midst? People can't accept that the world doesn't owe them anything.
Get real! You can hate MS all you want for their business practices, but I'm sick of all this garbage about their products not working. All of the big software packages have their problems, but Microsoft's are no worse than anybody elses. WordPerfect crashes _more_ than Word. Navigator is probably the most unstable piece of software that I have. So at least be fair in your arguments.
Takr this with a big grain of salt, because I'm a chemist/CS type person and not a biologist/virologist/whatever (just read a lot, heh heh) that would have true insight into this, but don't virii that mutate into an air vectored form genrally become less virulent? For some reason my mind is bringing up the common cold as an example but I can't think of what the corresponding non-aerial virus would be. So, I'm I'm recalling this correctly, an airborne AIDS would be less virulent than the current strain. So, basically, your immune system might be screwed for a year instead of permenantly (telecommute city!).
.02USD.
Anyhow, my
damn slashdot for making passwords so hard to remember... m|ke
The real reason Bill Gates and his company, Micro$oft, are (were) so successful is that they have shamelessly exploited (read "embraced and extended") the best ideas of others.
.tmp file has part of it.
So? Would you like some cheese with that whine?
3. Windows. I won't get too far into this one. M$ stole the idea, lock, stock and barrel, from Apple. Who had stolen it from Xerox's PARC.
Who cares? Apple sued over this, they lost. I don't here you bitching about KDE stealing from Apple. The fact that you can have a very Mac looking Linux doesn't seem to have you up in arms does it.
It took them no less than THREE iterations (three!) to get this ugly piece of crap functional.
I remember playing Balance of Power on Windows 2.0. Worked fine for me. I didn't particularly care for it, but it worked ok.
In the meantime, since they were still making gobs of money from MS-DOG, they stabbed IBM in the back (not a big loss),
Thats an interesting spin.
sunk Digital Research (a company 1000% more creative than they were)
But still a business. Some people forget that everyonce in a while. For example, did you buy any DR products? If not, why not?
Lotus? Let's do a 1-2-3 killer!
Lotus dropped the ball. They had a corner on the spreadsheet market and got fat and lazy.
OS/2? No way! Wordperfect? Here comes WinWord!
Wordperfect sucked. Crashed all the time when I used it. Nothing like spending 3 hours writing a paper and having it crash and hoping the
DBase? Let's buy Fox Software! Borland? Here comes Quick C & Quick Pascal! Oh please. Microsoft didn't kill Borland with QuickC and Quick Pascal. Turbo C and Turbo Pascal blew both of those away in market share and performance. Borland died from its own business ineptitude. Borland C++ 4.x were dogs. Once Visual C++ 2.0 came out, Borland was hosed in the compiler game. Here, Borland had a better product and they screwed up. I myself switch from Borland at this point, and I went from being pro-Borland and a Microsoft hater to a grudging Microsoft user. Its about the products stupid.
Internet? Let's become an Internet company and pollute HTML every chance we get! Every time, they used their competitor's ideas and turned out mediocre, inferior imitations of the real thing... All of this bankrolled by the near-monopoly of MS-DOG.
And they've been a hell of a lot more benevolent than someone like Sun would've been or Oracle. Don't forget, the darling Netscape tried to push through just as many standards as Microsoft.
What a lot of the free software idiots don't realize is that for businesses to beat Microsoft, they have to be better at business. That means not only making a superior product, but outmarketing Microsoft as well, penetrating the markets, and not resting on their asses when they already dominate the market like most of Microsoft's so called victims have done. Most of the companies crushed by Microsoft deserved it. The levies of buggy, inferior software can be applied to Borland over and over, WordPerfect, and Lotus to name a few.
This whole debate to me is a lot like the Protestants vs the Catholics. Both of them are pretty damn stupid at times, and its all based off of faith and not on reality. I've seen both sides, the religious Microsoft backers who think Microsoft can do no wrong, and then the rabid frothing at the mouth linux pundits that blame Gates for everything from global warming to cattle mutilations.
If Gates is truly a geek, he should use some of his billions to help fund the first manned spacecraft mission to Mars... and start on this project right away.
:-)
P.S.: Please, just no MS commercial software allowed on any of the critical systems on the spacecraft
You obviously don't know much about early microsoft. In the early 80's Gates sent letters to several computer trade magazines that were against people using other peoples code and pirating software. That is what the person ment in the previous post... However it is really quite redundant to the topic...
What a fitting metaphor. Bill Gates' house mirrors his personality. Bland and inoffensive on the outside, but who knows what goes on beneath the surface?
Actually he is only the fifth richest billionare of all time. John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, one other I can't remember all had more money than Gates. Rockefeller had $190 Billion (not adjusted for inflation)
moderators, please bump this up to a 5.
the reason i don't like microsoft is because everyone uses it, including family members and since i'm a computer engineeer, guess who gets the calls at odd hours from family members i haven't seen in years who call because windows crashed and they can't figure out why and how to get it back up again?
yes, it's partly my fault that i didn't make a general announcement that i'm a unix engineer, and that they should have bought a macintosh, or bought a pre-installed linux system with a how to use linux in 21 days book.
however, i'm f###ing sick of it, i'm sick of microsoft's products, and i'm sick of their monopoly.
>For a consumer product 'works for most' simply >isn't good enough and should not be tolerated.
Unfortunatly, and with all due respect, the marketplace seems to have rather solidly disproved this statement. The VW Beetle and Ford Taurus are/were crappy cars, but that didn't stop them from being big sellers. NKOTB may suck big time but I sure wish my band had their album sales.
The fact that this company can do as well as it does with the shit that is Win9X/DOS is really simply amazing. The amount of lost productivity to DOS based OSes have to be truly staggering.
The shift to the NT kernel is really MS only hope. This shift will be slow. It will happen and it will allow MS to remain afloat. However, the foot in the door that DOS based crap is already allowing OSS software will be viewed as a major boost to the inevitable: Linux or other Open Source OS as the base of all computing.
I think people often confuse their frustration at Microsoft's monopoly power (and it's consequences) with some personal hatred of MS's management - William H. Gates being the ultimate figurehead.
Money aside (and I don't think many in this community are truly driven by financial greed), there is little to envy about Mr. Gates' life.
He is a strange figure when viewed from the hacker perspective. On the one hand, he's technically brilliant, and must intellectually appreciate high-quality software and open standards. On the other hand, he is cursed (blessed?) with a monomaniacal desire to succeed commercially and the business instincts (and talents) to do it, often at the expense of technical purity and (at the very least by hacker standards) ethics.
There is much to be learned from studying MS - they have some questionable practices, but also some very good practices that are yet to be truly emulated.
MS exceeds at attracting and retaining brilliant people (especially young ones with alot of energy). Fortunately, the Open Source movement seems to be attracting a whole generation of young, talented programmers into the mindset of technical quality and open standards. But when it comes to technical college recruiting (actually making lucrative offers to the right people at the right time and aggressively pursuing them), nobody came close to MS at my alma mater.
MS also understands that the key to sustaining momentum in their products is capturing the corporate developer. The open standards community is certainly very appealing to the technically elite or naturally curious, but the evolving realities of corporate IT - at least in the US - require an increasing number of less technical people to be rapidly trained and dropped into technical jobs. Microsoft goes a long way towards making their products an easy choice for these developers - through integrated tools, online resources, even certification programs that allow people with little technical background to come up to a certain standard of knowledge (some of you will snicker - but in corporate America that's often the reality).
We live in an exciting time. In the technology markets, traditional binary competition (A's standard or B's standard) is evolving towards a much more sophisticated model of cooperative competition - where products have to freely interact and compete for the very specific needs of each customer.
As Nite_Hawk points out, we are in a position to have a lot more fun than the William Gateses of the world. He had his fun days in the garage and taking on the gargantuan IBM. Now he has to try to hold together his empire against a world that increasingly rewards a level of innovation and flexibility that is much harder to generate in a company burdened by the very source of its power: its existing products (and APIs).
A realistic view of Microsoft's future is that it will continue to be a major force, but increasingly less dominant.
As this process occurs, Mr. Gates, despite enjoying more 'success' than others even dream of, will probably be a very unhappy man.
...Writing Commisioned Books For His Majesty's Posterity...
...oh, and here dad... you're only useful function in life was to bring me into existance... to bad you couldn't raise me to be a functional human being... why don't your brush up my image (that is a parent's job, right) by giving away some of my vast wealth (just think, if he'd been a little more generious prior to his mother's sickness she might still be around... well, I guess hindsight is 20/20 even if you are a complete tyranical bastard).
> "love thy neighbor as thyself"
Dude... he doesn't live in my neighborhood.
In fact, he doesn't live in ANYONE's neighborhood, which says more negative things about him than it does about you or me.
"love your neighbor?" Oh, that one's easy... no neighbors and all I have to love is myself, right? "Next problem, God", said Mr. Gates just prior to being struck by lightening...
Except that the little people (monks, etc) of the RCC kept the old literature around and saved quite a bit of knowledge which would have otherwise been lost.
Also, one must remember that for all Luther did, Catholicism is still larger than any of the Protestant religions, in fact, larger than any one other religion. (20% world share)
...It's his fscking kid!
Well, we can only hope that the 10 million cap on its inheritance will limit it later in life
in the mean time, anyone want to pass the hat around to buy it a decent nanny who will keep it from growing up to be a completely emotially void thing with too much money and an important name?
Agreed. This Microsoft fixation is getting tiresome, especially from a group of people who one would think was far more capable than the average person to be able to think logically and resist mindless repetition of the media-induced crap that fills the mind of the average citizen. Has anyone else noticed that although Microsoft HAS always played the tricks of the market, it has all but spurned the politics game. For a long time Microsoft had no lobbyists, and still barely has any last I checked (they started half-heartedly lobbying right after (I think)the first antitrust suits over Win95 so long ago). So here we have a company that is neither trying to get anything from the government, nor either wanting anything from them. They didn't play the kickback game in other words. Suppose that has anything to do with why the DOJ is after them?
Honestly here, does anyone have a story of having to load Windows at gunpoint? If your PHB makes you use NT, is that Microsoft's fault or your boss's?
Lastly, what's with this Linux community "beat Microsoft"? This is a pathetically low goal to set, isn't it? If all you ever care about is being better than someone else, that will be all you will be. Try for "as good as possible" and Microsoft (or anyone else) will not only be left in the dust but won't have a chance to beat you. I'd be a lot more impressed if I knew the money for, say, a Netscape product was paying for the development of a kickass product instead of funding someone's petty envy-fueled grudgematch against a richer CEO.
--Shadowstrider, but I forgot my password. Also changed ISP/email addy, so I can't get it back. Damn. One argument for making every website have the same password instead of being security conscious I guess.
"If at first you don't succeed, you can always sue the annoying bastard who did"
You're not the first one to make this observation. In the book "Accidental Empires" by Robert X. Cringley, the chapter about Microsoft is entitled "Chairman Bill leads the Happy Workers in Song."
A good read, that book.
John Walker, founder of AutoDesk which makes AutoCAD, had to deal with MS a lot.
This link :
http://www.fourmilab.to/documents/msapogee.html
which he wrote, describes pretty well what is going to happen, even if it is a little old.
Don't look at the current numbers, which will mislead you, instead, look at the trends. Kind of like you look at the first derivative curve in calculus to see what is happening in the equation.
The trends are that the real innovation are happenning on the Web, and on Linux; increasingly, cool new stuff that comes out runs on more than MS platforms, or even runs on Linux and not on MS. I think that is what Jon's point is above when he talks about eBay - you can use ANY Web device to access eBay, even a Netscape browser, running on Linux - the success is not tied to MSFT!
Just IMHO
Patrick Giagnocavo
a222@redrose.net
people gather around people who tell them what they want to hear.
Defence is the key to winning, but you'll never win unless you're on the offence some as well. That's the point he tried to make.
If most of Bill G.'s value is in his Microsoft stock:
1. If he liquidated it, wouldn't that ruin the company?
and 2. How could he liquidate $100 billion? I.e., who's gonna buy?
>> The open source and free software movements - the literal antitheses of Microsoft and it's business
>> philosophy -- have gained a strong foothold on the ^^^
>Oh, and on the nit-picky side, that sohuld be "its" (belonging to it), not "it's" (contraction of 'it is').
And, as usual, the person pointing out the spelling/grammer error makes an error himself. How typical.
Perhaps you were trying to be ironic?
Its like you started using computers yesterday, and happened to read the latest Microsoft marketing blitz. Microsoft in no way invented User Friendliness. They didn't invent the GUI. What positive have they done for Joe Schmoe? Lets Look at Excel for example, or even MS Office. 10 years ago, both Lotus and D-base were just as good.
Why is it that when I erase Microsoft software, I have to insert the software' CD? Why is it when I imported excel spreadsheets into Word, it crashes 9/10? Why is it when I export data from MS access to Word's mail merge, using the mail merge format, I get meaningless error messages? User friendliness, where?
Do you really believe most users can really fully install Windows95 from start even? Format HD, download and find drivers and what not?
For beginners Mac is still a better choice. The problem is lack of software, and what not. This has nothing to do with MS's excellence. It has to do with the fact that MS is the standard.
Do I need to enumerate how many software products were killed or never made it to market because MS is the beast that they are? MS kills innovation, because everyone is afraid of them. If you were to develop a good word processor for example, that was significantly better, what do you think your odds of success are? The fact of the matter is that Microsoft finds it far more economical to sit on their duff and conserve marketing dollars, than to actually spend large sums of money on real R&D. They just wait till the next threat comes along, and do whatever it takes to quash it. Be that netscape, corel, macintosh, you name it.
In all honesty, I can't think of any real positive's for the consumer. Almost every single one of their products was acquired or stolen from another company. Please tell me what it is that MS has contributed to this world, i'd really like to hear it. Atleast give me an argument.
FallLine @ work
...but Microsoft's are no worse than noybody elses. WordPerfect crashes _more_ than Word. Navigator is probably the most unstable piece of software that I have. So at least be fair in your arguments.
You probably haven't tested those apps on a non-MS OS? The results might be shocking for you.
You're bang on: Katz is a poor writer. He's the journalistic equivalent of MSFT's bloatware: he has no style, his facts are buggy and he takes 10x as many lines to say something as he needs to.
You're also right about the moderation - I've seen some nice gentle barbs moderated (read: censored) off the site. That's why I spend less and less time here. Do slashdot readers need some come of guidance? I don't think so. Do they need Katz? I don't think so either...
Simply, Katz makes for a worse slashdot. That's the end of the story for me.
Since you like your Indian food, how about you pay me $20 for every time you eat?
What? You don't understand why you should?
That is EXACTLY our point. Why should I have to pay the MS tax if I want a computer with a national warrenty? I'd have to buy it from Dell or Compaq or Gateway and they ALL (used to) sell only MS pre-loaded machines. You couldn't even buy a blank machine.
You're confusing Libertarianism with Organized Crime, again.
And don't start off on that "government should stay out of business" rant, either. If you want government out of business (no anti-trust laws) then we'll just get government OUT of business.
No copyright laws.
Let's see MS maintain their monopoly when anyone can use their code for free and hack on it and re-release it.
Hmmmmm, it seems your view has some serious holes.
Too bad, so sad.
Hello...
The focus on Gates as a person seems to be mostly a fixation of the media and financial community. And not a very sensible one--it seems to me that inside Microsoft, it's Ballmer who runs the show, and the 20-somethings that make the technical decisions.
I couldn't let this one slide by.
That's not exactly the case. Inside Microsoft, Gates doesn't care anymore about anything but the Internet. Throughout the rest of the company, Ballmer has 'final say', and the way decisions get made are a direct result of Ballmer's own style. Decisions are made on the basis of whomever yells the loudest and longest. Technical arguments are not won on the basis of fact, they are won on the basis of volume and persistence.
This is Ballmer's style, and he hired people who work the same or can survive working in that manner, and they hired people who work the same. It's just about as f**ked up as you can imagine.
Gates stopped caring about the goings on inside Microsoft when he got blindsided by the Internet and refocused himself on it. As soon as he stopped giving a damn about anything but that, the technical competence to management incompetence ratio fell through the floor in the company.
I'm posting this as an AC for obvious reasons.
Were you referring to ABASIC or the later AmigaBasic product? Both were true hallmarks of inferior BASIC design.
That last phrase does seem somewhat redundant...
But I don't appreciate the "Could it do anything but crash" crack. The Amiga is making a comeback with Linux. Then will come the Night of the Long Knives for all you Amiga scoffers. We know where you live.
"like the original Godzilla swatting down those pesky jet fighters. "
LoL man, there were like not any jet engines back when that movie was made!
Totally bogas mistake dude!!!
Just a few quick corrections.
First, the reason why IBM allowed Microsoft to retain the rights to MS-DOS was that IBM didn't think very much of the PC market. They were a big metal company; they are a big metal company, and PCs were introduced by IBM only because some blue suited fellow decided they needed products at every price point. So Microsoft retained the rights because honestly IBM didn't care about the PC revolution they helped to start.
Second, the notion of Apple stealing from Xerox is silly; that's one of those random things that has been put to rest quite a while ago. Those items that Xerox PARC invented that were not "open sourced" were licensed for a song to Apple--because Xerox, like IBM before, didn't understand the value of what they intented. (Xerox was, and is, a paper company.) Apple's lawsuit of Microsoft was because Microsoft pressured Apple into licensing elements of the MacOS to Microsoft for use in Windows 2.0--which Apple believed didn't apply to Windows 3.0 or Windows 95.
I'll also note that Visual C was bought from an outside company, as was other technologies for a number of Microsoft's better products. It seems that Microsoft is less of an innovator than their PR folks would want you to believe.
Where Microsoft succeeds, by the way, is in it's treatment of it's employees--its still the only major company I have ever heard of which doesn't attempt to "retire" it's programmers upwards into management after 5 years. Instead, there are separate career paths that allow you to make a bundle if you decide to stay a software programmer, including stock options which at most other companies are only seen by paper-pushing managers.
And of course the fact that Bill Gates hates to lose a fight.
I've rambled enough.
Borland lost out for a simple reason: during the transition from the Win16 to the Win32 API in Windows 95, Borland didn't make the transition fast enough. If you wanted to be on the cutting edge and start developing Win32s applications that were compatable with the upcomming Win95 operating system, you bought Visual C++.
Partially, I think it's Microsoft's fault: they were simply not making the new libraries and APIs available to Borland at the same rate they were making them available to the VC++ group within Microsoft. But it was clear from Borland that they were a bit reluctant to make the transition to 32-bit compiler technology, having invested so much into making their 16-bit technology as good as it was.
I've heard the acronym
NOISE (Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Everyone but Microsoft) used frequently.
One reason this cabal is unsuccesful is that some (McNealy and Ellison) are vying to be Gates-like figures themselves. This is certainly true for Ellison.
It does work, more or less. For the masses of consumers out there, their printers print. Their Word opens. Their modems dial the internet. IE5 works as well as or better than Netscape (neither is all that stable).
/. nerd, but it _works_ for most people.
It may not be up to par for your average
I was an MS intern last summer. He invited us to his house - the architecture was not "ostentatious" and about the only thing that I noticed that was "digital" about it was the artwork on the display screens but even that was done tastefully. He also talked with us for more than an hour and wasn't the "bland," visionless, moon-the-judge automaton reporters meet in interviews. From that evening with him in his backyard, I could tell the guy has a passion for cool technology and success. The surprising thing for me was that despite the fact that he's been known to call people communist if they forget about the bottom line, money isn't his primary objective anymore--he just wants to make the IAYF technology that changes the world--naturally, the money follows. Traditionally, doing that has required the leverage of a large corporation. Would you rather be begging hardware vendors to give you specs to write device drivers or would you rather have them begging you to write them for you? Ironically, it seems to me that he's got the same change-the-world motivation that drives the open source movement, and he's making it real. He's a hacker who's made it to the front line, not a pointy haired boss. That kind of motivation is entirely lacking in whos-got-the-bigger-house Bill-bashing Silicon Valley CEO's. A lot of times when the Ellisons and McNealy's point a finger at Ghengis Kahn I see three pointing straight back at them. Bill's got more in common with us than we realize.
their code worked.
Who out there would begrudge Bill a dime *IF* his software worked AS ADVERTISED?
Many consumers would buy and be happy if the code worked. The desire of many people to topple BillCo wouldn't exist if they didn't feel dissapointed by Micro$oft releases.
This 'disapointment' in Micro$oft is the achilles heal. All the competitors have to do is to promise and then deliver.
The OpenSource movement has the advantage. While promising and delivering, the product does not have to have a cash flow to survive, unlike the commerical world.
Death by 10,000 paper cuts, or an attack of artic circle mosquotoes is what BillCo fears.
Hey, I'm no fan of Bill's, but I do know more than a little about architecture (even Seattle architecture), and this statement is just plain wrong. Given that you are going to build a house of the scale of Gates', what Bill has built is about as far from ostentatious as possible. It is very much in the regional architectural style, so it doesn't stand out from its neighbors. Large portions of the house are underground, and the profile of those portions above ground is broken up and concealed with vegetation so that it appears to be multiple smaller buildings, not one overwhelming mass.
Even the inevitable disruption of construction was carefully orchestrated to minimize its impact on the neighborhood (to the extreme of buying neighboring properties to provide a buffer zone during construction.)
Notably, there are currently a couple of law suits around Seattle concerning overscale houses and disruptive construction practices, but Bill's house hasn't been the target of similar actions. In all honesty, this is a very nice and sensitive piece of architecture, and Bill is not a bad neighbor (at least in a residential sense.)
He knows how to get over on interns. I never met the man so I have to judge him by his public actions.
Remember, Hitler was a nice guy if you sat down to tea with him too.
Anyone offended by my use of hitler, feel free to substitute JDRockefeller, ACarnegie, TAEdison (before you flame for this one, research edisons position with regard to licensing motion picture technology) or any of the usual political figures.
Best comment I've heard all day... Damn, wish I had moderator status right now (I've already posted to this forum... Doh!)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Gates did start out with a dream... He tried very hard to impliment it. And in the process he very nearly destroyed the very industry he helped create. But then again, it seems as though his contemporaries (Ellison, McNealy, etc) are hell-bent on self-destruction. Their single-minded focus on one man distracted them from the real issues: making money, building market share, and so forth. Microsoft was always on the offensive, and everyone else was on the defensive (with the possible exception of Sun). Anyone who's watched a football or baseball or soccer or chess game knows who's more likely to win in a scenario like that.
I think that Gates deserves his fortune, but not the rest of the world's, too. I don't want MS to control our basic telecommunications infrastructure (hell I don't want any one organization to do that... power corrupts and all that). Look at the last major organization that controlled our thoughts and speech the way MS does now: The Roman Catholic Church. No more Tower of Babel of competing standards (religions). A CEO (pope) controls a corporation (church), and maintains his stranglehold over the consumers (peasants) by keeping control over his proprietary protocols (Latin Text Bibles), and by charging a small amount of money for upgrades (tithes) every once in a while. Competitors (heretics) are driven out of business (excommunicated), or bought up (forced to "confess" their sins). The executives (Bishops) grow fat with the excesses of wealth from stock options (church properties).
But then comes along Linus Torvalds (Martin Luther), a sometimes unwilling crusader for freedom.
Ok, that reference has been made before, but it bears repeating. After all, the Catholic Church in it's height of power was very nearly responsible for the Dark Ages (illiteracy was promoted and encouraged to prevent people from asking too many questions about their center of power, the Bible, among other things; therefore not a whole lot was written about that 1000 year epoch). Compare this to growing trends promoted by Microsoft to "make things easier" for you. Who needs literacy (computer or otherwise)? All you need to do is point and click! It's that simple! Oh don't pay attention to how proprietary our formats are... We're the One True (Microsoft) Way!
Comments were made about how proprietary formats are changing so fast that information stored today is lost a year from now. The storage mediums are slightly to blame, but that may become less of an issue as technology becomes sturdier (hopefully). The real issues are the data formats. When a software package is only partially compatible with previous versions of itself, data is lost. Imagine how much literature written only 10 years ago is lost today because the data formats are no longer supported! Probably not a whole lot now, but if these proprietary protocols continue their long march towards converting the masses, stuff like Jon Katz's review above (I caught the smart quotes, Jon... use Demoronizer :^) might not be readable in 15 years. Oh sorry, we don't support that old format, why don't you buy our new product instead!
Yea verily, we are in a Dark Ages of sorts. Our hope? Universal standardized formats. ASCII is still used everywhere; it probably won't go away. HTML and XML may probably also be what will be used for long-term storage. The reasons? The formats are simple, yet extensible and useful enough for a long time.
Hmmm I appeared to go off on a rant. I'll stop now. Maybe I needed to vent after listening to a Microsoft guy spout out "Global Market" and "At Your Fingertips" one too many times. Gods, I hate buzzwords. :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Bill Gates is not Ellison, Wozniak, or Jobs. He never risked anything real in his life -- lots of paper, perhaps his ego, but he never risked going hungry, not having a roof, or being forced to work in a fast food joint.
He has shown himself to be a very good businessman. I wouldn't confuse this with being a productive member of society. [Though to Gates' credit, most companies of Microsoft's size -- and the bussinessmen who lead them -- have done far worse things than MS]
I find it humorous that the exact same behavior (focusing corporate effort on taking out a competitor) that is so exemplary in Bill Gates is so quixotic for Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison. Would someone please explain to me how what Microsoft did to Digital Research or Netscape is any different from what Sun and Oracle want to do to Microsoft?
h tml). If you insist on seeing everything Oracle or Sun does as an attack on Microsoft, they've racked up an impressive string of failures (which reinforces the assumption that they're obsessed with taking on Bill- else why would they keep making such doomed attempts?). If, on the other hand, you look at them as attempts to please their customers...
McNealy and Ellison want to take one Gates for the same reason Dillinger robbed banks- "That's where the money is." Why is it considered irrational to look at the richest man in history and go "gee, I'd like a peice of that action"?
And lastly, I think the amount of time Ellison/McNealy spend on taking on Gates is vastly overrated. Even such proposals as RawIron (which is tangential to Oracle's anti-Microsoft thrust if anything is, considering the OS they're talking about replacing is _Solaris_) was seen as yet another bungled attempt to take on Microsoft (see http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2878.
>if you want something better than Windoze, build
> it yourself. The freedom to do that, and to
> cooperate with others to the same ends is the
> only thing the world "ows" you.
That is where you're wrong and why your attitude is too much one of a peasant. The world, or rather, the market very much owes all of us something:CHOICE. Choice is the payment we get out of being the smaller cogs that allow the obscenely wealthy to have something to base their success on. Benefiting by building wealth through capitalism is not just for the robber-barons.
If good product is only to be found in a museum, then there is little point in capitalism for the rest of us.
We should demand better and ignore those fools that think the system doesn't owe us anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When Corleones do the same thing they end up charged under RICO. Bullying and extortion still remain the same regardless of what kind of excuses you wish to make for them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Good product would also be nice. That is where their profit center is supposed to be ideally. Yet they do anything they can to avoid having to do this. The preload market is just one example of this. Notice how it started to 'suddenly' open up a bit as soon as Microsoft was under external constraints.
Now, why people might buy DOS over MacOS is just a matter of another natural monopoly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You guys remember when bill got hit in the face with a pie on videotape for all the world to see? I think in some ways, we should feel some pity for bill. From what was said after the incident, he didn't take it very well. Now, many of us, myself included, would probably feel some embarassment if we were hit in the face with a pie, but could probably laugh it off. If I was the type of person that couldn't laugh that off though, I think despite having tons and tons of money, the world would seem like a much more bleak place. And while Bill sits looking over his shoulder for his enemies to plot his downfall, and while his enemies sit and watch over thier shoulders for him to come along and try to destroy them, all of us here in the opensource community can sit on irc and laugh and code and just have a merry old time. :)
With all that in mind, I think in some ways you and I, here, where we can benefit from everyone else's work for free, and with the ability to give freely back to those around us, have it better than bill with his stacks of money, paranoid friends and enemies, and life of coldness and business.
And why is this a problem? After all, Gates has done nothing the prevent those who would make something better for themselves from doing so: [GNU]/Linux is proof of this.
Of course, the screams go up, you can't make money "selling Linux" (without something else on the side, like support). You can't buy a Linux distribution or get it pre-installed with the same ease. Finally, Billy-G's got all the distribution mechanisms sown up tight pushing his garbage around.
All true. But, all irrelevant.
The world doesn't owe you a profit -- if people value what you make (even if it is garbage) you will make one.
The world doesn't have to bend to your desires or make your life more convenient. In short, the world doesn't owe you the ability to get a Linux distro the way you might want to. There aren't any Indian restaurants close to where I live and I like Indian food. That's my tough -- I can buy a cookbook and prepare Chicken Vindaloo myself if I want.
If you want something better than Windoze, build it yourself. The freedom to do that, and to cooperate with others to the same ends is the only thing the world "ows" you.
Clearly, enough people thought it worthwhile to improve and expand on Linus Torvalds' personal operating system itch. They (we) did it not to "get rich" but to build somethibg better for ourselves. That this goal was achieved, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, serves to prove that Billy-G is no impedement what so ever to personal and collective effort.
Those who despise him for his wealth are just envious bastards who would think nothing of stealing if they could get away with it.
Of course, he still flogs useless garbage, IMNSHO, but if people are willing to buy it, who am I to interfere?
In Liberty, Rene
One of these again.
Look. On most points, I tend to agree with you. Most people don't get AIDS by any other means than doing one of several very stupid things. Quite literally they bring it upon themselves. I know it sounds like a heartless way of saying it, and I'm not saying they don't deserve help, but that's more or less the way it is in most cases. In most.
There are others, however, who don't exactly have a choice in the matter. I could point to the classical example of the baby born with it, but that's too saccharine. I'll point to the ones who get it by, say, a bad blood transfusion which by some freak accident slipped through the screening process. Or worse, the ones who were deliberately infected by others who use their disease as a weapon (yep, such people do exist; there was a dentist in Florida several years back who infected nearly 20 people in this manner. They claim it's a move born of desperation, to force scientists to find a cure, but I don't think that makes the crime any less horrid).
Oh, and the other reason to invest in AIDS research: there are scientists who predict that by about 2010, AIDS will mutate and evolve into an airborne form, as contagious as the common cold. The other half insist that this is a ludicrous idea, that viruses take longer than that to evolve, and I tend to agree with that, but still, let's consider the 11-year one the worst-case scenario. Suddenly, it's not a "sinners' disease" anymore, is it? It's a plague which could well wipe humanity off the face of the planet. That's the thing: we need to find a cure, or at least a vaccine, fast.
I still don't like Bill Gates. And his donating $100G to AIDS research still doesn't put him in the same league as other "philantropic" billionares, who give far larger portions of their wealth away (take Ted Turner; he only donated $1G to his cause, but that was fully half of his wealth; I consider that to be the more generous contribution). But much as I hate to admit it, I've got to say Billy's actually done something good for a change.
By the way, as for the "sinners" bit; I suggest you get off of your holier-than-thou kick. You're certainly no better than anyone else; you can't even obey the simple rule of respecting all people (phrased in most translations as "love thy neighbor as thyself" but meaning exactly the same thing).
Well, at least where I went to school (U. of Arizona), we were only allowed to use the schools computers for school work. Of course, we didn't always follow that, but that was the rule.
If you had a time machine, which of the following would you do?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Sure, no secretary is ever going to be ready to
tar -xvf some file, But I've had difficulty finding a secretary who can even find the floppy disk on Windows95. Sure, she can save to disk from Word, but find the file on the disk from outside Word? No way. A secretary on a Macintosh however...
All Microsoft have done is try to make MacOS for the PC, and failed miserably... But damn can they market dog turd like it was chocolate cake..
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
...microsoft, windows and bill gates
Two years ago it was nearly impossible to avoid these words for one day if you are in computer-buisness - now it is in many cases at least possible, sometimes it`s even normal.
Maybe even code doesn`t matter because if noone talks about gates anymore, he wont scare anyone anymore.
silence...
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Why does the "expensive hardcover" link above point to slashdot? I strongly doubt that the author of the post sent it in that way, and it's not the first instance of this kind that I have noticed, although I don't recall any from the pre-Andover days.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I suspected that it was the book merchant part of the URL that was getting it "censored". Earlier today I thought I saw in the right hand sidebar of the main page a link to Amazon with a mention that slashdot gets a cut, but it seems to have disappeared now. Co-incidence?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Multiple choice:
a: and this is a bad thing?
b: compared to when?
c: why does it have to take so long?
d: all of the above.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Solomon's entire city used gold cutlery because silver wasn't considered valuable enough. And other things.
I don't think a mere house which takes 50 NT servers to operate* is really in the race at all. A trillion dollars might buy one of Solomon's city blocks, and young William has a good way to go to get to the magic trillion, even on paper.
I wonder what William III's foundation really spends its money on, and how closely it's tied to M$?
* Fifty NT servers... let me see... seven crashes a day? fifty a day? does he need fifty servers in order to have at least one up for each room at any instant? I guess it depends on what apps they run... I guess if he used XFree and multi-headed them, he could cut the lossage down to maybe six FreeBSD or Linux boxes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's still on the main page, too.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
>Let's face it: Microsoft only stregths are (a) its ruthlessness (b) its ability to make money any which way they can and (c) its ability to churn
.txt extention either program ``helpfully" adds. Bleh.)
>out evil FUD and buggy program. It does *not* take a good programmer to create a crappy program.
I would disagree with your last sentence, & state instead that it is a fourth strength: MS knows at what point its software is ``just good enough" to release. Whether it meets the specification, even if the specification has a typo in it, or deciding just how many bugs need to be fixed to be better than its competition (whether said competition is another company, or an older version of the software), or even if a choice between features coddles an entry-level user while handicapping an experienced one.
DOS, for example, had the ability to address 640K of RAM -- 10x more than other existing OS's -- but this ability does not increase without much work & pain. It was ``just good enough" in meeting IBM's specifications.
When WinWord had to compete with WordPerfect, bug-killing was a priority at Redmond; now that Word has no significant competition, the folks at MS devote their resources to creating more ``features" like dancing paperclips.
And trying to avoid the resource hog of Word with either notepad or wordpad leads to constant petty frustrations. (Try editting & saving a perl script in wordpad & not having to remove the
Further, MS makes their software ``just open enough" -- more open than Apple did, as well as the other non-UNIX operating systems before it -- but not one line more. Otherwise, software would not break with every revision of Windows, whether a documented revision or not.
When MS to embrace an Open Standard means to follow it ``just enough" to claim technical obedience -- but not too much, or else someone else might reverse engineer the product, & create a better one for less money.
> And, yes, Bill Gate$ is bland: he
>simply hides his greedy eyes behind an affable geek mask. Here is a man who will sell his own mother to make a buck. And because he
>knows decent people do not like that kind of behaviour, he tries to hide as bast as he can -- but more and more people realize the truth.
Actually, I think not selling his mother for a buck is one of the few business ethics he has. He appears to get along quite well with his father, who runs the charitable foundation.
Microsoft is run as the extreme form of a corporation: every calculation is made to maximize reportable profit in a way no other corporation has done before. (Watching MS dominate the computer industry is like watching play a winning Civ II game.) Employees are expected to devote every waking minute to the company while on the other hand every attempt is made to reduce the benefits paid to employees -- which is why Microsoft is having legal troubles with their numerous legions of permanent temporary workers. Partnerships are made with other companies & then abused so that MS can learn their technologies & steal their market, while keeping as much of the Windows internals an ``intellectual secret" as possible.
I can't imagine a more aggressive company than Microsoft -- unless you repealed the laws on slavery, barratry & commerce.
>To me, the beginning of the end for Micro$oft is 1995.
Actually, I have always seen 1995 as the apex of MS's dominance of the computer industry. On one hand, they released Win95 to widespread enthusiasm, on the other hand, they pulled off a major realignment of th eocmpany to focus on the Internet. Since then, it's all been either defeats or qualified successes. All that growth we see in Microsoft is cancer, & when MS falls, it will be faster than Romanov Russia.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
All the Bill-bashers out there (gee, could there be any on slashdot?) might actually appreciate this book. It doesn't exactly gush praise over Bill Gates so much as it shows some of the not-exactly-rational behavior his enemies display. And even if it does hold Bill to be a hero, it might perhaps broaden your horizons to read a book that doesn't march in lockstep with your personal dogmas of hatred.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
About your review...first of all, with a title like that, one might start to assume that the author is a MS
flunky himself. You must admit that it strongly suggests that interpretation.
Then, you write:
> Aside from Daddy Warbucks, billionaires aren't very popular. Beyond the
> obvious reasons - envy and resentment - they tend to be a strong-willed,
> arrogant lot. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan - don't generally get to be billionaires
> through sensitivity and thoughtfulness.
That's, ahh, a sort of left-handed compliment, rather than a criticism. Of course, there's *no* possibility
that billionaires got to be that way through means that broke other people, broke other companies,
trashed neighborhoods, towns, and cities, and left people poorer. That couldn't *possiblly* be any reason for
disenchantment with 'em. It couldn't be such things as, to quote J.P. Morgan, since you mention him,
"The public be damned".
> And for the many entrenched individualistic, Libertarian elements of the Net and
> Web, he is a nightmare: monopolistic and greedy and the purveyor of
> over-priced, ever obsolete, buggy software that exploits consumers and
> promotes computing ignorance
Why is it that you feel that there is *no* element that is not in the mainstream, that is against Gates & Co.,
that is not on the right? In fact, an awful lot of what you say in the paragraph above is much more of the
attitude of those of us on the *left*, rather than some libertarian fellow travelers, such as the dba who
I used to work with last year, who didn't feel that monopoly was bad.
> According to Gary Rivlin, author of the new book "The Plot to Get Bill Gates,"
> (Times Business, $US 25), the people who hate Gates and are out to get him -
> the likes of Scott McNealy of Sun, Marc Andreessen and James Barksdale of
> Netscape, venture capitalist John Doerr, various anti-trust lawyers and
> government officials have become a culture all their own.
So any group of serious competitors, who might be afraid that someone ten and twenty and thirty
times their size, who has a history of grinding competitors into bankruptcy by such tactics as
what, in international trade, is called dumping, or by simply making serious, and illegal, attempts
to close the market to them (vide the post, late last year, I believe, on slashdot, by the guy who
went to 10 OEMs, and could not buy a pc without a MS operating system (except, of course,
for IBM, who offered OS/2), are a "culture of their own"? Lawyers who may, occasionally,
actually believe in anti-trust laws, and laws intended to promote competition, are part of this
"culture"?
> This book is the story of these idiosyncratic, sometimes rabid cabal of Silicon
> Valley muck-a-mucks known within Microsoft as "Captain Ahab's Club" for
> their obsessive pursuit of Redmond's own contemporary version of Moby
They are rabid, because they'd like a share of the pie? Funny, I don't remember this kind of vituperation
when, a mere dozen years ago, it was IBM and the Seven Dwarfs, and the government used anti-trust
laws against IBM...unless, of course, IBM is Faceless (tm), and MS is Bill the Gates.
> For many of these people, says Rivlin, Gates has become an obsession. They
> talk and think about him constantly. He is always looking over their shoulder,
> the invisible man at every business meeting. What would Gates do? What does
> he think? What is he up to? They dump on him behind his back, then swoon at
> the sight of him.
Ahh, they talk of him? As in, "how do we write software that can deal with all the bugs, and undocumented
bad code usage, in his software"? And I'd really like to know who it is that "swoons" over the sight
of him.
> Even the most savage assaults seem mostly to annoy him, like the original Godzilla swatting down
> those pesky jet fighters.
The *original, original* Godzilla, as in the first movie, was Not Nice...and was *killed*, at
the end, by something the size, or smaller (it's been a while, y'know), than piranha (anti-trust lawyers?)
> If you can judge a man by his enemies, Gates looks better. Rivlin doesn't show us anyone more
> agile or noble.
Is thissupposed to mean that Gates looks to any degree noble? One might say that Stalin, then, looked
noble, based on his enemies (us, among others).
> He has an amazing capacity to re-engineer himself - thus his company -- no small skill in so fluid and
> brutally competitive a marketplace.
But isn't that what he's really all about - not goshawowie software, but marketing? I mean, how else
could Word push down WorPerfect, or Internet Exploder take so much from Netscape, for so little
software value?
> The open source and free software movements - the literal antitheses of Microsoft and it's business
> philosophy -- have gained a strong foothold on the ^^^
Oh, and on the nit-picky side, that sohuld be "its" (belonging to it), not "it's" (contraction of 'it is').
> There is, nonetheless, an unyielding blandness about the man that makes it as difficult to hate him
> as to like him.
And this...do I take it that you are unfamiliar with the idea that the worst part of the majority of evil
is that it is so *banal*?
mark
(with a cc to Jon)
Who's trying to "beat" Gates/microsoft? We're simply rendering them irrelevant. He may hold all the cards, but we're playing chess. Open Source isn't about people who sell software, it's about people who use software. When microsoft's toll booths and potholes get in our way, we go around them, like the internet we created. We have work to do: writing papers, simulating wind tunnels, or playing doom. Microsoft is not involved. Who cares about them? Despite Gates's ego and money, the computer industry is not about him and never was. It's about us, the programmers and users who do stuff with computers. If MS is no longer an asset to us, discard it and move on. Replace the broken tools with ones that work and get back to using them, not arguing about them. All this talk of Gates is a distraction at best. Rob
Where did MS start by being software pirates?
Unless you mean stealing time on a university computer to develop a BASIC? Hmmm. Seems to remind me of how a lot of Open Source products get started...
S.
Could it do anything but crash?
:-(
I don't think so.
D
----
I saw this at Borders the other night; At $22.50, I probably won't buy it (I've already got an expensive hardcover to still read, yet).
;-)
However, you can be sure that I went to the index in the back, and looked up Linux and Linus. Indeed, Linux gets referenced a fair bit.
Looked up Slashdot too, but didn't see any mention
hmmm, that is strange.
5 3/o/qid=933619455/sr=8-1/002-5558908-28014 46
n quiry.asp?pcount=0&srefer=&isbn=0195076753
In any case, the book was Visions of Jazz, by Gary Giddins, heh.
let's try this again.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/01950767
hyperlink
...interesting, the hyperlink gets converted during the preview, and strange spaces are being inserted into the non-linked url.
Oh well, try this address (it killed the barnes and noble url, too)
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnI
(of course, I do realise this is probably more info than you even wanted.)
"You have to pay us even when you sell a competitor's product" sounds like bullying to me. Tricking IBM into buying a cheap low-function clone of CP/M instead of the real deal doesn't sound like honesty to me. (Even though DR had some blame in that.) Exploitng a legal hole in a contract (the Apple GUI thingy) sounds like less-than-honest practices, too.
And if you want to defend little William III, you need arguments, not insults, coward.
Remember that Netscape is now part of AOL, the online M$. It seems like Microsoft's business plan is "Make low-quality products and sell them at high prices to people who don't know any better." AOL shares that philosophy... charging $22/mo for half the speed of a $14.95 local ISP.
Wouldn't it be really cool if some of this was dedicated to grants to Open Source projects?
But you can't blame Gates for that--that's a political and social issue for all of US society to deal with: people who run successful businesses become enormously wealthy in the US. And it's not the wealth that bothers me (whatever makes people happy), but the enormous poverty and suffering of the bottom 20% that seems to go along with that kind of income distribution.
As for Gates, if he sticks to his promises about charitable donations, he will have done pretty much all you could ask from him to do his part.
I don't like Microsoft for their technologies, just like I don't like Macdonald's food or Hertz customer service. But unlike Macdonald's or Hertz, avoiding Microsoft is becoming very difficult, no matter how poor I may think their products are. It's that monopoly position, that to me mostly seems to be the result of network effects and monopolistic practices, that bothers me.
I wonder what it is in Rivlin's background that causes him to see this as an epic struggle of hero versus villain, rather than as the technical and economic issue that it is. To the degree that Gates matters at all, he is simply the current figurehead of Microsoft. If he resigned and got replaced by someone else, nobody would care much about Gates anymore.
The failure for technical people to "bring down Gates" is probably a result of the fact that it isn't about bringing down Gates--it's about open protocols, open access, and choice. And it seems to me the technical community has been quite successful there, and there is enormous momentum in that area. If Gates and Microsoft prosper in an open, non-proprietary world (and I see no reason why they shouldn't), all the better for them.
jetson123 stuck a cord with me. As an average, semi-technical user, I was never bothered about MS, until I began feeling like I wasn't going to have a choice anymore about my software. I don't want WinCE on my mobile phone, or in my car breaks, and I don't want NT on my desktop -- as an architect I have some sensibility regarding tecnique and design, and MS stuff just seems to be poorly designed. Not terribly designed, just not the best either. I want my right to choose the best for me.
Scott McNealy, Marc Andreesen, The guy at Novell (Noorda?), Larry Ellison, these are men that spend so much time looking over their shoulders and trying to beat bill Gates that they'll always lose. If Netscape had spent a fraction of the time on their product that they spend whining about IE and bundling they would still be the number one browser. Gates is too saavy to fall prey to a direct attack. He has consistenly and successfully flanked his opponents every time they attack him directly. If you want to compete with Bill Gates you need to compete with him, not fight him.
The only reason that Linux has been successful is that Linus et. al. do not care in the slightest about what Bill Gates is doing. They put their modest resources into a product, not a figght. If Sun, Oracle and AOL would just learn.
Although you'll never unseat Gates from the top of the heap, There are a number of people within striking distance of the Microsoft monopoly. If they would just work on their products and services rather than squabbling with Gates they might have a chance.
-Rich
Lots of companies are ruthless. "Playing nice" may make the world a better place overall, but that's not what business is about. Business is about money.
... wife, kid, big house, the most successful software company in the world, interesting life, a few enemies (including those incredibly scary Linux hackers and ESR with his guns) but still lots of admirers.
Being able to make money any which way you can is not something that counts against Microsoft. It's something we should look up to. If the same tactics were to be used against Microsoft, the company doing so would be called "creative" or at most, "aggressive".
Agreed. Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison aren't exactly the moral equivalents of Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa. There's plenty of ego and rapacity out there without Bill Gates. Think either of them would turn down MS's market share? In hell with those snowballs.
Ruthlessness? You don't grab that opportunity or stop the other guy from getting it, your business will suffer. So will your shareholders, employees, their families and kids.
The Bill Gates/Citizen Kane thing doesn't do it for me. I would expect him to be pretty happy right now
Crap software? Since when was quality a primary determinant of what people buy? Turn on your most successful TV channel, read a tabloid newspaper or the national enquirer. Crap sells. People eat it up. As H L Mencken said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Sickened by the "injustice"? Your problem. The rest of us just deal with it.
I'm normally an inveterate Katz basher (boycott theaters that won't let underage kids watch South Park? sheesh! Get a life!) but I thought this review was OK.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Actually, to call slashdot's system moderation is a bit of a misnomer. It really has to do with to very closely allied things called 'editing' and 'censoring.'
You see, the job of an editor is to read all the garbage that nobody else wants to take the time to read, and decide what in that pile of crap (other wise known as 'the slushpile') is worth paying money to read. Then that much gets published. In the world of paper, publishing is expensive, as is buying a magazine or book. This tends to mean that the editor discards a great deal of material, and thus what gets published is closer to being worth the money. A great deal of worthless garbarge still gets published, but at least it doesn't read like it was written by a five year old!
Censorship is the almost the same thing as editorship, with the difference being that a censorship is blatantly about preventing 'dangerous ideas' from spreading, or protecting sensitive young minds. In actual practise, the diferance is nothing! Because the editor has to discard so much material, they always end up discarding stuff mostly because they simply disagree with it, or it gives them a creepy feeling.
So what does the world of paper publishing have to do with slashdot? On slashdot, the purpose of moderation is to keep the signal to noise ratio at a respectable level. For the most part, it's very effective - When was the last time you saw a "first post?" It's no longer in every single story. Mission accomplished! But why does it work? The posts aren't deleted, they never happen! And why do they never happen? Because they're moderated to -1, and most people never see them, which means that posting a 'first post!' comment won't get you the attention that you want. So why bother?
And so yes, moderation does boil down to editing, simply because that's what is required to change the S/N ratio! and nothing less will work. Which is why the moderator guidlines include:
Personally, I think the 'this is boring' and 'Katz sucks' comments fall under both 'something said 15 times already' AND 'They detract from the article they are attached to.' If you explain in depth and detail, with footnotes, why it is so, that might contribute something positive to the discussion. Your comment comes close to that, and so it hasn't been moderated down. But neither will it be moderated up. If the comment not only doesn't contribute to the discussion, but is actually a waste of time to read, it should be moderated down! And thus it will discourage such posts in the future, and increase the S/N ratio here on slashdot. Being moderated down is a cruel thing to do to someone - i.e. causing 50,000 people to ignore them. But it is an effective way of saying 'contribute something positive!'
We all know darn well that you can filter out katz' articles if you so choose. If you want to have someone a bit more mainstream (whatever that means on a 'news for nerds' board) take the soapbox, then why don't you take a whack at it yourself and submit an acticle or two?
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I think this evaluation of 'the moderation of Katz' is about as dead on as it gets. Moderators are supposed to provide guidance, not censorship, and this is essentially what the function has become. How ironic that the man who incites people to break the law (no matter how silly) and masticates anyone who disagrees with him has his material protected by the moderating thought police.
BTW, I've observed Katz as a factually sloppy, intellectually dishonest fruitcake with delusions of relevance. The fact that Rob & Hemos continue to foist this knothead's opinions on us as 'features' might be a sign that Slashdot isn't about community discussion but is becoming increasingly about a codified agenda.
How about encouraging someone slightly more mainstream to use the soapbox as well? The tit-for-tat opinions would provide a more balanced view and we might start attracting the type of well considered attention (as opposed to the screaming-penguins) that will drive Linux further into the market and more programmers into the Linux world. Katz is the antithesis of the reasoning that we need and adds nothing to the debate but piss 'n vinegar (I was going to just say vitriol, but then reread his SouthPark censorship BS first and decided PnV was more accurate.)
Whether you agree or disagree, let me hear from you.
M.
flames > dev/null
I haven't read anything so mind-numbing in a loooong time...
(First post?)
Your point is?
Lots of companies are ruthless. "Playing nice" may make the world a better place overall, but that's not what business is about. Business is about money.
Being able to make money any which way you can is not something that counts against Microsoft. It's something we should look up to. If the same tactics were to be used against Microsoft, the company doing so would be called "creative" or at most, "aggressive".
And what's wrong with being ruthless? When somebody is being ruthless, he is being self-protective at the expense of others. Just like a cornered dog biting at anybody who comes too close. Is this something we should be upset over? No-- it's natural.
So what if MS writes buggy software? Nobody *has* to use MS, just like nobody *has* to use Linux. The whole "pre-installation monopoly" bit is bull. Most people would buy Windows anyway, even if it *weren't* pre-installed.
And FUD? It's not like your rant about the MS monopoly isn't just as bad.
While I agree with the conclusions, I'd just like to nitpick out a few historical facts.
1) Basic began life at Dartmouth. I don't know if a corporate contractor made it (is that who Computer Sciences is?). The BASIC interpreter is the only thing that (AFAIK) Gates ever actually wrote. Even then he knew the way to make money was to control the OS. He wanted BASIC to be *the* user interface to computers. He made arrangements with a number of hardware vendors to get MS-BASIC in the ROM on their machines. Captive consumers!
2) MS-DOS used to be known as 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. It was written by Tim Patterson to make it easy to port CP/M applications to the new 8086 processor. The 640k limit was imposed not by MS-DOS but by the IBM-PC architecture. The physical memory limit of the 8086 was 1MB. MS-DOS was available for other hardware (the Zenith Z-100 leaps to mind) where it could address more than 640k just fine. I'm not praising MS-DOS, jut trying to put the blame wth IBM where it really belongs...
3) Here I won't argue. I bought Windows 1.0 (how much will some of you pay me for a copy of the 1.0 manual? I've got it, you want it? I don't think I have the 5-1/4 floppies any more, but I might. I can look. I fired it up, played reversi a few times, erased it from my 10M hard drive and never ran it again). I will, however, point out that Digital Research was the arrogant corporate giant. They overcharged big time for CP/M-86 and they really did not keep up. No heirarchical file system (of course, neither did MS-DOS v1), no forward motion on the core system (but look at GEM later and at DR-DOS, once their lunch got eaten, they got innovative again). MS-DOS v1 reeked compared to CP/M, but MS-DOS v2 added some critical stuff and CP/M was too expensive and didn't move. I can't blame MS for CP/M's death. It killed itself. I *can* blame them for killing DR-DOS, however, with their bogus 95 "no more DOS" baloney. As for all the other products they've killed, each of those companies also rested on their laurels. Word 2 caught up with WP and Word 6 kicked its butt (and I *hate* Word!). MS actually made better (if fatter) apps. Borland? I don't know why people went to MS from Borland. As a guy who writes software for a living, I found the Borland stuff to be consistently far superior to the MS tools. I don't know why Borland lost. MS really started being abusive IMHO with DR-DOS and with Netscape. In both of these cases they used their OEM licensing agreements and thus their control of the distribution channels to crush the innovator.
So, while I dislike MS software, I don't think MS is wholly to blame for the demise of every defunct ISV, nor do I think that every sucky thing about PCs is due to them. IBM deserves a lot of blame for building and designing well below their capabilities.
One last thing. Would we have been stuck with the cruddy architectural heritage of the IBM PC design (which we still fight around to make good computers) if all software had been open source? Hell, no! We could have moved to new architectures with little effort if we had so desired. It is that "base of applications" sold binary by closed-source companies that have us locked on that set of legacy design crud. Those companies cannot cost-justify moving to a new platform ("why when there are gazillions of PCs?") but when you have the source, you can do it yourself. It is a chicken-and-egg thing. With the source, you just clone the d--ned chicken!
Ramble mode off...
> The interesting thing is the "sometime in his lifetime" part.
I suspect it would do more good to give $5Bill to AIDS research now, than to give $100Bill in 20 years.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I saw this on www.planethardware.com
Gates to Donate $100 billion to Charity
Reporter : Cozmo August 1, 1999 : 15:36 PST
That's right, according to Gates' father, who manages the William H. Gates Foundation he's going to be giving it all away. He stated the money was to be used to help rid the planet of diseases such as AIDS and malaria during an interview with the Sunday Times of London. The cash would be handed over throughout the lifetimes of Gates and his wife Melinda, leaving their two children with approximately $10 million each. (All I can say is holy crap!)
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, so be it, but I just don't agree with you.
-- ioctl
I want to know what he did that was positive for the computing community? I'm not flaming you...I really want to know. Who is to say that if the MS empire didn't exist that things wouldn't have evolved into something much better? Who's to say that the oppressive nature of MS hasn't actually harmed the computing world...
If you want to know why we have PC's in so many houses I would say that the invention of html and browsers (heck tcp/ip too) has everything to do with it and MS Windows very little.
Why does he get so much credit for "what he has done for technology"... the way I see it the man hired some F-ing brilliant marketing people, that is is claim to fame.
Tha Almighty Zoltar
Dude, he's not giving money to "libral organizations" he's Creating his own organization and I don't think the Willam H gates foundation is trying to bring down Microsoft, but that's just my theory....
anyway, his dad, who is supposedly running the thing is a lawyer, so he's probably a libral himself.
he worst part is that HIV causing AIDS is a sham, and most of his money will go to supporting the corrupt system that produced this whole situation
Then what *does* cause aids? Remember were talking about africa here, not the US. really, do you have *any* facts to back up your quite frankly bizzare clame?
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
uh $100 billion would be *all* his welth, as of now, and if he does give *all* of it away at some other point in time, it would be worth a lot more
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
your cock produces Cheese? what the FUCK is wrong with you??????!?!??
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I liked the Chairman Mao/Billy G comparison; it seems valid to me. They both had that face of inscrutability: you could look at both of them, and have no idea what was going on in that head, other than the fact that you probably weren't going to like it. Bill's even putting out books of his thoughts!
creating stuff and then releasing it for free is pretty much normal acceptable and expected behaviour at universities. i cant think of a university i've heard of having a rule against this. (it is certainly possible, i just dont know of any)
however, most of the universities i am familiar with do have specific rules against using school resources for personal financial gain.
so i dont think comparing using time to build a product you are going to sell and using time to build something you give away is really a valid way to vindicate that behaviour.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
I think this would be a good thing for another reason. I remember reading somewhere (think was Robert Anton Wilson) that it was discovered that advanced stages of AIDS was very similar to accelerated aging.
So basically when the cure for AIDS is discovered we'll have the ability to slow down the aging process significantly. Imagine being able to live hundreds of years within Bill's lifetime...
Pork is not a verb
Monopoly is the free market killer, the only thing that keeps prices down and quality up is competition, take that away and the model simply doesn't work. It's not the model failing as much as it is just getting crap parameters passed to it.
+&x
But that the thing he didn't do anythign except copy others people work. Mac for years was more easier to use than a Windows 2.0 machine. If Apple wasn't a prick about letting people clone their machines we wopuld probably all be using Apples.
Don't let his nice face mislead you, he still enbraces and extends every open standard he sees on the road. In a sense, he help create the GLP -the only technology money can't buy. He is the runaway dead-beat dad of GPL (I won't tell who the mother is which will give you unpleasent imagnation )
CY
I thought winmodem count.
Normally, I want my users to be completely ignorant about computer hardware and OS they are using.
Why would you want them to be ignorant?
Are we to understand that you would begrudge them the knowledge that you posses? And why? To have control over them? Pah!
Insert mind here.
Bill gates is gonna give 100 billion to various
AIDS and poor type organizations.
He seems to have forgotten about the free market under which he has gained those billions. And he seems to have forgotten about the government patheticos who want to take his money/power away from him.
So instead of contributing to the various libertarian organizations out there (Think tanks like cato, or even the libertarian party, which have both defended his right to do business), he contributes his money to the politically correct liberal organizations, who are busy trying to take him down.
Why do I get the feeling that his wife is doing all of the contributing?
The worst part is that HIV causing AIDS is a sham, and most of his money will go to supporting the corrupt system that produced this whole situation.
Be free and multiply.
Hello! This is so yesterday.
Like, read the Seattle Times (www.seattletimes.com) or the Seattle P-I (www.seattlepi.com) and he's publicly saying this is not true.
Never trust a Brit Pub to get the facts straight.
His dad's just miffed because Bill's poll numbers have dropped, so he made it sound better than it was.
Besides, $10 million isn't much these days - I plan on leaving that much to my son.
Will in Seattle
In exchange for 2 visits to PARC to look at their GUI, Xerox got $1M in Apple stock before Apple went public. After Apple went public, Xerox's shares were worth about $17M. In short, Xerox was paid by Apple. Read Apple Confidential for the details.
While there's no sign that his company will totter and fall anytime soon, one has the sense that the history of the Net and the Web are moving past the man. Microsoft and its software are still pre-eminent, but the company no longer seems to be at the heart of the action.
The history of the Net, moving past the man? Hmm...the history of the Net. ArpaNET....no MS involvement. Internet...first time I ever had access was on a VAX....no MS. The WWW.... a friend showed this to me in 1993 on a SGI Indy, using Mosaic...no MS. It took the incredible success of Netscape for MS to even notice the Internet. Even now, I believe the majority of non-dialup hosts are *NIX servers. The only part of the Net where MS software seems pre-eminent is the realm of dialup access, and that is only a very recent development of the past few years. It seems that someone here is confusing the Internet with desktop/home computing. While the incredible popularity of the Net has contributed to vast increases in home computing, and while MS might dominate home computing, MS is still a far cry from dominating the Net.
It's interesting to note how much someone's perspective of the Net gives away. Especially in the mainstream media (Jon still seems to be strugling in his attempts to become a 'counterculture geek' writer as opposed to a mainstream tech writer who only has half a clue).
Hey, how'd you know I was lookin' at you if you weren't lookin' at me?
I'll try my best not to be inflammatory, but I must ask if this article is even a review. Does Mr. Katz make any mention of the author's writing style? Does he comment on the scope of the book, the order of presentation, the availability of supporting documentation in a well organized bibliography?
From my best assesment, this is more of a book summary than a review, and it goes so far as to cloud the line as to whether the writing is the books perspective or Mr. Katz's comments and opinions. If he had at least made a critical comment about the cover art, the typeface or the quality of the paper, then perhaps you could make an argument that it's a review.
So, in a final attempt to be constructive, I will say that I do hope that if Mr Katz attempts a review again in the future, he will actually comment on the object in question.
This, in a nutshell, sums up my problem with Bill Gates Windows monopoly. Recently, after events in Colorado, Microsoft announced a plan to include a "violent video game blocker" in the next iteration of Windows. Of course, in order for this thing to work, all the companies making game CD-ROMs out there (this virtual V-chip is designed to work on CD-ROMs, not other forms of distribution) will have to include a code similar to the V-Chip code broadcast networks have to beam out with there TV signal.
My question is, why would anyone do this? I mean aside from the fact that CD-ROM games (which is what this thing is aimed at censoring) already have one layer of blocking (the clerk at the local Software Etc.) my big thought was, what if somebody figures out a way to activate this program remotely?
Well, this goes with Gates, "let's control everyone philosophy," and in my opinion will ultimately backfire on Windows.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Who cares what he does with the money? If he'd come by it legitimately, I wouldn't give a flying fuck if he spent it on big macs or blowjobs from Tipper Gore.
What I take exception to, is the fact that that little shit launched his company on software piracy, and has maintained his position by bullying every hardware maker in sight.
When he gets sent up the river, I want it to be for the right reasons. I want to see the DOJ nail his ass for the code he stole from DR, Apple, Stacker, and the rest.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hey, show me a secretary that's prepared to deal with a BO2K infestation, or an executive with the guts to throw out NT when it doesn't FUCKING WORK.
Windoze isn't good enough for ordinary people to use.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is that their products are crap. Sure, Windoze is crap too, but Netscrape is even less reliable than its microsquish counterpart, Oracle has a *long* history of promising things their engine couldn't deliver, and Java is the "write once, run away!" language.
Windoze will be defeated by software that doesn't SUCK. Java ain't it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just an aside, but nevertheless a thought that has puzzled me for years: Bill Gates is a very powerful figure, and the entity he represents, namely Microsoft, is a danger to so many people, and its presence has such a profound effect on the entire industrialised world, that it's discontinued presence would open up a lot of opportunities for a lot of people. With so many people wanting Microsoft out of the way, why is it that Bill has not been assassinated? Ballmer too. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't like for anyone to be killed, but many powerful companies would have an interest in doing so. So why is it that no-one has put a bomb under his car? I'm just curious.
Why don't people just leave the guy alone.
... well a crappy story...
I dislike Windows but have to admin NT servers at work and what I fail to understand is the criticism this guy gets for breathing. Walks down the street its a story. Takes a dump a story.
He did something positive for the computing community whether or not people accept that. Even with some of the flaws in the Windows operating system, it still is and will probably continue to be a dominating OS for years to come.
Show me a secretary thats ready to tar -xvf somefile.tar, or an executive thats willing to chmod 700 whateverfile and I'll shut up.
A lot of people buy books with fancy covers not knowing what the story is about. Same for OS'. People love easy set-ups, hassle free installs, etc. Microcrap provides new PC users with this so when the storyline starts most people see it ends up being
Blah at MS and the lawsuits they keep sending us for www.macroshaft.org
sil@antioffline.com
sil@macroshaft.org
gcc sleep.c -o sleep
./sleep
[root@destruxiOn.antioffline.com]#error sleep undefined
Want Root?
yah,... bill is just that guy, you know.
The real reason Bill Gates and his company, Micro$oft, are (were) so successful is that they have shamelessly exploited (read "embraced and extended") the best ideas of others. Examples:
1. BASIC: at one point the only product MS ever made, it was actually invented by Computer Sciences researchers, in order to teach programming. Being "Open Source" (well kind of...), BASIC was milked by Micro$oft for all it was worth -- and we now have VB and the wonderful Basic-for-Apps that allow script kiddies to create virii-things like Melissa. They made many small Computer companies bleed through the nose for the "privilege" of having M$ Basic on their machine (anyone remember the crappy Amiga M$ Basic?).
2. MS-DOS used to be known as "Quick and Dirty Disk Operating System". Micro$oft bought the company and sold that product back to IBM. It was so ridiculously uninteresting (640KB limit, blah, blah, blah) that IBM and M$ made sure CP/M (at this time the dominant OS on microcomputers) could be installed on PCs instead. The stroke of genius (for Bill Gate$) was to retain all rigths to MS-DOG. Once IBM compatibles were born (Thank you Compaq), gazillions of dollars started flowing into M$ coffers. This is where it starts to be interesting.
3. Windows. I won't get too far into this one. M$ stole the idea, lock, stock and barrel, from Apple. Who had stolen it from Xerox's PARC. It took them no less than THREE iterations (three!) to get this ugly piece of crap functional. In the meantime, since they were still making gobs of money from MS-DOG, they stabbed IBM in the back (not a big loss), sunk Digital Research (a company 1000% more creative than they were) and threatened, bullied, bought and pressured every other software maker known to man. Lotus? Let's do a 1-2-3 killer! OS/2? No way! Wordperfect? Here comes WinWord! DBase? Let's buy Fox Software! Borland? Here comes Quick C & Quick Pascal! Internet? Let's become an Internet company and pollute HTML every chance we get! Every time, they used their competitor's ideas and turned out mediocre, inferior imitations of the real thing... All of this bankrolled by the near-monopoly of MS-DOG.
And so on and so forth. I could talk about Windows NT (entirely created by VMS people, from Digital Corp.), "Visual" C++ (marrying a non-M$ language and NextStep development environnement), Exchange (Notes-Killer), etc... etc...
Let's face it: Microsoft only stregths are (a) its ruthlessness (b) its ability to make money any which way they can and (c) its ability to churn out evil FUD and buggy program. It does *not* take a good programmer to create a crappy program. And, yes, Bill Gate$ is bland: he simply hides his greedy eyes behind an affable geek mask. Here is a man who will sell his own mother to make a buck. And because he knows decent people do not like that kind of behaviour, he tries to hide as bast as he can -- but more and more people realize the truth.
To me, the beginning of the end for Micro$oft is 1995. When Win95 was released, for the first time, many people realized that a company this size, able to spend such an obscene amout of money to hype a product that was nothing more than an s____y upgrade to an inferior product could not be honest. Even M$-paid press drones realized that.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I, too, have been "on the inside" of Bill's house, got to shake his hand, the whole bit. I have to say that, for a supposedly maniacal evil genius he is very understated in both his demeanor and appearance. Of course, the night he met with us was also the night before he appeared on that huge monitor behind Steve Jobs and announced his $100 million investment in Apple. Quite a contrast.
Bottom line is: Bill knows how to sell a product, and he knows how to treat his employees.
Can your IM do this?