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BBC Solicts Questions to Ask Bill Gates
James Hunt writes "The BBC are doing an interview with Bill Gates on Sunday 17th October at 8pm BST on BBC2, and are looking for questions people might be interested in putting to him. Heavy hitting BBC interview veteran Jeremy Paxman - known for not holding back on interviewees is conducting the interview. Email: paxmanvsgates@bbc.co.uk to submit your questions. " <preach> Remember polite and incisive question will do a better job than flame. Let's be grown-ups. </preach>
Bill, how many times a day do you read slashdot? And does the borg thing bother you?
"When I look down I miss all the good stuff, When I look up I trip over things..."-Ani DiFranco
Paxman is not known for treating his interviewees lightly. He is a very bright, ruthless interrogater with impeccable manners.
If you are going to submit questions then make sure they are "opening" so they allow Paxman to follow up.
I really hope the BBC makes a webcast of this for you people on the other side of the pond.
An interesting question might be, whether he bill gates sees modularity as the future, or that he thinks tight, specific code is better in the end.
...entirety, or did satan allow you to sell just chunks....i figure if a kidney can get 1.5M, then your left chakra should be about worth 25million years in hell?
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
For those who don't know, Jeremy Paxman is the interviewer who recently asked Henry Kissinger if he felt like a fraud for accepting a Nobel peace price considering his support for Pinochet, the Chinese government and the bombing of Cambodia.
Mr Gates, do you believe that all cryptographic export restrictions should be scrapped?
I can easily see him asking "Are you ever going to produce a product that saves more time than it wastes?" or "When will you realize that stability is important?"
There was one famous interview where he asked a senior politician the same question thirteen times in a row until he got a straight answer. I look forward to seeing that same no-bullshit style used against Uncle Gates' carefully prepared marketing drivel.
Do you worry about, or plan for, being sued over losses resulting from an instability in NT?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Bill, there was a time when you talked about "information at your fingertips"(tm).
:- the phrase "information at your fingertips" is trademarked by Microsoft.
The Internet has delivered this promise and yet for years Microsoft ignored the potential
of the Internet. Was the desire to own the worldwide computing infrasructure blinding Microsoft to the possibility of realizing this vision through open interoperable protocols ?
Isn't Microsoft doing the same by keeping it's Office and Win2000 products tightly controlled ?
Will "information at your fingertips" be realized (in the new millenium) by Linux, Java and the open Internet rather than Microsoft's Win2000, DCOM and tightly controlled application architecture ?
Overall, have open architectures delivered on Microsoft's "information at
your fingertips" vision far better than
Microsoft ever could ?
Note
-----------------------------------------
The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
You know, I really don't care what Bill Gates says about anything... and that should terrify him.
This isn't a casual statement, I did give thought to a question. And I might still submit it, or a variant:
A&E Biography recently named you the 41st most influential person of the past 1000 years. That is quite an honor... but Robin Williams in the same show attacked your truthfulness in a series of one-liners about several honorees. A well-regarded computer trade journalist (whose name I forget!) has commented that no one would throw Microsoft and the truth into the same room for fear of a matter-antimatter explosion.
Doesn't it concern you that Bill Gates and dishonesty are becoming as synonymous as John DeLorean and cocaine trafficking?
But the sad truth is that I simply don't give a damn what Bill Gates has to say about anything. There is simply nothing he can say that will interest me because I know, from a decade of Bill-watching, that it will be self-serving, vaporware, or both.
I wish Jeremy Paxman the best of luck, but I honestly think it would have been easier to interview Richard Nixon shortly after Watergate than Bill Gates today.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Then when MS-DOS v2 came along and needed to support directories, they couldn't use the slash as it would be ambiguous. So the "other" slash was used instead... the one which was already used as an escape character in UNIX. Which, to cut a long story short, is why Samba users everywhere regularly type four backslashes before their server name :)
The OMG (www.omg.org) is a standards body with a membership list of over 800 companies - one which reads like a who's-who in the industry. It's mission is interoperability - helping different vendors software work together.
Microsoft is a member and yet appears to ignore the resulting standards. Microsoft continues to push it's own propriority solutions.
Does Microsoft really believe these 800 other companies are wrong? Or is it safe to conclude that Microsoft is not interested in interoperability, the innovation that releases and the customer choice that this engenders [1].
Gab
[1] For instance there is one vendor of the Microsoft 'Application Server' solution (DCOM) - Microsoft, and about 20 vendors of application servers based on the OMG standard (CORBA).
Mr. Gates:
:-)
Two questions:
First, I do not villify you. I do not consider you a "Great Satan" of the world, nor do I plot your downfall or anything of the sort. However, there are people out there who have some extremely negative reactions to your success, and the perception that you've gotten where you are through legal chicanery, false advertising, and outright bullying not only appears to be a common sentiment but also one justified in a disturbingly large amount of evidence. My questions to you are as follows:
First, if you had the power to do so, what would be three things that you would go back and change about the ways in which your company has done business over the years? Or, so as to not put too many words in your mouth, are there three things over the past twenty or so years of Microsoft's "ascent to stardom" that you regret on a personal level, an ethical level, or a simple bottom line profitability calculation?
My second question to you is more subtle, and probably won't engender me too popular with my Slashdot brethren. Your programming team which composed Internet Explorer 5 did an outstanding job creating a browser that, while not perfect, easily can stand on its own as a significant advance in any number of web technologies. Unfortunately, their work was marred by relatively horrific enforcement of your company's mandate to eliminate Netscape at all costs--one incident led to Compaq recieving official termination of its licensing agreement for all Windows operating systems; another led to Gateway 2000 practically thanking Microsoft for the right to allow Netscape to be a customer choice in an extremely limited circumstance. As a leader and perhaps a role model to the engineers of Microsoft, how do you justify the apparent denegration and distrust in the quality of their work, even when they create products of excellent quality?
That's what I'd like to know. Knowing a few of you here on Slashdot, you probably think I was paid off by Microsoft, or am really some 35 mid forties PR schmuck hired to defend The Man.
Nope. Email me or check my web page, and don't even try to get all geekier-than-thou with me
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Mr. Gates, if you where a Tree, what type of Tree would you be?
Mr. Gates, Microsoft is a business, and the primary goal of any business is to make money. However, your personal interest and enthusiasm about technology means that Microsoft is also strongly geared toward progress and technical advancement as an end goal.
People who support the capitalist economic model would claim that it's a good thing for Microsot to be so profit-driven, because the profits that MS makes represent happy customers. But there is a growing anti-Microsoft sentiment outside of Redmond, composed not only of open-source enthusiasts but average users as well, who claim that profits and user satisfaction are not correlated closely enough, and that Microsoft is simply ignoring the desires of users by focusing so closely on profits.
What argument would you make to convince those disgruntled users that the profit-driven corporate business model is actually the best way to produce software and satisfy users? Have you or others in the company considered trying out a small open-source project (maybe a game or a small tool or something independent from Windows or Office, etc) to see what the pros and cons of that development method might be?
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Um, I realise that these questions are probably vetted by technical chappies before getting to J. Paxman, but even so, how many BBC viewers would really understand the question, and how many of those would care?
-----
Or we could mail Microsoft's press office and ask whether Bill would mind stripping naked and fighting a pack of rabid dogs with only a half-brick in a sock to defend himself. We might be more likely to get a response :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Mr. Gates,
I know Microsoft is a business and businesses make money.
But I've heard that you are interested in increasing innovation and
technology. If this is true, then a heterogeneous environment is
the more productive than a homogeneous one. To do this we
need to form standards: standards in communication, standards
in document format, and standards in user interfaces. Standards
should be configurable to suit most environments. This doesn't mean
that standards should benefit one environment over another.
It's good to push for standards, but I see Microsoft pushing those
that will benefit Microsoft while damaging other environments.
This is not a Good Thing(TM). Standards should be used to
help different environments interact and not to improve ones
market share. The former is a perspective of a technical person,
the later is the perspective of a marketer.
My question: Are you a technical advocate, or are you just
here for marketing?
PS: when will Windows(tm) GUI be able to push back a window.
If I have a window full screen in front of other windows, I would like
to just push it to the back (under other windows). All other
environments
I've used allow this, but Windows is yet to do
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
I have a studio audience ticket for this interview. It will take place at 2.30pm Wednesday 13th Oct ie tomorrow. I assume it will be broadcast on Sunday. Better get those questions in fast . I don't expect Paxman will be able to ask anything too technical as he won't understand the answer. Hopefully he will open the questions to the audience at some stage and we'll get a chance to make Bill squirm.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With the antitrust trial not over, I would be very surprised to see any honest answers at all. In fact, I'm surprised he's even doing this interview at all.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
#1, Does Mr. Gates believe his company makes products with a high degree of quality?
#2, If so, why does his company refuse to offer any sort of warranty on said products if they fail? (witness the End User License Agreement, from any version of Windows: "Microsoft Corporation hereby disclaims all warranties and conditions with regard to the software, including all implied warranties and conditions of mechantability or fitness for a particular purpose.")
If a company truly believes that they make a quality product, should they not be willing to back-up that belief with a warranty stating that the product will (at least) do what it was advertised to?
(nb. before anyone points out that GPL does pretty much the same thing, keep in mind that GPL software can be obtained for free (beer) - MS sells it's wares for money.. and since (in theory) I'm handing over my cash, I should be able to expect some guarantee that the damn thing will at least do what the box says.)
Microsoft purchased the rights to republish Spyglass's web browser *way* back in the day. Anyone who played around with Internet Explorer 2(didn't even support *frames*) will remember that, while somewhat fast, the browser was broken beyond belief.
IE3 was the first build that actually impressed me, and stands to this day as one of the fastest and slickest products to leave Microsoft.
I can't imagine, after seeing the quality level of IE3, how Microsoft could have so little faith in the skills of their coders that they had to lie, cheat, and steal their browser into dominance.
Everybody says Microsoft can't code...I find it almost tragic that Microsoft agrees.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Because I (and others) have to decide how to make our client's systems work in the real world. If we decide that MS isn't suitable for the project, we don't use MS. If the company insists on it, we smile and tell them to call us if they change their mind, but there's no guarantee that we'll be available and willing to clean up the mess. It sounds harsh, but we're all tired of working 60+ hour weeks because someone else picked the wrong tools for the job.
But we're professionals and recognize that sometimes MS is the correct solution... but the distortions over the past few weeks has been so transparent that we're left wondering if there's *anything* we can trust. In our situation, that question answers itself. If we don't have confidence in our tools we don't use them, and if we don't have confidence in the companies we don't bother paying attention to what they say.
Microsoft can make all of the claims it wants, but businesses have to find local staff to actually make their projects work. These people bring their own experiences to the job, and don't dismiss a major vendor out-of-hand lightly. But when they do, any sane company will ask *why*. It doesn't matter if the CTO thinks that Bill Gates is the hacker's god if he can't find the senior people who can actually bring a project to completion.
If you think I'm overstating the case, I invite you to compare the number of sites writing code in Pascal (or even Pascal, Modulo-2/-3, and Ada) vs. C. There are a lot of deep similarities.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
"If you had to choose money or power, which would you choose?" (followup) "How are you making that happen?"
> "Flaimbaiter" gets Score 4! I'm impressed!
I suppose it would have been flamebait if he had posted it to alt.fan.bill-gates, but in the present context it happens to make perfect sense.
For that matter, I agree with him. When was the last time BG did anything significant for IT, other than switching Micorsoft toward the internet when he discovered he had missed "the road ahead" ?
If he wasn't sitting on $100G and didn't have enormous influence at that 900 pound gorilla in Redmond, no one would care a fig about his opinions. Those of us who are able to keep Micorsoft at arm's length don't care already. The "flamebaiter" has it exactly right, at least for some of us.
He's out of my life, except to the extent he can damage open protocols and suppress innovation. And I think those days are waning rapidly.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade