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Jeremy Paxman, BBC, Interview with Bill Gates
craggyisland writes "One of BBC's top interviewers, Jeremy Paxman, has done an interview with Bill Gates where he "admits his company Microsoft will one day be replaced." Read the article on BBC News Online " The interview will air Oct. 17, but the conversations seems to have ranged from pornography, the DOJ case (of course), and the charities he's involved with.
People get angry at Bill for the rather nasty tactics his company uses...like, say, cancelling Compaq's license to sell Windows because they were trying to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop. Or pulling some Soviet Revisionism on that Linux Netshow Player which disappeared off the face of the microsoft.com planet. Or removing critical Knowledge Base entries regarding Samba compatibility.
Check out any of the Halloween papers. Is he a geek? Yup. There's a definite sense of betrayal and violent tendancies, though, that's accumulated through years of abuses against the industry as a whole.
The company's behavior gets projected on him, which may or may not be fair.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Yes, yes, your old pal the DougMan has in fact secured the currently-unreleased transcript of the Bill Gates interview conducted by our good friend Mr. Paxman. And it seems likely to THIS secret agent that some of this interview will never see the light of day...so to whet everyone's appetite, here is what will probably be a lost snippet from the interview, never meant to see the light of day... (lights please)...
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: Microsoft is innovating in many ways.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: Microsoft is an innovator in baby seal technology.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: Microsoft has made the lives of many baby seals easier with its technological innovations.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: (long pause, no answer)
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: Windows 2000 will enable baby seals everywhere to enjoy the benefits of Active Directory technology.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: In the future, baby seals will be able to talk to their PCs , and the PCs will talk back.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: Eventually, all baby seals will be replaced.
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: (nervous twitch, long pause)
Paxman: Have you ever clubbed a baby seal?
Gates: (violent shaking, Gates, falls to the floor and suffers a grand mal seizure. After being tended to by medics he gets back up and sits down.)
Paxman: I'll take that as a yes. Have you ever kidnapped babies and sold them on eBay?
There it is folks, a world exclusive. Don't share this with anyone!
Everyone seems to slam Bill gates but at the end of the day, hes a capitalist in a capitalist system, playing by that systems rules and winning. If you want an alternative system then fine, but dont knock bill for being too good at the game. Microsoft fights dirty, just like all small young eager companies do, they just get the hunger beaten out of them when they get older. If you had a chum running a little software company who fought just as eagerly for his company as Bill did, yet only tunred over $50k youd think he was an underground geek hero. The fact that this particular geek won big time shouldnt change that.
I applaud Bill gates, hes one of the only hugely rich guys who is one of us (hes a coder just like most of us geeks).
And BTW, I have 2 windows machines at home that never NEVER crash, despite one being used as a development environment. I may get flamed for this, but Windows98 is as stable as any other operating system ive seen...
Cliffski
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
On the day Windows 95 was launched, MS payed News International (owned by one Rupert Murdoch, and my current employer) to sponsor The Times, one of the UK's most respected papers, for a day -- basically the paper was free for that one day. Coincidentally, The Times chose to run a hefty pullout section that day about Windows 95, in which it claimed Bill Gates was globally accepted as being the most brilliant programmer of his generation. Still think MS doesn't have influence over the mainstream press? This one incident appalled and disgusted me, but it did make me realise just how much money talks... Oh, and by the way, I won't deny that Murdoch shapes and pollutes the minds of his readers. He blatantly does, but then again, the sort of people that read The Sun don't have much of a mind to start with :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
He acknowledges that someone may be working opn the type of ground-breaking innovation he came up with in the late 70's to revolutionize the industry
Does anyone know what that was? I dont seem to recall anything of the sort happening. Lets see... he bought DOS from someone else, had the personal computer market handed to him on a platter through his mother sitting on a bank board with the then-chairman of IBM, and has since then been one of the biggest thieves of intellectual property in the industry.
"The thing we're involved with has democratised communications and anyone can publish on the internet."
Ah, yes. MS taking credit for the internet.
Operating the computer by speaking to it is also likely in the near future, and the computer will answer back. "One of the things you will be able to select is the personality," Gates tells his interviewer
I would love to see them try this, but would hate to try to use it! Anyone else seen the chillingly horrible talking parrot for outlook? And you thought the winking paper clip was abominable.
Just had to respond to some of that.
Juln
The most interesting thing I remember about MS's corporate culture is how, even when a member of the press got a manager to go "off the record", "in the clear", etc., they still spouted the company line.
Even when the statements were profoundly ludicrous, they'd still believe whatever came from up top, because to work for the company is to subscribe to an entire worldview.
(Sidenote: It's different in the Valley, where you can jump from between a hundred major tech jobs. Up there, it's MS or Bust. That has an isolationist effect, and (among other things) is one of the reasons why MS's turnover rate isn't ridiculously high. SAP also chooses to run a major development house in the middle of Bumfuck Germany for this same psychoisolationist effect.)
Where was I...ah yes. Microsoft employee's slavish devotion to the company line--remember when Ballmer slammed MS stock as overrated? Recall how all the stockholders were furious? Ballmer had to do what he did--he had to inform the flock that it was OK and acceptable not to have infinite faith in the value of their stock; that diversifying one's portfolio was an acceptable maneuver. That way, instead of all the MS employees being wiped out if/when there's a crash, at least some will have heeded the New Allowable Thought and gotten some financial advice.
If you think about it, I mean really, you know that's why he said what he did.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
He did not need to revolutionize the industry, since he created it. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the BASIC for MITS Altair, the first popular home computer that was sold as a kit. And this was done without an actual working example of the Altair-they have done the implementation on a 8008 simulator they have written on a mainframe machine.
I am not particularly a fan of Microsoft software, but let's give credit where it's due. Altair BASIC was the first piece of software that allowed computer hobbyists write programs easily, using a high level language. I don't think anyone on Slashdot will be stupid enough to claim that writing a BASIC interpreter using a primitive assembly language WITHOUT using a real example of the target processor or a native host system is an easy thing to do. After BASIC, business just took off.
Microsoft is behind most popular BASIC implementations of the era. The fact that Kemenyi and Kurtz(creators of BASIC) were not pleased with MS BASIC is irrelevant IMHO, there was very little standardization at that time. And frankly, they did not bother to leave their ivory tower and write a BASIC implementation that run on popular computers at a reasonable price, so I don't think they have a right to complain. Only after watching thousands of people get rich had they the courage to go out and start a company around BASIC, and it was way too late then.
I am as fervent a Linux enthusiast as most people around here, but I really believe the MS and Gates-bashing here is excessive. He may be a marketing and management guy now; but he has impressive accomplishments nevertheless, and deserves to be named among the geniuses in this industry; for starting the personal computer software business, and vision.
If you have a chance to read this post before it is moderated down to -7, I would really like to see a discussion on this.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
He adds: "Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'.
He owns the newspapers and buys editorials if he buys full page ads.
He owns grass roots campains and "independent" funded studies if he pays for them.
What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it.
And define the lock-in protocol of the word processors that are loosely defined and full of undocumented features? No, his company would NEVER go that low, would it?
What bothered me most about outtakes from that interview appearing in the article was the following quote from Mr. Gates:
This is bunk. Any software, and especially Microsoft's, has a keen influence on "how" it is used. I would go so far to say that even posts on /. carry a certain weight from the /. software, though not as much baggage as something like Word. The capabilities and the automation of software influence greatly what you can say just as the language you write in. The earlier comment about MHz vs. Mhz is a small example; I would submit that Word's set of templates, rules about documents, and "autocorrection" lends its influence to the output greatly.
I am at least glad to hear he said "The thing we're involved with has democratised..." instead of "We have democratised...". Although the Internet probably would have had a slightly different face without the influence of Microsoft and Internet Explorer, it would certainly still be democratized! I hate to sound crochety, but I feel it was much better before Windows had TCP/IP capability :-)
Gates claims that his business is "not like owning a newspaper".
He adds: "Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'.
"What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it.
He's right, to some degree.
Outside of the computer press(this includes computer sections of mainstream press), MS exerts almost zero influence.
With the exception of a few rather ridiculous and amateurish attempts at influencing public opinion through falsified Letters To The Editor(as well as the recent exposing of a sponsored advertisement so a good number of economists could publically agree with Microsoft's position in court), MS doesn't haven't nearly the kind of overarching mindshare gravitational suction that seems to permeate most other extremely large corporations.
It's a dichotomy worth studying--outside of self-defense or self-aggrandization within the rather limited context of computer technologies, Microsoft(unlike Sun, apparently) is actually surprisingly freedom minded. They do bundle MP3 encoding and decoding code, they're slapping Priceline down where they belong, and in general seem to have a general slant towards getting as much functionality as possible to the user.
That they use totalitarian and underhanded tactics in their quest to spread computating freedom is...interesting. They want people to be free, but damnit, they're going to be the one's to do it, whatever the cost.
Honestly, I think that's how they keep the company together. "Where do you want to go today...because we're going to be the one's to take you there; we're not letting you out." The coders take pride in the freedom, the suits take pride in the fact that they're preventing the Evil Outsiders from perverting the mission.
In that context, Gates' comments make perfect sense. He feels Murdoch works to pollute and shape the minds of his readers. Should the Murdoch's of the world release the software, he thinks, he'll use it to shape people's minds.
I'm kinda curious--when was the last time a major media outlet criticized(or at least reported negatively) about a parent company? MSNBC has delivered significant praise to Linux, and I believe has at least truthfully reported on the DoJ lawsuit. I wonder how often this could be said about the media world.
There's an interesting psychology at Microsoft; it deserves further research.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com