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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!
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
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?
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