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Slashdot Reader Analyzes BBC Interview With Bill Gates
However, the interview has enlightened me as to Gates' motivations. Some people have said he's motivated by money. I don't think so. Others say that he's power-hungry. I don't think he comes across as the sort of person who's massively concerned about power.
One significant thing I noticed was that Gates seems to believe that Microsoft is responsible for the success of the personal computer and he seems to believe that it's because of his company's software that the Internet has become as popular as it has. He asserted, during the interview, that Microsoft's software empowers people to publish their thoughts on the Internet, yet he later admitted that he didn't like the fact that others might use that same software to incite race hatred. He also spoke quite enthusiastically about what lay ahead and the sort of technologies (e.g. speech recognition) that Microsoft is currently working on.
I think Gates believes that he and Microsoft have, almost single-handedly, advanced the human race to the brink of the information age. I think he credits himself and his company as being directly responsible for the fact that there is "a computer on every desk and in every home".
I believe that Bill Gates sees himself as some kind of custodian. Because Microsoft has been so successful and because its software runs on nine out of every ten of the world's computers, he's come to the conclusion that he knows better than anyone else and, therefore, he has assumed the responsibility for leading humanity into the information age.
I think that he sees Microsoft as a tool - it is the company which will do the research, develop the technology and market the software which will help the human race advance. He sees himself as its custodian, rather than its owner. The fact that he has decided to leave his money, not to his children, but to a charitable institution which will fund research into health and education, supports this theory. Bill Gates does actually see himself as having been chosen, in some way, to help humanity.
I'm not saying that he sees himself as some sort of Messiah or genius; just that he has this perception of himself as someone who can change things for the better.
The problem is that he thinks he knows best and this explains his willingness to stomp all over any potential competition who might pose a threat to Microsoft's position (and thus, to his plans and vision of the future), as well as his arrogance towards the US Government.
Let me make it clear that I don't think Bill Gates is evil. I don't think his motivations are selfish. I merely think that he is misguided. He thinks that he knows best and he uses this belief to justify what he does, in effectively forcing the world to adopt the standards which his company has developed, under his supervision, not because he wants to be rich or powerful, but because he believes that he knows best than everyone else.
I don't blame Gates for his actions or the actions of his company. I think his intentions, deep down, are good. But I think that he may suffer from some psychological condition which blinds him to the fact that he doesn't have the right to disregard others just because he thinks he knows best. I suspect that he may believe that the end justifies the means. However, whilst I don't believe that Bill Gates' ultimate intentions are dishonourable, I do believe that he is dangerous because of the immensely powerful position Microsoft holds. Furthermore, I suspect that the people he has appointed to senior positions within Microsoft share his vision. As a result I really hope that the Department of Justice wins their antitrust court case against Microsoft, and that Microsoft is either broken up or has limits placed upon it which will prevent it from single-handedly controlling the development of the software, protocols and networks which will form the basis for the information age.
To be honest, the thought that Microsoft might be left intact or unfettered, to pursue its and Gates' goals, scares me. Not so much because their goal is a bad one, but because that, in achieving it, they could irrevocably stunt the development of the information age.
- The Dodger
Thanks, Dodger. An artful piece piece of writing. Please send your real name, shipping/mailing address, and t-shirt size to roblimo@nojunk.slashdot.org (minus the "nojunk") and we'll send you a Slashdot t-shirt from Copyleft, as we now do to all readers who contribute features or reviews.
Thanks for agreeing with me ... since that's what I noted in a later post ... yes, if Bill wanted that money, it would practically disappear IMHO. :)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Back in 1989, when Windows looked like crap, and they had many competing GUI's (OS/2, DESQview, among many others!), MS hired the designers of the Mac GUI's look and feel to work on Windows 3.0's.
Bear in mind that OS/2 was originally a joint IBM/Microsoft project.
The cake is a pie
i'm about as sick and tired as I can conceivably be without event of degenarative disease or death of all this let's just get along crap.
If something is designed badly it sucks, if something is designed well, it rules. Very simple. Man this is like that color blind and sexless world crap where because color is an issue for some devolved individuals or because some sexist religions and societies exist a sexless colorless world is a better choice.
Gates is not responsible for the proliferation of PC's. He's responsible for little beyond preventing others from getting involved. Just foollow the story of DirectX.
In fact I'd say we'd be light years from where we are if it weren't for IBM's narrow Business Machines only vision, Apple's childish Jetsons futurism, Microsoft's out the door before it's born and functional approach, the commercial Unix wars happening every three days, and first posting.
In fact I'd say there's quite a few devils on the loose.
You may flame when ready... when I'm ready that is.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Not Hitler! Actually that sounds more like Dr. Strangelove, with his involuntary "Sig Heil"ing.
Bill Gates is Dr. Strangelove, now the universe makes more sense!
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
So by your standards, Leonardo Da Vinci wasn't a genius. Picasso wasn't a genius. Buffet isn't a genius. Why do you equate genius with "Good at computers"? Gates was certainly, in the early 80s, and probably even today, much better with this whole IT business that all of us combined. Gates is undoubtedly one of the savviest business minds in the 20th century. Does that make him a genius in what he does best? If not, what constitutes genius?
Please up-moderate the interesting thread starting at comment #94 about the deleted bits of the interview.
He is a buisnessman genius, whether he can code is of small importance. It takes brains to play your cards right, otherwise we'd all be billionaires ;)
This is much too benign. To see Gates at face value is to swallow all the political hype we've learned to disregard over the years. There are so many variables here - how much coaching was allowed? What did Gates know in advance? How much did his spin doctors prepare him (as if they weren't involved and like _intensely_ all along)?
Much too benign. Misguided?
Balderdash!
radsoft.net
Purity... Of.... Essence....
Ever see a Commie drink water Mandrake?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Damn Straight
yep. also see:2 02&cid=208
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/10/17/1719
What a load!
Name any other recent innovation from any other company or group (including OSS) that is truly innovative and not based on any other work?
I bet you can't.
If Bill Gates isn't evel, then "evil" doesn't exist.
I believe evil does exist -- maybe not the kind driven by "demons" -- but the kind where a human being, deep down, believes all other humans exist only to serve him/her.
Bill Gates (and Company) have cheated, stole, lied and taken the free market from not only the American populace, but the people of the World as well.
Many will disagree, because there are no convictions on record. But the convictions would exist, had Microsoft not followed the all-too-familiar path of entangling opponents in lawsuits and settling at the last moment to avoid a conviction.
I believe he views the world population as sheep, whom he (as the benevolent technocrat) will "guide" to the truth, for a mandatory fee -- all the while, altering the history of computing to match his view. He will gladly point to the various "Bill Gates this-or-that" shrines/autitoriums and declare them "proof" of his greatness.
Currently, we are all being held hostage in our schools, workplace, even in the places where we spend our money by Microsoft.
A technologically weak product, the vast majority of which is little more than a clone of bits and pieces paid for by the taxpayer through University funds, has catapulted this delusional fanatic to the position of wealth and influence he now holds.
By the way, if anyone is considering posting the same old drone of "my jealousy and anger", read the following first:
When I was a kid, like many kids, there were bullies in the neighborhood. They picked on the smaller guys; in return, we hated them. This is really no different. BG had a lot of influence in the closure of a company my brother worked for, making him struggle to earn a living for he and his family for over a year. So, it's personal. I don't like the man or his company, and seeing either (or both) fade away would be a good thing from my point of view.
Additionally, I've met and gotten to know (somewhat) at least three extremely wealthy people over the years. They didn't have to steal or cheat to make their money. They were smart, friendly, and able to make quality alliances and produce good products. None held a monopoly, and all lead quality lives. They're good people with a respect for the law.
Even just a few years ago, I saw a group of *big* guys stealing from people at the beach. They just walked up and took what they wanted. They had knives in their belts, tatoos, etc. No one stood up because they didn't want the knife.
So, I say evil does exist, and Microsoft and Bill Gates are evil. Rise above.
Considering Apple spend lots of time and money developing the Newton, without other handhelds available for them to "study", and beat everyone to the punch by releasing it first, is an innovation in my book. Sure, the idea wasn't new, but my definition of innovation includes more than just coming up with the concept.
I was actually wrong about firewire, it was invented in 1986 as a SCSI replacement for the Mac. So it was more than 10 yers ago. Firewire was then submited to the IEEE as a standard in 1995, which it gave the "IEEE 1394" designation. Apple kept the Firewire(tm) name probably for marketing purposes.
FYI, Quicktime is more than just a movie format. It's also an audio/video player, a picture viewer, a VR viewer(QTVR), a 3D API(QuickDraw 3D), windowing system(QuickDraw). It's a complete multimedia architecture(where do you think MS got the idea for DirectX?). Was there anything like that before 1992?
The Web was invented for very much the exact same reasons that Signal 11 cited for the Internet. Perhaps you should do a little more research into the origins of HTML and how Tim Berners-Lee first kicked off this whole fiasco.. If anything made anything else popular, the Web made the Internet popular. And yes, you're right, the media doesn't have a clue what the difference is.
You'll notice that HTML is meant to "mark up" text, not define appearance. It wasn't originally intended for the masses. The original form, which was just about perfect for its original users, might have astounded you with its lack of utility with regards to modern "designers". And believe me, these guys weren't using Windows, either. Once again I defer to Signal 11's remarks on the subject..
~ Kish
Bill Gates is rich because he's a ruthless psychopath, totally unethical, and unwilling to let anyone who has something better than he has survive. And he has the power (massive paid-for public relations lies to dupe the public) and weapons (unfettered economic power over the entire PC computer industry) to force everyone involved in any business connected with the PC to do his bidding or die. If you are so impressed with money, then I imagine you also worship the lords of the drug cartels-- they too are obscenely rich, psychopathic, obsessively tyrannical, and greedy. Another common trait that Gates and the drug lords share, is that they are the very models of polite behavior when facing their "public". Gates steer the industry the way he sees fit? God help us all! What a complete clinical megalomaniac!
Erchie
I watched Bill Gates in a discussion on German television last night and I really got to admit that he is a genius. Always listening more than saying, but giving the right answers if he is asked to. He might be "blinded" about how the Internet developed, but he got a big understanding of economy and how to lead a software company. And in the end who would not do the same thing if he was in Gates' position. The funniest about the interview was to watch someone speak to a bunch of managers and a politician who thinks he is so important and the camera is focused on Gates and the subtitle says "Bill Gates - Richest man of the world".
http://blog.klimpong.de
Anonymous articles start at 0.
Again, that's just what he seems to think. The truth of the matter is, he's too powerful, and he's dangerous to America's economy. No one person should have so much wealth or power.
Nobody.
I agree. This analogy may be way off, but think of Hitler. He (single-handedly?) convinced an enormous group of people that he knew who deserved to live and he knew what the world should be like and proceeded from there. And look what he did.
Now, I'm not saying that M$ is trying to kill everybody or take over the world... they're just trying to take over the computing world. And I don't like it. And I know that there are a great many other people in this world who don't like it. I realize that M$ has some decent stuff.. (I use Windows.. b/c, in my current circumstances, I must) - decent as in, it works, and it's not the end of the world - but they have by far NOT taken the world to where it is by themselves, nor do they know what's best, nor are they carrying the world today, nor should they, nor should they have complete say over the future of the world ("world" here meaning (1)the computing/computer/technology world, and (2) the physical world/Earth).
I just hope the DoJ wins the anti-trust case and that M$ can be enlightened.
Insert mind here.
My guess is that he defends it at least partially because his wife had a major role in its development. If he admitted it was terrible, there might be some domestic discord in the household.
On the other hand, there's always the Office talking paperclip. While most people seem to really hate the object that I immediately dubbed "The Paperclip Spy", I've actually met people who defend some of the other assistants, such as Einstein. Maybe this means the ideas behind the paperclip are better than any of us thought.
Or maybe I just have deranged friends.
Personally, all I notice is that the help I actually receive from the paperclip is worse than ever, and I take my anger out on the paperclip, not Microsoft. I have to assume this is exactly what MS wants, and is the real reason for the paperclip. "You know, Microsoft and Gates are OK, but gosh, this paperclip, it never tells me what to do!"
D
----
Who's idea was it anyhow for the OS to require more resources then the application you're runnig?
"Since you are the richest guy on the planet and you know you can't live forever, have you considered investing heavily in medical science?
Serious research in to cell reconstruction (anti-aging, you can't become younger) is hindered by lack of funding. Do you beleive this would be a worthwhile pursuit for mankind should you decide to bless some team of research medico's with a grant?"
Now, let's see if Rob can organise a '20 questions' for the man to answer.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Not gonna let this one go ;-)
The GUI and Mice, for instance, were developed back in the 60's AFAIK by individuals (their names escape me at the moment).
...who relocated to PARC soon after, and refined the technology while there. To that extent, they are PARC ideas. (I'm not at all sure, but I believe the mouse was a PARC invention, at least as a replacement for less useful pointer.)
And the Alta and Star were not a 'limited implementations'. In many ways, they were (and in fewer ways, still are) superior to the MacOS (and Windows, and X...).
However, you miss something very key. Apple did not invent the GUI by any stretch of the imagination. They essentially stole it from Xerox PARC. Virtually all the important technologies we use today (GUIs, mice, Ethernet, laser printers, PostScript) were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
That's why I originally said "we would still probably have some sort of GUI-based system today since concepts and even limited implementations were in place before the Mac was born"
I didn't miss anything, I just wasn't specific. Not everything was developed at Xerox. The GUI and Mice, for instance, were developed back in the 60's AFAIK by individuals (their names escape me at the moment).
Will Gates be remembered as one of the Great Names of computer science? I like to think not. Cerf will be remembered in the future, probably more than he is now; perhaps Postel will be also; Torvalds and Stallman might; and so might Schneier (because I think cryptography is destined to become far more important in daily life than it is now). But Gates will be remembered only as a great businessman (along with Rockafeller). Or is that just me hoping?
If you're going to count Torvalds and Stallman as being members of the "Great Names of Computer Science", it's hypocritical not to include Gates. Torvalds hasn't given much to Computer Science - neither has Stallman.
In another response, you write that:
"Torvalds did make a point about the efficiency of a monolithic kernel"
Hell, *I* could have told you that a monolithic kernel was efficient - it's bleeding OBVIOUS. As for "and Stallman about the possibility of writing a reasonably efficient cross-platform C compiler"... what about Ron Cain? James Hendrix? Anders Hejlsberg? To be honest, a "Cross-platform C compiler" wasn't exactly new - people had been writing them for years, and more efficiently than Stallman (see HiSoft, for example).
Tellya what... include Gates, and I'll let you include Torvalds and Stallman.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Before I start I would like to say a few things. I hate Bill Gates! The fact that i bought windows 4 times over the years when I purchase a new computer pisses me off to the extreme. But when I sit down and really think and try to not put any emotion into my thoughts I can picture an even worse world.
:-)
/.ers but I prefer bill's world. We all have linux right? As long as we keep linux then I dont care.
I would of never thought of saying this a few years ago but we in general would all be paying more money for computers if it weren't or Bill Gates. THe computers would be expensive and proprietary ps/4 and ps/5 computers with hidden bios features with proprietary busses that linux couldnt run off of and the only alternative would be the mac.
THis is what I believe what would of happened if it weren't for microsoft.
Sure os/2 would be much better then NT but would it have a gui? I dont think so. Microsoft was the only company brave enough to write one and risk being sued by apple. Apple had some patents that the ms lawyers sleazed by them with tricky words and deceptions (its great what alot of money will buy these days). I bet os/2 would be in character mode and proprietary and would be quite different from os/2 warp. Remember it was Bill who was crazy all over IBM to include a gui. Linux might of never been born at all! os/2 was at least stable and you cold easily port unix shells to it.
IF linux ever did come into existence it would be difficult to crack and write drivers for the proprietary bios and bus settings.
SO what else might of happened if Bill never was born?
hmm. Do you remember those g4 macs that were slowed down by 50mhz and still sold for the same price? Well, this is what probably over a 3rd of all linux users would of probably been using since apple is cheaper and faster. Remember that todays fast chips have been fueled by competition with OEMs. IF only BIM was around, they would re-engineer every motherboard and we would probably still be using p2 450's for $3,300 due to desing constrictions and lack of incentive to make better machines.
Apple would be cheaper and we would all have to put up with another more friendlier monopolist.
We would also be using proprietary networks and oracle would of been gone and out of the picture by now and db2 would be king. With a more stable OS on every machine we would also see alot of unixes die off. I believe sun would still be around for higher tasks like today. I picture outrageously expensive computers, routers and software with proprietary ps/5's everywhere running only IBM software without linux or linux would be hell of alot smaller. Remember it was teh ms bahsers who blow linux out of proportions. I know the hard core hackers are non ms-biased. BUt ms haters really have supported linux. You have to admit this. THis is what I think about when BIll is not in the picture. I quiver when I think about this alternative universe.
Sorry
THank you BIll for competition, open standards and linux. Strange!
Weird but probably true. Just imagine the world. Remember IBM played nice for a litte while when clones appeared. IF it weren't for the clones it would of been alot nastier. I just think the world with IBM and apple only scares me half to death. At least we have semi-open hardware that we can write linux too.
Tell me all what you think.
Thanks Bill Gates and Al Gore for bringing us the internet. End Sarcasm.
10Brett-T
Oh, bother.
Actually Win2k Professional requires 32 meg RAM and a 133 mhz CPU. Server takes a 133 and 64 min and 128 recommended, and adv server takes 133 CPU and 64 min. and 256 recommended.
not really his net worth for sure, but definitly his "goal" of making things better :)
Thanks Bill Gates and Al Gore for bringing us the internet.
End Sarcasm.
10Brett-T
Oh, bother.
Neither has the Linux community, you all are just copying features from Windows, Macs and Unix. What has the Linux community done that is new? Given away software? Been done for a long time. USB support? Nope, still not in Linux. AI? Nope. Speach recognition? Nope, not in Linux.
The Lisa was released in January of 1983, while windows 1.0 didnt come out until 1985 or so. The lisa came out before the mac but it basically had the same GUI as the first MAC. Lisa sold for 10 k and had the following specs announced 19 January 1983 for May delivery at $9,995 with 5 MB Apple ProFile hard drive; also available with 10 MB hard drive; discontinued April1985 CPU: 5 MHz 68000 ROM: 64KB RAM: 1 MB, expandable to 2 MB 12" b&w screen keyboard attached via coiled telephone-like cable mouse attached via DB-9 connector two DB-9 serial ports parallel printer port three expansion slots floppies: two 5.25" 860KB ultra-thin Twiggy drives. One more thing, Apple did not "steal" the Gui from xerox, they purchased it for several million shares of apple when it went public, which xerox made mucho dinero off of.
So Bill Gates is essentially just Wily E. Coyote?
I agree, this was the worst piece of prose I've ever read on Slashdot.
. . . but on the other hand, some hard-core conspiracy freaks have been filtering up into the upper echelons of the GOP since the 1980's. I don't just mean Pat Buchanan, either. Lott, Barr, and DeLay are pretty far out there on a lot of issues when you really pin them down, and I don't just mean ties to the Klan (though they sure do have those, don't they?)
Is Chenoweth still around? Heh. The Armed Overthrow of the Government Candidate. "Vote for me, I hate ZOG, too!"
Psychopaths . . . Still, your average mainstream/extreme Republican knows when to pander to the armed-struggle crowd, and when to shut up and play it cool. Most of it probably really is just pandering, anyway. They're making a fat buck on things as they are, there's no need for any changes.
Well ;) You can snicker down at him and call him "The devil" but you have to admit, the guy is a genius. To have amassed such a fortune in so a short time is impressive. The guy has been in the right place at the right time for quite a while. Yeah it's scary that Microsoft controls as much of the market as it does, but it's still impressive.
Yea but Linus is saying his way of doing things is right and Bills way is wrong. There is nothing wrong in thinking you are right but to attack one person for it and treat the other like a god is stupid.
But what does this mean if he were no longer able to be "custodian" to Microsoft? Would they simply cease? Or does he have enough "followers" to continue this practice of slash and burn?
The interview was very simple, no indepth questioning. I sent the BBC some questions to make Bill squirm like :-
What do you say to the accusation that the timing
of your donations to charity has been driven by the ongoing DOJ (Department of Justice) trial?
You talk in your recent book Business at the Speed
of Thought that you have a huge amount of business information at your fingertips, yet one of the Microsoft witmesses, Richard Schmalensee claimed that you didnt, that is was all done on bits of paper, so who is being truthful and who is lying?
... and many more, Paxman can make people sweat with the right info, but he was just fauning over Bill being very light handed, I was really disappointed he could have had a field day. As for how Bill came off in the interview, like a spokeperson for MS, not much else, the only interesting line of questioning was when Paxman asked about "The Road Ahead", but completely missed the fact that it had to be revised for the second edition as in the first Bill talked about CDROMs, and played down the Net. All in all I think the BBC need someone who can brief interviewers on the industry so that they can go in and ask all the difficult questions, otherwise we will just have to wait for the DOJ / Caldera etc to ask the questions in court.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
We all know that the most successful CEOs are very good on the hot seat. I don't believe that Bill Gates came into $100 Billion (US) in the last 15 years or so by being a relatively nice guy who doesn't care much about money or power.
... one builds huge towers so everyone knows he's got money, the other silently kills off competitors but acts like a really nice guy in public.
... he's not evil necessarily, just not quite the angel this article makes him out to be.
...
I think he's done an excellent job of maintaining Microsoft as being the head of the pack in some areas (Windows has been very successful in its own right, not just because of monopoly). I think however, that he makes people believe what you've taken away from it so that he doesn't get slammed for being so powerful.
There are two ways to be powerful; Donald Trump and the Mafia
I'd put Bill Gates in the second category.
But hey, to each their own
- Not "misguided", "misguiding"
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I think you are misinterpreting the meaning of "evil." I propose that nearly all people that we would consider evil do not consider themselves as such. Rather, they consider themselves misunderstood.
Lets examine the extreme case: Did Hitler see himself as evil? Did he think he was causing great harm to humanity? Or did he feel that he was greatly benefitting those most in need of his services? I would guess the latter.
What about the Christians who suppressed Science and Knowledge in Europe for over a millennia? Did they feel that they were doing humanity a service? I think the vast majority of them believed strongly in the righteousness of their actions.
What does this mean? Evil can only be considered objectively if it's a measure of actions. When evil is used to measure intentionality, it merely means "on the other team."
So is Bill Gates evil? That depends upon his effect. Is he a + or a - to humanity?
I vote -.
Any fool can see that ORRIN HATCH is the primary political enemy of Bill Gates and what is Hatch? Yes, a senior and very influential member of the remaining tattered remnants of the Lawful Government of the Occupied (formerly "United") States of America.
Gates/NT market control monopoly is not a product of the free market, it is only a sham by the Media to make it appear that way. Massive Liberal (radical socialist) government funding has fueled meteoric rise of Gates and Microsoft, customers have been forced to buy, distributors forbidden by armed coercion to sell competing products -- allowing total market control and dominance by inferior, "pre-cracked" Surveillance-Assistance Technology (called "Windows NT" by the lying media). This Technology allows the criminal "Democratic Party" liberal conspiracy shadow-government to monitor and encode all of your communications, and fosters their dominance of this Occupied and tormented land.
Don't believe the lies, the Truth is so obvious if you only think about it.
Whether Mr. Gates is responsible for the proliferation of the PC is undisputed...
I'll dispute that. PC's would have proliferated at the same rate, regardless of the presence or absence of one William Gates III. The difference would have been, we would have been roughly 8-9 years further advanced in software without him. Think about it. Right now, with Linux, we are just about finished building a system that already existed at Xerox Palo Alto research center in the late 70's. Complete with solid file system and virtual memory handling system like that perfected by IBM considerably earlier. This work should have been ported to PC's by the end of the 80's - instead, Bill took over the ball game and everything degenerated into a big control game, instead of getting on with making software as good as it can be. Turns out, Bill's team just couldn't go the distance - what with internal politics, and keeping various barbarians at bay - and dropped the ball. Meaning we unwashed hordes had to pick it up... and... scuse me, this sports metaphor is starting to get lame. In simple terms, we had to rebuild everything from scratch, do 9 years of work all over again, just so we could do it right, make it open, and have a solid base from which to attack the real issues of what computers are capable of. That was unnecessary. Thanks for nothing, Bill.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Netscape forgot that diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggy!' while carrying a big stick. I really think they would have gotten a lot farther if they had kept a low profile, and subtly started adding things such as Java, without the "We're gonna squash Microsoft like the bug that they are!" fanfare. Instead of sneaking past the sleeping giant, they woke him up...
--synaptik
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
just that he has this perception of himself as someone who can change things for the better.
.02
he is *trying* but I think in a futile attempt. Look at the rescent article about Activisions opening up their source to a group of programmers so that they could improve on it. Their *own* programmers didn't do a great job, and outsiders were able to improve on it. Microsoft really needs to move into the Open Source movement and allow other people to improve it. It isn't going to get better until he realizes that Open Source isn't communism and will help his financial situation...
Just my worthless
Sorry, the stats I had were from ZdTV. (Why did I trust them..?)
Rockefeller's idea of giving to charity was throwing nickels into the starving crowd in the mids of the depression. The man had the vision that the big money in the oil business was selling the stuff rather than mining it. Other than that it's as if he lived on mars all his life, reading about earth in glossy advertisements
That's absolutely right. Programming feats attributed to Gates are fake. And he didn't build the billion dollar empire from nothing. (Started with a few million (from his parents), went broke, got millions more from his parents and got wealthy.)
I still have my GEOS 5 1/4 disks dated from 1986, by Berkeley Softworks.
GEOS was a remarkable Operating System, considering that it was written for an 8-bit machine with 64KB of RAM.
Some features of GEOS were drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, memory managment which allowed programs to swap memory to disk, support for many IO devices, such as mice, light-pens.. printers..etc..
Later version even supported hard-drives, and task switching..
Screenshots of the GUI can be found at: http://www.zimmers.net/geos/
The Operating System was ususaly bundled with each Commodore 64 system sold, just like these days, Windows is bundled with every PC sold...
Bill Gates didn't inovate anything new at all..
"Businesses are *NOT* creatures with desires, goals, and instincts of their own and with a right to survival at any cost. They are supposed to be voluntary organizations of humans for their and society's mutual benefit."
Wrong! Businesses purpose is to make money - period! Their pupose is NOT for societys benifit, they are for their owners/stock holders benifit. They have a duty to compete as effectivly as possible, which means fighting to win. It does not mean 'I've got enough now so I can start helping my competitors'. It is mankinds nature to compete until the compitition is extinct. Those who can't compete are eliminated, that's life - get used to it.
It is widely known and understood that winners in almost every field have poor recollection of their past: the mistakes they made, the competitors who lost, their failed predictions. This happens because they don't have anyone to keep them honest. It's the same effect when great authors get mediocre after their fourth or fifth novel: there's no motivation for themselves or their editors to keep the quality up.
With that in mind, here are some notable examples from the Gates interview:
*sigh*
I think that Apple knew what they were doing when they used "Think Different." Apple doesn't want people to think differently. That wouldn't make much sense at all.... Rather, I suspect that they'd like to be identified as the 'Different' Company. Ergo, "Think Different" means "Think Apple" not "Think Differently"
Ever see the (abominable) movie Oh God, 2? They've got a similar catchphrase in it, IIRC, "Think God". The point being to think about God, not to think like God.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, that lawyer has an email address @ Microsoft and argues for ANYONE at Microsoft over speeding tickets (that pays him to). Not just Bill. A lot of ppl do this at MS to prevent insurance from going up and taking too many points on their license.
What are you gonna do? Release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
With Ati-Vec.. ehh, "velocity engine" Dragon should port to the Mac. It would follow Apple's goals, and the CPU is perfect for it. Dragon now supports KMI SIMDs, which improve performance by a great deal (supposedly). The Alti-Vec instructions are far superior, and are not just marketting ploys. With them, and the far better quality of the PowerPC design, I'm sure a speech recognition program would be superb.
... course, a lot of us don't have Macs and want to use another OS anyways.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
In the past, I have read some magazine interviews with billg@microsoft.com that were conducted by email. Apparently, he often prefers email as a medium of communication and is (was?) willing to exchange ideas on equal terms with many a journalist.
I think that just maybe taco&hemos could get en exchange going with Redmond if they restrict some of the more immature slashdot readers. Of course, the slashdot staff will immediatly be denounced by a majority of the linux world for Fraternizing With the Enemy.
--Bogey
Why spend so much time ranting about something that takes 1 second to turn off? Or is it that you really haven't USED the software and are just basing your rant on the rants of others? The hard core Linux advocates are looking more and more like lemmings all the time. Don't you have something better to do like inovating something new (for once) in Linux?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991018 -000001.html
I had a friend in college who had a headset and could do very basic speech recognition on a C-64.
Speech recognition technology would not be dependant on any platform unless there was support for it built into the OS. I don't imagine that it is any more trouble for IBM to develop speech recognition for Windows than for the Mac.
Now if a recent Mac OS has support built in that's another matter... anyone?
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The first Macintosh came out in 1984. Before that was the Lisa, which had mostly the same GUI, but was two expensive, and weird disk drives, and never really caught on.
As far as the origin of the GUI, Apple saw some of the stuff that was going on at Xerox (the mouse, and Smalltalk come to mind), got excited, hired away a bunch of Xerox people, and started writing a GUI extending those ideas, and adding their own ideas to it. (Look at Smalltalk, and try to tell me that it had *everything* a modern GUI does. Apple stole some ideas from Xerox, but some of the ideas later stolen by Microsoft were their own...)
Now, Apple knew that if the Macintosh was to catch on, there had to be software for it, so they got Microsoft to write an office suite for it. In order to do this, Microsoft had to have access to information about the OS, and Microsoft naturally took notes, and eventually turned out Windows based on them...
Apple sued, but Microsoft hadn't actually stolen code, just the look and feel, and Apple had been a bit sloppy in the agreements Microsoft wrote up, so Microsoft got away with it...
--Arcum
Netscape went out of business? That's strange. I thought Navigator 5.0 was coming out.
I'm a Jew and I love a good Jewish joke. My dad's a lawyer and he not only loves lawyer jokes, but tells them to everyone else.
/. a couple months ago:
If Bill Gates hasn't heard a Bill Gates joke, he's out of touch with reality. Primitive tribesmen in darkest Africa who have never had any contact with modern civilization know Bill Gates jokes (although probably not very good ones, I'll grant)
Anyway, here's a good one I saw on
Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on who was the best programmer.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best kernel in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
True. Except Washington doesn't use points....
-- Moondog
i.e. the system knows to execute a .class file by invoking "java". Hmmm, that must have been real tough to code. Not.
The point about OSS is that it allows much more freedom to innovate, even if a lot of time is currently spent replicating what someone else has done (which is not surprising and to be welcomed, not condemned!). This is the big picture which debates like this tend to miss.
Female Prison Rape in NY
haps they didn't invent it, but Speech Recognition has been around on the Mac since around 1995.
IBM has had speech recognition for at least as long. Maybe they didn't have a marketable product, but I remember IBM commercials going to around 1990 stating that they were working on speech recognition. (Remember the commercials with "writing mrs. wright right away" or some such thing?
My journal has hot
The "working computer": the Mac II had a very innovatively designed hardware system where you could put any board in and it'd work almost like magic. You could attach any external drive and it'd work. Any monitor would carry with it the necessary information to properly configure with the system, somewhere near 72 dpi, no questions asked. Mac users often called this "plug 'n' play" or "PnP", which were somehow trademarked. The way apple designed their systems was also remarkable. Steve Jobs demonstrated that he could deconstruct and rebuild Mac IIcx in five minutes using one screwdriver. Ten years later, I was still getting bitten by PCs I had to repair. Choosing Nubus with its Euro-DIN connectors that required no stabilizing screw was an example of this commitment to good design. Look at PCI and you'll see that they're still making the same mistakes.
I for one would be very interested in sending some questions his way. Whether we like it or not, Bill's company will continue to be a part of the world's computing landscape for a while to come and I would be very interested in hearing his responses to some of our criticism about his company, products and practices...
David
I do hope you're joking. I think I've wasted more time fixing problems with Windows and DOS than any other system I've ever used. In general, all I learned was how badly put together MS products are. Put another way, I don't think Yugo make better cars than Mercedes-Benz because they force you to pull over and futz with the engine every so often.
I've been out of University for 25 years now. How about you?
You accurately describe the state of business today. I'm incredulous you consider that state of affairs ideal. Look around you, there are six billion people and more on the way. There aren't enough resources for everyone to have the lifestyle we currently enjoy in the U.S. Either you better get used to war, reduced life style, or a more efficient style of production. One that maximizes quality and quantity of output, not personal wealth and corporate power.
"It is mankinds nature to compete until the compitition is extinct."
And there you stand on a planet swept clean of life. What a vision. You won! Congratulations.
Unless you agree with Linus and believe Linus is right and Bill is wrong. Then it isn't so stupid, it's more like supporting what you believe, and some people think that's smart. But you obviously don't think so. Well, it would be useless to try to change your mind (but that's because I think _you_ are stupid, which is why I included this part, get it?). ;-)
I'm not a fan of World Domination by anyone, Linux included. Yes, products that no one uses will die. That's quite different from sabotoging them and muscling them away from the distributors.
Microsoft is more like a mass extinction than a competing predator anyway. And it didn't claw its way to the top for survival. I imagine Bill could somehow limp along if he only had a few billion instead of hundreds.
While that behavior may be tolerable in animals, I find it a little short of what I expect from humans. Businesses are *NOT* creatures with desires, goals, and instincts of their own and with a right to survival at any cost. They are supposed to be voluntary organizations of humans for their and society's mutual benefit. Their genes do not force them to dominate by screwing customers, they *choose* to do that. It sure *ain't* pretty when major world corporations act like 14 yr old males showing off.
If you want to think that the prisoner's dilemna means cooperation in business is impossible, you may. I don't wish to view the world that darkly. We haven't learned the trick yet, but the cooperation stemming from open source is the best hope I see today.
Life isn't about smashing everyone around you down so you can stand on top. There doesn't *have* to *be* just *one* top. It doesn't have to be a rat race.
Very good point. I believe the two characters are very similar, too. The Gates = Reardon similarity has obviously been noticed by a lot of people, not only the Objectivist bunch (who have a well-known Microsoft defense site , BTW).
Specifically Microsofties(what people who work at Microsoft call themselves) seem to allude to the connection a lot, I believe the new company of one of the original founders of WebTV (acquired by Microsoft) is named "Reardon Steel".
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
"power-hungry ","most special person in the world","single-handedly advanced the human race into the info age" Hmm.. sounds like Al (I invented the internet) Gore.
Don't make too much out of disputing traffic tickets. You can argue that he got the tickets because he was/is arrogant. He probably fought the citations so that his driving privileges wouldn't be suspended. Even billg isn't allowed to drive if he gets too many points on his license.
I'd be fascinated to see what happens here. I'd have to agree with our writer's assemsnet of Billy G - misguided rather than evil - but I'd love to see what would happen if he got some serious questions asked of him - a proper Paxman interview, which that wasn't. Jeremy's normally a pretty aggressive interviewer and that was as gentle as it gets - no really nasty questions, and I can't believe that they either gave Bill question approval or that I was the only one who sumbitted searching questions.
The interesting question, I suppose, is more how he'd react when presented with clear arguments that what he's doing is wrong. Jeremy just didn't know enough about the field, and I'm guessing most MS staff are a little wary of this.
As an aside, he commented at one point (sorry, not an exact quote) that MS people came in every day and produced the very best work they could. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of either their staff or their recruitment office, is it?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
... was the Lisa, which (IIRC) was later rebranded the Macintosh XL.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Apple forced Digital Research (remember CP/M?) to stop producing GEM for the PC. Before that suit, some prominent companies were supporting GEM with products like Ventura Publisher. This is part of the reason for Ventura's initial success in the PC market over Aldus, who put Pagemaker on Win 2.0--Ventura's choice of interface was better written, faster, and easier to use. Later, Ventura had to play a catch-up game with Aldus who bet their DTP business on the Macintosh, a good move at the time. Adobe won by monopolizing DTP. :) When Apple won the suit, we saw multiple sufferings, including Atari's ST line, the original GEM, and the proliferation of Windows, the biggest cause of frustration since [flamebait] Unix.
Virtually all the important technologies we use today (GUIs, mice, Ethernet, laser printers, PostScript) were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
Er, no. I couldn't give you exact details off the top of my head, but both GUIs and mice had been around before. Xerox PARC made the first decent modern one - overlapping windows being an innovation IIRC - but the concept wasn't entirely new.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
His complete failure to answer any questions in that interview pissed me off, though. Every single question was answered with an advert for Microsoft, whether it was related to Microsoft or not.
The questions were so open-ended that you could attack him for not answering any of them or defend him for having answered all of them with roughly equal validity.
The bottom line is - as far as interviews go, it was more Jeremy Clarkson than Jeremy Paxman - more talk-show material. Anyone who expected more was bound to be disappointed. I found it interesting because, like it or not, Microsoft does have a lot of say in what appears in the software marketplace (after all, they produce rather a lot of it) and it is interesting to hear what they have their eye on next (you can argue the toss about whether it's innovative or not, of course).
And Paxman didn't badger him! I expected him to nail Billy-boy down to an answer!
"And in related news, Jeremy Paxman is in a critical condition after being electrocuted by his computer during the production of Newsnight. It is not entirely sure what caused the accident, though one cameraman claims that shortly after the incident he heard from the computer the following words: 'That will teach him to mess with ME.' No Microsoft official was available for comment."
--
"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
You believe all that do you? Was Monte Davidoff's middle name Cristo by any chance? Did Philip Morris debug it for them? The Marlboro man was their marketing guru no doubt?
There is no optimal operating system. I have been a major fan of various ones, starting with C64/1541, all the way through the gamut (you name it, I can say something good about it), until I started to think outside the box. There is no consumer OS that has been designed for the customer. MacOS used to be, but the link is becoming obscure now. There are so many operating system technologies, but the market is 20 yrs behind research, excluding only the log-structured filesystem. I don't see Linux becoming the great consumer OS. It's not in the genes. I don't see Microsoft or Apple doing it anymore either. They are too concerned with eye candy. If a revolution is to happen, someone is going to have to start observing the consumer.
In my experience with talking to Mac users they ignore anything not Apple related and when something 'new' comes out (like AirPort) they think they're the first ones to have the 'innovation'.
I'm sure wireless networking has been around a little longer :)
Just my observation...
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Still, I don't know about you, but I've never seen a M$ product function "reasonably" with the minimun requirements listed.
Yeah, there's that point too.... :)
My journal has hot
I watched the same interview with great interrest thinking (perhaps foolishly) that it would contain some actual substance, however I didn't find anything particularly interresting. Contrary to what the author of this review says I was not impressed with Jeremy's interview - not that it was particularly bad but it was just a normal crap 30min interview asking the same sorts of questions that you would ask a pop-star. Bill Gates didn't say anything particularly enlightening. Basically the interview was fine, but it was basically the same as any other interview of a famous/rich person. It was about the same calibur as an interview with the Spice Girls or any other star would have been. I don't think it was worthy of a review on slashdot as it was issentially a non-event.
Well, there's certainly something afoot otherwise why else would Bill Gates bother to talk to a politician? Certainly not to pick up typing skills.
However, you can't uproot a skilled workforce in any significant numbers without severe lossage, regardless of what you pay them, so I doubt that he would even consider moving the existing HQ elsewhere.
However, there is a related possibility that ties in quite nicely with a few other problems that plague him. If he were to set up a brand new cryptographic division in the UK then he'd get out from under the daft US regulations in that area.
He must know that security and thus strong encryption will be absolutely fundamental and huge on the Internet as soon as e-commerce hits the exponential ramp, yet he's prevented from offering killer products in that area to the world from the US at the present time. That must really piss him off because *now* is the time to establish a massive mindshare in that future commercial environment.
So, setting up a cryptographic R&D + development operation in the UK would allow him to thumb his nose at the crypto dinosaurs barring his way, gain him extra technical staff in a key area, and simultaneously send a message of some sort to the Dept of Justice.
Three birds with one stone?
[And Microsoft would almost certainly get both political and financial support from the UK government for that, because our politicians don't have the vision and knowledge in that sphere to see beyond an offer of investment and recognize a flawed infrastructure when they see one, let alone understand the more subtle dangers of a single-solution mindset for their people.]
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
re 2: All companies advertise. All companies push propaganda. In fact, one of the (few) things I've really admired MS for is their refusal to abuse the US goverment for their own ends. (Though I suspect that this is changed now that they've been sued so many times...)
re 3: No, they haven't. The reason being that all of their research suggests that they cannot sell programs on superior implementation. They're probably right. Convince your mother, friends, your mothers friends and anyone who will listen to demand quality not quantity. The way to their ears is through their pocketbooks.
re 4: Think about it this way : developing (commercial) software is like making this choice: "Lots of features, Ship on time, Good implementation. Choose two of the three." Guess which two everyone chooses? Even fabled developers like id do this : release early then patch away. Though you're probably right. MS seems to not even care to make patches available : they typically push fixes off until the next rev (so you have to pay for their mistakes, essentially.)
Are you voting for Pat Robinson for president?
I didn't think that Christians ate their food raw...
And you don't beleive in GERMS? I can show you germs under a magnifing lense.
MS had a monopoly from day one. That's 100% market share of the IBM PC market. If you look at the legal and market shenanigans that ensued in the DOS world up to the early 90's, its pretty clear why that total monopoly didn't decline much.
Hell, it took MS eight years to come up with a GUI that even came close to matching the MacOS, yet they still retained near total power during that period. And this is in the computer industry. Continents have risen from the ocean faster than that in this business.
Bill's no genius. He has aptitides, but they have nothing to do with computing.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
>It's not too user friendly yet. yes it is, once you set it up correctly, and if you really look into it, a well tuned linux installation is way more user friendly than win. >GO WRITE GOOD USER-FRIENDLY CODE AND GIVE THAT >90% AN OPTION THAT THEY WANT!! it seems to me that you haven't really ever worked with linux GUIs at all (and btw stop screaming). the number of "user friendly" applications for linux is overwhelming, just check out freshmeat. > so lets go make linux user-friendly. if you want anything more than simple windoze functionality and look for linux, you have to tweak it. besides if you ever tried tuning nt you'd see its anything but friendly. let alone the crappy expensive support they provide
Because the damn thing pops up every time I use a new feature. And there is no way to turn that off.
Yes, you are so correct about us open source people never inovating anything. My god, there were only about 3 original ideas today on Freshmeat.
Maybe because this is all fact and is worthless these days? If you keep looking back you'll never get a chance to look forward.
A Gates interview is not a interview with Bill Gates, its a microsoft ad. So would be a slashdot Gates interview. The questions would be forwarded to the proper PR guys and gals and you'd get a reply from some temporary bgates email box. Not that Gates can't give us propaganda on his own he's probably too important to hand out many real interviews. I can do the PR's job just using old Mirosoft press releases. Send your questions to me and I'll take care of the rest. Maybe Microsoft will offer me a job in PR if I do it well enough.
Scary Thought- long after MS collapses Bill has a great future in politics. "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
How about the Newton? How about QuickTime? FireWire? I'm not saying Apple is the greatest innovator, but I'm pretty sure they innovated a few things in the last ten years.
"The point is that MS did, in fact, come up with a few good things themselves and market them in such a way that made PCs on the desktop a viable, and even useful choice for businesses. "
Yes I agree MS Bob was truly innovative, and because of it businesses everywere have standarized on windows. Now let's remove the rose-colored glasses and look at reality again.
Name anything that MS has supposedly came up with and I can point out it's true origins and how second-hand it really is.
What about the environmentalists motto, "Think Greenly"? Or is it "Think Green" :-) So, if you think Apple's slogan is grammatically incorrect, think differently.
Macs came out '84, Amigas late '85. The ST was Atari's in-house effort at an Amiga competitor when they were beaten to buying the Amiga by Commodore. It appears to have come out slightly before the Amiga, mainly through cutting corners right, left and centre to get it finished in time.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Gates is a disgusting little creep and Paxman for once gave a fawning and sychophantic interview. I thought he was going to start fellating Gates about 5 minutes into the interview. Paxo seemed to be awe of him. He didn't question the fact that a lot of the billions he's giving to charity is being used to buy computers which run his software - out of one pocket and in to the other! The whole thing was just an advert for Microsoft. Paxman didn't ask about MS lobbying for the DOJs budget to be reduced, or Microsofts complete lack of innovation, or giving away charity money for PR.
Heard last night on radio - a New York announcer had recently bought a PC to check out all the Internet Hype and has had quite a bit of trouble getting it up and running - said "My windows machine goes down more than a 10th Ave hooker the day before the rent is due". :)) Chuck (AC - away from desk)
He is rich because he lucked into a total destop OS monopoly and took anti-competitive steps to keep that monopoly. These efforts continue to this very day, hence the anti-trust suite against him. If Microsoft hadn't broken the law with price fixing and software bundling then DOJ wouldn't have their butt in court right now.
He is a sick and twisted individual who wants to win at any cost and his idea of winning is for everyone else to lose.
Thus the only way for open source to win is for Bill to lose. This isn't our idea, this is Bills idea. We are just fighting for our survival.
-- For evil to succeed all it takes is for good men to do nothing.
If IE had remained a turkey, I would be typing this on some other kind of machine.
Oh that it were so simple!
The sad fact is that the Wintel platform hit critical mass ages ago and so has the Network Effect keeping it going. Most people buy it simply because they want a computer and there aren't any practical alternatives - or, if you go back 5-10 years, because they haven't heard of the practical alternatives, better though they may be.
In other words, anyone building a new platform (me included, if you check out my URL) needs to remember that to overhaul an existing platform, you need to subvert its network effect. Pull in enough users _somehow_ - this has to be the trick with Linux TBH, as you run it on your existing machine and it keeps the GPL zealots happy - and hope that they can start dragging users off elssewhere by making a more practical alternative.
Sad to say it, but the only way Windows is going to disappear any time soon is if MS do a better job of killing it than they and IBM tried to do of DOS with OS/2. Would a REALLY bad IE have killed it (as I still prefer NS to IE)? No, we'd use Netscape instead, except we'd probably be about a year behind on the version history and more stable due to the more sensible development times that'd have allowed.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
How would you like to be the first to demonstrate that immortality can literally be purchased?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
And it wasn't really long enough...
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
Time for Bill to Hang it up and pass the troch. He's just starting to admit it and in no time it will be so.
Bye Bye Bill...
hmm Well I dunno Ive got W2k Professional RC 2 running on a k6 233 with 48 meg RAM, and it runs pretty damn good on that.
$627.00
Site License for same:
$20,000+
Knowing your file and print services are safely and anonymously run on Debian 2.0:
Priceless.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I saw this interview too. It was deadly boring.
Gates came across as 'nice' but self-obsessed. He gladly accepted all credit for creating the internet, and was happy to talk for the whole computer industry - rather than just Micro$oft.
Paxman really chickened out of the meaty stuff - he almost seemed 'awe-inspired' by Bill - like he'd never spoken to anyone important before. He was definitely put-off by the fact that he was talking to the richest man in the world. Now if he'd been a politician...
Only Paxman mentioned Dr Linus, Bill didn't mention Linux once, in fact, he talked endlessly about Microsoft having loads of competition - but he couldn't name any contenders.
Most of the interview was about Bill being a 'visionary' from birth to current day. They ended the interview talking about where Microsoft would take the world of computers in the future.
insignificant sig
The story I heard is that MS hired away the chief icon designer from Apple for Windows 3.0. The result was the round, pastel icons that signified Windows 3, and are still in modern Windows versions (Calculator, Media Player, Domain Users).
The 'window dressing' in Windows 3 is pretty clearly influenced by OS/2 and Motif.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
How hard is it to market Microsoft when every magazine is Pro Microsoft? There is only one Magazine that runs an anti microsoft column, Computer shopper, but it is in the back of the magazine.
When you spend billions in advertising you get the golden treatment from all the magazines.
I have written anti-microsoft letters to magazines for years, but strangely they never made it onto the editorial page.
Thank god for Slashdot that the truth can now be shared with the world.
There has been OS level support for Speech Recognition with the Mac OS since '95. Sure, it was a seperate componant that didn't install by accident with the default system, but it has always been available.
The only application that takes advantage of the feature, however, is implemented by Apple with Speakable Items. Essentially, all you can do out of the box is tie Apple Events (or AppleScripts) to spoken phrases. In reality, this is hardly useful - consider an office full of cubicles with everyone telling their computers to quit application - close window - open netscape - shutdown... well you get the point.
But - the point is: it's been on the OS level from the start...
Culture is more than commerce
A very similar thing could be said about linux. Linux is a technically superior OS with or without the "Let's kill Microsoft!" mentality.
On the other hand, a technically superior product doesn't always win. (eg. OS2, Beta, etc...)
Backed by a couple of small startups - what are they called again, oh yeah, Sun and AOL.
Bills right, sure everyone scoffs at Bill the moment he mentioned, and I won't even mention the o/s
But hey, theres some truth to what he says, i'd say that the percentage of linux users were at some point simply misguided Windows users, now they've made the move to linux they scoff at windows. I'm one of them.
It was through the massive amounts of marketing put in place by MS that (personal) computing is where it is today, who can really deny it.
Sure linux would have come about anyway, but I don't think it would have the following it does now/
IMHO we all have to recognise MS for there work, otherwise it would be a very differnt world (maybe even better.) But who can really say...unless your some 20th dimensional being somehow caught in the wrong dimension and stuck in out internet, and you have insight into how things "could be"
anyway, thats my 2c worth.
Wearing my standard publicity hat, have you come across KOSH? OK, we're going a little slower than we did when we started, but we are still doing stuff, honest! And the whole point is that we design around the users then run it basically as a mutual cooperative - that is, developers, retailers and users all have a say and there's no financial institutions holding shares who have to be kept sweet.
If you're interested, please have a look at our website over at http://kosh.convergence.org - sorry, the software isn't letting me post links directly today...
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
What I found even more scarier is:
I don't blame Gates for his actions or the actions of his company. I think his intentions, deep down, are good. But I think that he may suffer from some psychological condition which blinds him to the fact that he doesn't have the right to disregard others just because he thinks he knows best. I suspect that he may believe that the end justifies the means.
That sounds just like some people we have come to know very well here in Russia... the Communists. Psychological condition indeed. Thank God the guy is "only" into software, otherwise the whole staff of Netscape would be cutting down trees in some forced-labour camp in Northern Alaska right now.
No, really, I'm serious. Bill and the Commies: while they may adhere to vastly different beliefs, the mindset is identical. We know what's right, we know what's best, everyone else is misguided and must be repressed at all costs so as not to threaten The Vision. Compare, e.g., "Worldwide Communist Revolution" and "Windows Everywhere"... Same goes for the Nazies, I suppose, though quite fortunately I don't have personal experience with that particular bunch.
I find it pretty ironic that Open Source (and especially RMS) are referred to as Communist in some particularly unpleasant mainstream editorials, when in reality the other way around is much, much closer to the truth.
Oh well. The Commies didn't last that long. At the rate the industry is moving, M$ has a few years left, at best. Bill can always move to North Korea afterwards...
Let me make it clear that I don't think Bill Gates is evil. I don't think his motivations are selfish. I merely think that he is misguided. He thinks that he knows best and he uses this belief to justify what he does, in effectively forcing the world to adopt the standards which his company has developed, under his supervision, not because he wants to be rich or powerful, but because he believes that he knows best than everyone else.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
Unleash the mechanical Richard Simmons!
-Splat
Al Gore was actually instrumental in lots of the legislation supporting the backbone to what is now the internet.
He may have overreached when he said "help create," but he did certainly helped grow it.
or at least that is my prediction...
Lets look at the evidence:
a) About to be broken up by US DOJ
b) Just had a nice meeting with UK PM.
c) Threatened to move Microsoft lock stock and barrel to China if DOJ interviened, UK would be easier for him to do so.
d) Probably got assurances from "our friend Tony" that he won't be cut up (see b)
Tony gets the extra tax revenue and gets the political kudos of attracting to worlds largest company.
Tony gets kudos for his e-commerce strategy (I bet Bill would even give him all the training and seminars for as many people as he wanted for free...)
Opinions?
I should also point out that since the Macintosh, Apple really hasn't had any significant innovations. (Anyone who thinks that the iMac is any kind of technological innovation needs to be shot. A good marketing innvotation, perhaps :) Most of the important innovations (HTTP/HTML, Java, etc.) have come out of other companies and not Apple or Microsoft.
I thought the Newton was pretty innovative. Ditto for Quicktime. And OpenDoc. And Firewire. And ColorSync. Some of these were killed off, but I still think they were innovative in their own right.
No, I don't consider the iMac to be a technological breakthrough, but there's more to Apple then just the MacOS and coloured cases.
They are not the most innovative company, but they
have implemented/innovated quite a few nice technologies.
Mind you, my definiton of innovation may be different from your's, so this is just my opinion.
> Sure, another company could have done it, but they didn't - MS did.
I disagree. I think it was the IBM brand name that opened the doors to the use of PCs in businesses. This was back when no one got shot for buying IBM. That little sticker told purchasing agents that these were real computers, not just toys.
Of course, commodity hardware helped a lot, especially after Apple came out with a far superior product. But by the time commodity hardware came out PCs were already moving into business environments. The doors were open and we were on the road to today's arrangement.
The only free variable was what quality of software the machines would run, and of course MS can claim as much of the blame for that as they care to.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is off-topic (sort of), but whattahell.
:)
I don't whether there are any "old farts" here who remember the C64 stuff, but the Commodore 1541 was a wicked external disk drive.
The original 1541 (model I) ran hot enough to be used as a sauna stove, because of the built-in transformer. It was very noisy too. The ordinary way to access the floppy disk was to type in commands such as 'load "$",8' and "list" (for directory) in the "COMMODORE C64 ROM BASIC" interpreter, ie. the jolly blue screen which you get when you "boot" the thing.
Back then in the good old C64 days I was young and knew absolutely nothing about the power struggles going between big companies. Obviously there were those, I just wasn't aware of things. Looking back now it seems that the computing industry evolved just fine without me personally taking a stress and worrying about things.
So the bottom line is this: don't worry too much about Bill G, things probably change in another 10 years...
I feel like www.hamsterdance.com
You can still get GEOS too. Check out New Deal Software. They produce an office suite and other software primarily for schools, which are often the dumping ground for corporations that want to get a tax break for donating old computer equipment. While it's not open source, they do let you download a functional evaluation copy.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I've been following discussions about Microsoft, Linux, OSS (insert other OS advocacy subject here) over the last couple of months, and the intelligent comments seem to have almost disappeared to be replaced by an almost religious banter.
/. readers. It doesn't matter that they've collected huge amounts of data, talked with various people from both sides of the issue, and come up with an unbiased report. If it's MS it's bad, if it's Linux it's good.
/. readers claim to be intelligent and open minded. Try proving it by presenting valid arguments instead of continually bashing anyone who says something good about MS, or something bad about Linux.
The latest moronic discussion about Microsoft and Linux is about this particular interview with Bill Gates. Some unknown reader writes an analysis about Bill Gates from a fairly short interview, and the discussions flow in. There is no basis at all for this interview, and without even talking to the person, the reader decides that Bill Gates is dangerous, a threat to modern society, and is trying to rule the world A La Evil Genius.
I then read comment, and many (not all) readers decide that the article makes sense.
Earlier, a well known, respected consulting group who's been around the computer industry for many, many years talks to a slew of other major players in the industry (including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and HP), and they decide to present an analysis of the Linux market. They decide that Linux isn't bad, but it isn't perfect for all situations.
As expected, they are completely discredited by many
Most
bh
"Know the facts before distorting them"
- Ernest Hemmingway
-- $SIGNATURE
[shiver] When I read this, just now, the hair actually atood up on the back of my neck and I got a little twitch trying to justify Mr. Gates Logic. {/shiver]
Heap the blame on politicians, all of it.
They sense a weakness in people like a shark senses blood in the water, and they are every bit as amoral as sharks as they tear their people's better values and dignity to shreds in the quest for support and power.
The caring politician is a creature out of myth. If you are the former then you'll never make it as the latter.
It sounds bleak, but sadly that's the state of the world at present, and it'll remain so for as long as our dependency on material resources gives power to those who can muster control over material resourcing. Fortunately, that won't be forever.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I think it was more than just not on form. True Paxman's field is more for attacking politicaians, but he never really tried to get in on Gates. He seemd in awe of Bill and the on-queue laughter from the (hand picked) audience, does leave the suspicion of on-queue questions too. The Register have a pice on the interview btw; its critical of Paxman also. Ive seen Mr. Paxman ask very akward questions to politicians on Newsnight and not let them dodge the question, and to see him last night reduce the conversation to jokes.
What has the Linux community done that is new?
IP masqurading, direct execution of JAVA code...
Yes, i would say that Bill suffers an illness of some sort. He may not have come across as a control freak but thats part of his stratigie. I've never enjoyed my freedom of computing choice more than i have in the last 3.5 years of using Linux. Thats empowerment. The complete freedom to choose. If Bill had his way, we would be stripped of that freedom and forced to live in his dictitatorial computing environment.
"you look like the gay version of a homo in a fag costume" - Greg_L
Yeah, but whenever somebody in the media says "internet", the mean "web", and the pc had everything to do with that.
So IBM invented the PC to make it easier to crash subatomic particles together at close to the speed of light? This being what they do at CERN, where "the web" was invented. Also it is a very long way from Microsoft.
Perhaps we should try to educate the mainsteram press as thoroughly as we try to educate our more immediate bosses . Business people listen to these folk after all . your Squire squireson
Really? You mean I beat Jon Katz!!! Wow! Cool! :-)
For the record, the number of "I (don't) think"s in there is due to the fact that I wanted to make it very clear that these are my opinions, instead of stating them as fact.
With this article, as in life, YMMV.
D.
but it was not Microsoft that got the PC revolution started- it was IBM.
BZZZT. Microsoft got in on the ground floor of the "PC Revolution". They wrote the standard BASIC software that was either in the firmware or shipped with virtually every personal computer sold before IBM introduce theirs in 1981. (Apple, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, etc.). Microsoft has had it's cut of every PC sold since the very beginning in the mid 70s
BTW, Microsoft and Intel understood what was going on and in fact conspired to created the clone market. They were hardly accidental beneficiaries of the mighty and wise IBM. Proof - Microsoft got paid nearly nothing by IBM for PC/MS DOS 1.0. But they did get ownership of the code and the right to sell the OS to other computer manufacturers. They would have never made this deal if they didn't think that cloning would have been a good business in the future. (See Triumph of the Nerds for details.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I too did not like it when Gates inferred that Microsoft created the Internet. The more I think about it, the more the interview looked like a PAID ADVERTISEMENT for Microsoft. I wonder if Paxman's bank account is any healthier today!? BALIGEKO
That's an eye-opener of an article. It makes me wonder, we have interviewed so many other people on slashdot - would it be possible to send a list of questions to Bill Gates that we would like answers to? Among them could be the points listed in this article that were omitted, but perhaps we could all learn a lot about who he really is if we actually got to interact with him as group.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I agree, Paxman was just not on form. /. reader to just know what to ask.
I think he just wasnt prepared enough, then again, could you ever be prepared enough, Microsoft are in so much sh$t that you would have to be a full time
Or would it be McNealy or Ellison? :)
I disagree with a few poster here, i think its wrong to state that withought a particular person or company that a technology wouldnt exist.
I really think technology should be considered to be evolving not being created.
Everything we do, every idea we get is based on countless other peoples work whether we recognise them or not. Technology builds on itself. It always has and it always will, no governments policy (eg intellectual property) can control that.
If mac didnt have a GUI or billy didnt want control of a computer on every desktop then thats not to say it wouldnt happen.
Technology streams are just there, over time they mix interact and evolve... (or embrase, extend and extinguish?)
Wouldnt you say open source is more like evolving software than creating software ?
Wait wait.
Some stuff about the Lisa:
The first Lisa's OS really wasn't anything like the MacOS. Sure, it might have looked the same, but don't all GUIs? (ha ha. i know about enlightenment) It could also multitask. Us Mac users didnt get anything like that until Multifinder was introduced in System 6. It wasn't until after the Mac came out did you hear of any Lisa's running anything like the Mac OS.
Enough redundancy.
'Blaaaagh' - Crow T Robot, MST3k, Prince of Space
Back in 1989, when Windows looked like crap, and they had many competing GUI's (OS/2, DESQview, among many others!)
DESQView was a GUI? A multitasker, yes - but it was all character-based. Which IMHO was just as well, it ran light & tight.
I really loved DV.
When Paxman cracked the joke about Bill saying to God "You're sitting in my chair" Bill was not amused.
Also Paxman's constant quibs about the amount of money Bill had got very annoying after a while.
I would just like to point out, that the small article by The Dodger uses this interview as nothing but an offset for the Dodger to give his own personal irrelevant oppinion about Bill Gates. The analysis
It's not to say that his oppinion is any less irrelevant than so many other peoples oppinion, but I think that it's very dangerous to portray an article as being a sumup of an interview, when in fact it's nothing but yet another personal "insight" into the motivations of Bill Gates, of which only Bill Gates himself is able to tell.
So instead of using this useless "analysis" as an offset for a discussion, why don't we look a bit more at what Bill Gates has actually said (unless the Dodger really _is_ a mind reader).
Two hours later you could (or could not) see him on ARD, Germany. Must ask my mother for details ;) Again the interviewer, Sabine Christiansen, has no technical background. Is this an accident? Or is this the conditione sine qua non to get him interviewed at all? Why does he appear on public channels? Where else will he appear within this week?
It's true of what you say about certain Mac users, but don't assume we are all like that.
Please don't generalize.
Ok, what? How can he not be power-hungry and at the same time think he's the most special person in the world, who "single-handedly advanced the human race" into the info age? The difference between thirsting for power and thinking you're entitled to it, all of it, by merit of your own superior worth is a very fine line.
fh
I would like to ask how many people Gates paid to laugh at his jokes. Everything he said, there were five or six people in the audience who just laughed. Gates coughed, they laughed. It was sickening.
Is he evil? No. Is he misguided? Yes, I think so. He can't see past his own technological vision, and doesn't seem to accept that others may want things to work differently. With the amount of power he wields in the industry, that's definitely something to worry about.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Some of this is justifiably true. In fact, the industry would still have flourished if MS didn't exist. The time had come for the PC revolution. However, I think MS does deserve some credit. Their marketing and programming helped to get PCs on the desks of every employee in most companies. Sure, another company could have done it, but they didn't - MS did. I think it would behoove us to recognize Microsoft's place in the history of desktop computing as being beneficial. Sure, Windows isn't the greatest platform in the world, but it beats the hell out of nothing. Of course Linux kicks the shit out of nothing, but that's another story altogether.
Flame me now if you want, but all this anti-microsoft stuff just gets under my skin.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
The Amiga was pretty spectacular for it's time. Could be synched to a video signal, a real built-in graphical interface, 4096 colors, a multitasking operating system, stereo sound, a micro-kernel and whatnot. All developed in 1983-84 and released in 1985.
Seems that slashdot is just reporting news in the tech world. This interview was news. Slashdot obsessing about MS? No, just reporting the news. live with it, or leave ;)
I think its was submitted to the editors as a seperate story, not actually posted under the interview story respones section.
kaniff -- Ralph Hart Jr
Cough, Cough, In the old days, we had Tandy 2000's (ca 1984). I remember the original 128K Mac, Couldn't do anything useful on it. Needed a $5,000 Lisa to do Mac development. The Lisa was actually the first mass marketed GUI machine, but at $5,000 - $10,000 were not a big hit with anyone except those folks who needed them to do Mac development. Anyway where was I? Oh Yeah, Those Tandy 2000's were the hottest thing in those days, 640x400 RGBrgb graphics, 8MHz 186 CPU, 10M HD. Microsoft used them to develop the first version of Windows (This was long before they actually released 1.0). I even had a copy that I cloned from a demo machine. It fit on two 720k floppy disks. Couldn't do anything useful with it either. The DeskMate software you're referring to was a simple graphical shell, like GEM and others it really didn't do much more than execute programs.
The wait for tech support doubles every 18 months... Any likelihood they can solve your problem halves. Foosters
Newton.. hmm kinda an obvious step really there was alot of talk about developing handhelds like the newton, just apple beat them to the punch. Quicktime?? I could be wrong, but I swear there where other computer movie formats before quicktime, but still fairly obvious. Firewire, good idea not enough marketting, though I'm honestly not sure which came first, firewire, or USB. I would have naturally said firewire, but the other day I saw a guys old 486 that came with USB frainkly quite scared me, not exactly sure how old it is, but its an IBM branded computer. (Though in all honesty I'm more impressed with Firewire than USB, but the best technology doesn't always win.)
Microsoft was in on the ground floor, but
BZZZT.
It wasn't Microsoft that started it. It was the muscle of IBM, creating a desktop PC, that legitimized the market. Before then you had the various startups such as Apple, Commodore, etc., and their use in businesses was spotty at best. Microsoft was merely along for the ride- yes, they had created basic for almost every PC, but it wasn't their presence that made the IBM PC successful.
To be fair, I should have said Intel PC Revolution.
Conspired to create the clone market? Compaq might have something to say about that. But yes, Microsoft has made many advantageous deals over the years, and used those to build on.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I think Jobs would be more like Foghorn Leghorn
-- $SIGNATURE
I had a C128 with GEOS and a 4MB battery backed RAM drive. Talk about fast. I would turn it on and it would boot to the GUI in about 4 seconds. All of my applications and my current projects fit on the RAM drive and I would back everything up to my 800kb disk drive every so often.
I wish that I still everything all setup. It had a really good full featured word processor that was WYSIWYG. I still have all the disks, maybe I can find a copy of it for my C64 emulator that runs under Linux...
I used the commodore computer all through college. The dot matrix printer and software had high enough quality that one of my teachers complimented me on the quality of a report and asked me what kind of computer I had done it on. She gave me the strangest look when I told her it was a Commodore. I don't think that she believed me.
GEOS made the mistake of trying to compete directly against windows as a new OS for the X86 platform. They were about 5 years too late...
They should have just ported their integrated products to multiple operating systems, UNIX, Mac and Windows included and become a cross platform integrated application package. They would have been competing against works, so they would have had a chance.
Too bad, so sad!
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but it anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Well, I don't think anyone has got more money than Bill G though.
...of the real world.
..the world's richest man describes his meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair as "neat", /snip/ and claims never to have heard a Bill Gates joke.
First he says (in the article, not the analysis, he is billg)
Gates claims that his business is "not like owning a newspaper. Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'."
No, websites are nothing like newspapers, no one could possibly have up to the second editorial control. hmmm.
..and..
The next stage technologically is accessing the Internet through the television and the telephone, says Mr Gates.
umm, no comment...
..and..
..and..
Gates also denies there is a key to his software programmes held by the security services of the US Government.
...but at least he got one right...
Bill Gates, the world's first $100bn man, admits his company Microsoft will one day be replaced.
/end knee-jerk analysis
+&x
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but if anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
http://www.jonmasters.org/
This is NOT meant as flamebait...
But I firmly believe that had Apple not introduced the world to Macintosh, computers would be much harder to use. Gates has got to give them some credit.
Had the Mac never existed, we would still probably have some sort of GUI-based system today since the concepts and even limited implementations were in place before the Mac was born, but I guarantee you it wouldn't be like what we see today in Mac OS, Windows, KDE/Gnome, BeOS, etc.
Even Windows users need to recognize the importance that Apple holds in the marketplace. You might not agree with Apple's business practices, the limited customizability of Macintosh hardware, or the lack of choice when it comes to running a Mac OS-based system, and that's fine. I'm not going to argue with you there, and I'm a die-hard Mac user (though I know my Linux too!). Wishing Apple would go away is another thing entirely.
What EVERYONE must realize is the extreme importance that Apple still holds EVEN TODAY. Think about it. They are Windows' ONLY competition when it comes to an easy to use GUI-based Operating System experience.
Do you really think Windows 95/98 would be as good (a subjective term of course) as it is today had Apple not survived to offer them some real competition?
Even with the recent screwups that Apple has had, such as the G4 delays, the Apple Store order fiasco, etc the future looks bright. Apple is finally back on their feet and at the forefront of new technologies (ie. Firewire/1394) producing some kick ass new equipment.
So next time you see Bill Gates talking about how Microsoft is changing the world, remember who he is following.
"Where do you want to go today?" -- Microsoft
"Where are we going tomorrow?" -- Apple
Ben
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but if anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Quite true -- RMS seems to regard 'the future good of humanity' as equivalent to 'all software being free'.
trouble is -- when they get there, only then do they realise how much more needs to be done.
One of Bill's comments I do agree with, is the one about Rupert Murdock -- having control of Sky, numerous papers -- he could potentially become much more of a problem then Gates. And given RM's tendency to put his family in high places in his organisation tends to show that he is more motivated by greed.
but I certainly don't completely buy the idea that microsoft is fueled by BG's vision of the future -- he's changed direction so many times. (contrast this with, e.g. RMS -- who has his vision and STICKS with it come what may)
Hypothetical situation (but maybe someday reality): Free software is gaining ground rapidly and is well supported. The only hope for Microsoft would be to go open-source and gratis with a lot of their software, including OS'es and Internet software. Could MS survive this, or would it be a slow death, and why?
Martin
We are talking about the open source movement, not Linux in particular.
Gee, inovative, how about Perl for the cgi scripts that run the internet. How about Mozaic for being the original open source web browser that is the basis for Netscape and IE.
How about the apache web server, which predates most of the current crop of web servers, I think that httpd was the first real web server and was released by CERN as open source.
How about sendmail? You know, that software package that handles 99.99% of the e-mail on the internet?
How about Usenet newsgroups?
I would say that the internet was made possible by these "killer apps" .
What do you think?
This has hardly anything to do with the BBC interview. It is someone ranting on about how bad MS is. I'm getting really sick of slashdot posting so many stories about MS. Why do you guys care so much about them? This is flamebait and nothing more. I think you'd do yourselves a big favor if you stopped worrying so much about every little thing Bill Gates does.
This reviewer says he thinks Bill Gates believes he knows best, don't you think Linus and others think they do too? Why do something if you think you're wrong? Bill Gates vision for MS was pretty simple, a computer on every desk running his software. Well.. he has a right to be smug. He has succeeded quite well, surely it wasn't all because of his doing but as long as you reach your goal who cares how you got there?
I also think it's funny that people can claim MS has a monopoly but at the same time predict Linux will take over the server/desktop market. You guys do realize that it is impossible for both things to be true right?
Of course he belives that. He has every right to claim that. For better or worse, MS did bring computing to the masses. Something that Unix vendors were unable to do for almost 20 years.
The only reason that SUN and other workstations are getting cheaper is incredible onslaugth of afforable Intel based NT workstations.
Whatever we might think, 90 % of the time it is Windows software that is being used to read,write,transfer most of the stuff on the internet ( client side , that is)
To summarize, I don't see anything wrong with BG perception of reality.
Watching the interview, I certainly got the impression that Bill was mostly just talking up the industry. Much time was spent on how wonderful the information age is, how the use of MS products have liberated people and ideas, because it has lowered the cost of entry to publishing.
Most of this is true to an extent. (flameproof suit is on)
My point is that MS is in such a commanding position that Bill doesn't have to promote MS. He just has to promote the industry, and he will automatically get 90% of the benefit.
This is an important concept which dominant companies in many industries use in their advertising campaigns. For example, the Budweiser beer company in the US has such a dominant market position that they spend advertising dollars talking up the beer industry. Sometimes they don't even mention their product name. They know that an increase in the amount of beer sold in the US will benefit them more than their competition.
So how MS came to be in their dominant position is only really of academic interest. What will really hurt them is when others eat into their dominant position - hence this type of pseudo-advertising doesn't work anymore. Then they have to start competing on features per $.
Jeremy had an opening to make this point, but missed it.
Whether Mr. Gates is responsible for the proliferation of the PC is undisputed... but I have a bone to pick with the contention that he allowed the internet to go where it has. For one, Al Gore claimed that first, and for two the internet came about on UN*X mainframes in an academic setting - and had nothing to do with PCs. I don't think "e-commerce" would be around without the PC, but that wasn't the reason the internet was invented, contrary to commercial dogma. The reason it was invented was primarily so professors and such could exchange ideas and papers and such between each other.
Of course, I might be wrong.. so read the comments attached to this post as well! :^)
--
Talk to me, Bill
He's got an average suit,an average haircut but a very less-than-average sense of humour. As he prepared for a rare interview with Bill Gates, to be broadcast tonight, Jeremy Paxman discovers that the world's richest man is not good at small talk.
EVERY important man arrives with his entourage. In the case of the world's richest man, the claque is quietly busy and has only one focus: getting a photocopy of a list of the "most important men in Britain".
The word that "Bill needs the photocopy" comes as the man himself is en route to the BBC studios for his interview with me, after seeing the Prime Minister. The list, from a recent newspaper survey, ranks Bill Gates at No. 2, just below his Downing Street host.
Bill, when he arrives, will deny this importance. He will claim that he has no power. And, therefore, no responsibility for the fact that since 90 per cent of the world's computers run on his software, he is facilitating the production of pornography, incitements to racial hatred, and all the other tawdry misuses of the Internet.
Bill is on his way. He will arrive at the studio, to be hustled through by earpiece-wearing security men. Ever since an anarchist put a pie in his face, Bill has had to think about his security.
How he came to be a hate figure seems genuinely to baffle him. Plough through the endless screeds about Bill Gates and the word that leaps out time and again is "ubernerd". Gates is a geek who 1got lucky. And rich.
It won't really do as an explanation. Certainly, he's a nerd. Thirty years ago, how many other 12-year-olds would have become computer obsessives on the back of a device bought with the proceeds of a jumble sale held at his school ?
And obviously, he was interested in money. Having affected an indifference to his wealth in our interview, he let drop casually that he had made "thousands of dollars" out of programming computers while still at high school. Obviously, he likes money. Who wouldn't, if they were worth something in excess of $80 billion ?
Nowadays the Internet is full of "I hate Bill Gates" Web sites. On one, you click your mouse to punch his face. Another keeps a running tally of his wealth as it accumulates. Right now he is said to he worth more than 135 nations, including Ireland and New Zealand.
And now here comes the man himself. He is of average height, average weight, in an average suit, with average glasses and an average haircut. He had a monogrammed shirt (WHG), but he is certainly not spending his wealth on his appearance. If you didn't know what he looked like, Bill Gates could easily be the last person in his entourage with whom you would shake hands.
He sits down in the make-up chair. Would he like some eye definition, his hair brushed? To all inquiries he is equally noncommittal. He genuinely doesn't seem to care what he looks like.
His staff are chatty and solicitous, but they are not relaxed. Bill doesn't do media interviews often and they worry about how he will come across. I had watched one of his previous encounters - with the American Barbara Waiters - and could see their point. Bill is an awkward, retiring fellow and doesn't do small talk. The moment when she asked him to sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was the moment he should have grabbed her lacquered helmet of hair and thrust it through the nearest window.
But he didn't, he sat there and, in his reedy voice, sung for her. But back to the small talk, which Bill doesn't do. I make two or three attempts to engage him in conversation as he sits in front of the mirror. I get nowhere. He has logged off.
Bill Gates is this remote most of the time, I guess. But why shouldn't he be? He may be listed as the second most powerful man in Britain, but he's not a politician with a lot of gaudy promises to hawk around.
And that, I suppose, is the difficulty. For all his modesty, Bill Gates is an immensely influential figure. Because nine out of 10 personal computers use his software, the decisions his company makes determine the shape of the Information Age. That is why Tony Blair craves an hour of Bill's time.
When I put this to Gates, he seems genuinely nonplussed and produces a well-rehearsed argument. In essence, it is that he exists in a higly competitive industry and that he is, anyway, not the publisher of anything much. If we were talking newspapers, he would be the newsprint manufacturer. Perhaps.
But you cannot gainsay his achievement. To have had the vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home" was remarkable. To have recognised that what would matter was not who built the boxes, but who designed the software to make them ran, was just as remarkable.
It has made him fabulously rich and, whatever he says, given him great power. As the wealth has accrued, he has turned from Caped Crusader into Corporate Monster. The animosity is, staggering: in South Park The Movie, his cartoon representation gets shot. A friend who saw the film recently was amazed to hear the audience cheering their approval.
I found it quite impossible to reconcile this public Gates with the awkward, shy, nasal character I found seated opposite me. He claimed, quite plausibly, not even to have heard a Bill Gates joke. When I told him one, the audience laughed, but he looked blank. He ought to add a Fool to his court. (C) Sunday Telegraph Limited, 17.10.99
Hmm... So Bill Gates believes he *can* change the world for better? DAMN FSCKING RIGHT HE CAN! I mean, surely the whole /.+linux+OSS attitude is that we think M$ has too much *power*. The fact is, nothing actually SAYS that that power HAS to be used for something bad, although often it is. He can use it for better. And if he genuinely is trying to do so... just damn let him, instead of getting on your lam0r AC flame-triggers and saying M$ sucks. Actually this dodger guys views made me kinda think. So, M$'s business' practices suck kinda hard, crushing small companies, screwing up "standards", etc, etc. But, dont blame Gates. You think he personally controls all that shit? Well, if he really wants to do something good, instead of bitching at the guy, just stand back, and let him. Oh, btw, I have an account, but the site said the username wasnt found (?) Does /. expire usernames if you dont login within a certain # of days?
Right from all the childhood stories to his interview yesterday on the German TV (i didn't watch the bbc interview), i think there is one single line of thought that runs behind his actions: his absolute beief in capitalism. Read his open letter to the fellow hackers while in college explaining how sharing of code fails to reward the coder and will eventually lead to poor quality of code.
...and he works on that principle.
well, that concept might have been proved incorrect, but he believes that every company has the right to take all the necessary steps to crush competetion and this system leads to an efficient market. like the 'adam smith's invisible hand'
I don't think I think I believe I think I'm not saying The problem is I don't think I don't think He thinks but because he believes that he knows best than everyone else. But I think To be honest
I found the whole interview disappointing, I was hoping that paxman would explore more about the motivation behind microsoft development and not spent almost all the time talking about how much money bill gates has.
Paxman normally strikes me as someone who does a lot of research before an interview into the subject, there were as I remember only about two questions about technical subjects and both were put extremely badly.
If this was as the BBC billed it a clash of the Titans, Bill came off on top, especially when paxman came to asking Bill Gates what his favourite Bill Gates joke was.
there's one saying:
path to hell is marked by good intensions.
hany
Corporations have no implicit right to exist. They are given permission to exist and operate at the state's discretion at the time of their chartering. No corporation can operate in this country unless a state accepts its charter.
At any point in the future, the state has the authority (and some would say the duty) to revoke a given corporation's charter. This is effectively the corporate equivalent of the death sentence. There's a judge in alabama who's trying to go after tobacco companies this way.
The bottom line is that corporations do have social responsibilites and those responsibilities are codified into law. Businesses can delude themselves into thinking that the only thing that matters is money, but in reality, there are serious limits on what they can do and serious legal consequences for violating the public interest. This notion of unfettered corporations being free to do whatever they want with no limits or restrictions is just more advertising/marketing bull.
You may want to look at http://www.lightparty.com/Misc/C orporateDeath.html for more info on giving reckless corporations the death penalty.
As I learned a couple of years ago: People do what they feel is -right-. If it appears to be evil, it's only because the action is somewhat short-sighted.
Paxman got a lot more laughs than Gates did and deservedly so.
About ten years ago, I had the (un-asked for) opportunity to interactive with Bill Gates in a non-computer social situation, on several occasions, and my recollections and conclusions about him agree to large extent with the Dodger's. :)
It will be interseting to whether Mr. Gates ages gracefully.
I wasn't talking down to you before. But you know what? Now I am. Before I was just going on a random tangent. Why is that? Because of your imprecise use of the English language, which left some ambiguity as to what the last section of your original sentence was in reference to (of course, having said that, I'm now inviting all sorts of bizarre scrutiny concerning my usage of the English language, but you know what? I'm all for it). I took it to mean that you were saying the PC was responsible for the Web (not that odd of an assumption given the post you were referring to and the fact that if that wasn't what it meant, your post would seem just a little bit clueless, and pretty much offtopic [at least as IIRC, because Slashdot is having serious server problems right now]).
By the way, you fool (your deragotory comments made in light of my rather polite response only serve to make you look like a total asshole, not to mention completely ignorant for thinking I wasn't making a polite suggestion), the origins of HTML and the Web have a fuck of a lot to do with one another. Based on your offhand remark, however, I realize that you had absolutely no fucking idea of that. Which means you're a) barking up a tree you shouldn't even be near, much less pissing on b) you're trying to troll or c) you're really stupid (the ever-popular d) would assert any/all of the previously proposed options).
Now that I have, for the first time ever, talked down to you, you may now become "enraged" and act like a little troll baby. If you choose not to, I'll go back to being polite. Otherwise, expect to be ignored or flamed, depending upon how bored I am.
(by the way, PCs would be the primary cause for anything becoming popular with most of humanity with regards to computing.. why is that, you might ask? because most people own PCs, not workstations, servers, or mainframes.. pretty fucking weird, huh? so.. any more completely redundant points you'd like to offer? like that Windows became popular because of the PC? that breathing became popular because of air? that art became popular because of eyeballs? hmm?)
~ Kish
If you really believe in your product, you can talk about prices and cost, specifically. This has never been done. You can also talk about the cons of your opposition. Ask Bill, when is Visual studio going to support regular expressions, or why was the gartner cost model wrong. = interviews with fixed format. Just like no politician is asked, how much does childcare cost, or medical insurance in your home city. Never seen Bill squirm with specifics. Linux developers can, so can S Jobs and Larry E. Ask technical questions, not ones about familiarity.
When it comes to Apple, I think NOT.
Seriously, I think capt kangarooski has a point,
although it sounds very awkward to me.
However, using adjectives as adverbs is becoming pandemic, and it really bugs me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
While interesting to read, the commentor needs to take a longer view of history than the time since Linux arrived on the scene. The truth is, Microsoft has made the industry. Microsoft made the internet, and Microsoft is probably going to lead the industry for at least the immediate future. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Microsoft. I don't like what they do. I think that by and large their development staff tends to creatively borrow the best ideas from other sources.
I do remember though when my dad built a Digital Group computer and there was no operating system to run on it. I remember my first Apple II, and the only language available "Microsoft Basic." I remember that Microsoft bought MS-DOS because the original leader, the maker of "CPM" wasn't smart enough to sell it to IBM. If it weren't for Microsoft we would all be realing from the heavy boot of IBM, in a proprietary world where IBM not only owned the operating system, but the hardware design as well.
In time Microsoft has taken the best ideas of the computer age and placed them at the hands of people who couldn't even conceive of owning a computer twenty or thirty years ago.
The commentator noted that Mr. Gates thinks he had a lot to do with the internet explosion. The truth is, that is a well founded fact. It's true that most Server run on some variant of UNIX, but most of the consumers of that knowledge run on computers running Microsoft. If it weren't for Microsoft and their products, the internet would forever remain a playground of the intellictually elite ( E-Snobs ).
Faults Gates for a lot of things, but it is almost a sure thing, if you work in the industry, you owe your livelyhood to him.
Beware the wood elf!!!
Microsoft is one of the most commercially influential software companies around today. But Gates is right: Microsoft will eventually be replaced. Back in the days of big iron, IBM was the boss, and nobody really thought that they would ever be replaced. But they have, at least in terms of their hegemony. This is because the game has changed. It changed from big iron to the PC. Now the game is changing again from the PC to anything that starts with "e-". Gates knows this; and that's why they went balls-out on the Internet. But they've lost ground. And the game continues to change. Right now, we're changing the game. Open source, free software, whatever flag you want to wave, is starting to change the economics on the bottom.
My guess is that Gates is well aware of what is going on, but because it is so fundamentally different from everything that Microsoft was built on, he won't have a way to counter it. They're fighting on multiple fronts, and eventually, they will lose their grip. At that point, somebody else will notice that the game has changed, and microsoft will be replaced.
It might not happen today, or tomorrow, but within a matter of a few decades, Microsoft will be just another brick in the wall. Look at IBM today. I've seen numerous Slashdot stories and posts from readers who openly support IBM and their new business strategy. It may be hard for some to really imagine, but people such as ourselves might be saying the same sort of thing about the Microsoft many of us not villify.
While interesting to read, the commentor needs to take a longer view of history than the time since Linux arrived on the scene. The truth is, Microsoft has made the industry. Microsoft made the internet, and Microsoft is probably going to lead the industry for at least the immediate future. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Microsoft. I don't like what they do. I think that by and large their development staff tends to creatively borrow the best ideas from other sources.
I do remember though when my dad built a Digital Group computer and there was no operating system to run on it. I remember my first Apple II, and the only language available "Microsoft Basic." I remember that Microsoft bought MS-DOS because the original leader, the maker of "CPM" wasn't smart enough to sell it to IBM. If it weren't for Microsoft we would all be realing from the heavy boot of IBM, in a proprietary world where IBM not only owned the operating system, but the hardware design as well.
In time Microsoft has taken the best ideas of the computer age and placed them at the hands of people who couldn't even conceive of owning a computer twenty or thirty years ago.
The commentator noted that Mr. Gates thinks he had a lot to do with the internet explosion. The truth is, that is a well founded fact. It's true that most Server run on some variant of UNIX, but most of the consumers of that knowledge run on computers running Microsoft. If it weren't for Microsoft and their products, the internet would forever remain a playground of the intellictually elite ( E-Snobs ).
Fault Gates for a lot of things, but it is almost a sure thing, if you work in the industry, you owe your livelyhood to him.
Beware the wood elf!!!
Does Bill Gates have one?
I thought it odd when he didn't laugh off the custard pie... Odder when his only comment in his book about the MS buying the US joke was that it swamped the MS mail system.
But he really did seem to take the interview and jokes all just a bit too seriously. Don't you think?
C'mon, nobody sees the humor in that statement? I laughed out loud.
As much as I enjoyed the interview, Paxman didn't have the technical knowledge to ask the questions I wanted answering. However, another approach may have yielded more interesting results. The BBC run a great program called 'In the Psychiatrist's Chair' using an interviewer called Professor Anthony Clare. He could have taken a more personal approach, and instead of asking 'Do you really earn this much money' - could have been asking 'why he feels the need to be some awesomely sucessful' etc. Next time I hope the BBC producers are more imaginative.
If you see anything, I'm sure they are just hallucinations brought on by the ingestion of food contaminated by evil "preservatives." Now, excuse me while I go graze in the backyard and eat the family dog. I have seen the light!
I agree. Bill Gates is full of good intentions. Only, as we well know, ``the road to hell is paved with good intentions''.
;-) I also think it would not have happened any slower, though - I think it's a sort of ``psychohistorical'' necessity that cannot be slowed or hastened without great effort.
He has a relatively good idea of what can be done with a computer; only he is obviously clueless as to how things can be done.
He perceives the existence of the Internet Revolution, a phenomenon that is probably just starting, and he rightly knows that many client computers (as opposed to servers) are running Windows; by a considerably fallacious syllogism he concludes that Windows is somehow responsible for the revolution. I am (as most slashdot readers, I suppose) persuaded that the revolution would not have taken place any slower had it not been for Windows. (Hope I put the right number of negatives in the previous sentence
Will Gates be remembered as one of the Great Names of computer science? I like to think not. Cerf will be remembered in the future, probably more than he is now; perhaps Postel will be also; Torvalds and Stallman might; and so might Schneier (because I think cryptography is destined to become far more important in daily life than it is now). But Gates will be remembered only as a great businessman (along with Rockafeller). Or is that just me hoping?
Unfortunately, I could tell from five minutes in that Paxman was not going to be able to make the most of the interview. He clearly isn't sufficiently up to speed with the computing world to take Gates to task over even his more obvious evasions and misdirections. Even the introduction ('logging onto the internet' [shudder]) gave that away.
:), but nor did I enjoy seeing Gates allowed to get away with everything. He's clearly intelligent enough to cope with a more heated debate, but Paxman just wasn't up to providing him with opposition.
Don't get me wrong - I didn't want Paxman to go after Gates in a bitter, evil, twisted, personal sort of way (like many people here would no doubt have loved him to
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
While I compliment the author on his deep insight, I think he is reading a bit too much into very short interview. Bill G said the same things that you could get from the MS PR dept. He may not even believe half the things he says, (just like any polititcian), but he sticks to the party line. What is the harm in claiming the MS made the internet into what it is today? Sure, nobody with a clue believes it; but the interview isn't targeted to people that would know that, and you can be sure that the BBC isn't going to air something later that points out how stupid his answers were. The interview was a bunch of practiced answers to questions he has been asked before, nothing more.
Paxman has a huge knowledge of modern politics and politicians which he has used to devastating effect on numerous British politicians in the past
I felt he wasn't as confident or as dangerous with Bill Gates through a lack of technical knowledge.
It is a crying shame than interviewers of the calibre of Paxman rarely have the technical background to deal confidently with these goliaths of IT as they have so succesfully done with politicians.
Hmmm. Quicktime begam life around 90/91 purely as an audiovisual format, AFAICR. Later on, Apple bolted on VR.
As for QuickDraw, the only thing it has in common with Quicktime are the first five letters. It was around way before Quicktime, and concerns itself only with 2-dimensional representation. QuickDraw 3D came into being much later, around 1995/6, IIRC.
Quicktime is definitely not "a complete multimedia architecture". You are confusing two separate technologies built into the MacOS (QuickDraw and Quicktime).
Quicktime can hardly be called the inspiration behind the idea of DirectX. DirectX was conceived as a way to bring games to the Win 95 platform. Microsoft wanted to move everybody over to their wonderful, revolutionary, 32 bit, multitasking, mutithreaded, stable, wah, wah, wah new OS. They had to get rid of Win 3.1 and especially DOS, still the favorite of gamers (and an absolute bitch to program for, what with the individual support that had to be built for each peripheral, from joysticks to sound and video cards). DirectX was nothing short of a necessity for Microsoft. A standard set of APIs to adress in one go the whole PC spectrum? It was a PC game programmer's dream come true. Now, how good a game programming API DirextX is, that's another matter altogether.
In addition to that, remember Apple's 'Game Sprockets' set of APIs (How did they manage to come up with such a name?). They came on the scene (or were announced) about a year later than DirectX , were supposed to be cross-platform (Windows versions were also planned, presumably to encourage the use of said APIs and the release of more games for Macs). BTW, Quickdraw 3D was the 3D API for the Game Sprockets. I would say that Apple got the idea for Game Sprockets from DirectX, rather than M$ being inspired by that "complete multimedia architecture" called Quicktime.
When he blinks, he's not lying.
When he smiles, he's not lying.
When he folds his hands, he's not lying.
When he adjusts his tie, he's not lying.
It's when he speaks that he lies.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Meaning no disrespect to anyone, I'm wondering why this "analysis" was posted as a seperate story.
:)
AFAIK, Slashdot is structured so that responses (even "analyses" (sp?)) have their place in the response section. If the response/analysis is especially good, then it will most likely be given a high score and more people will then be likely to read it.
So, I ask, what is so special about this story? Is it particularly better than any of the responses to the original story? Maybe, but I personally don't think so. Does it represent some completely different facet of the original story? Again, maybe, but in my humble opinion, no. And finally, was this posted because the poster is a special|important|nice| person? I sure hope not.
Please someone shed some light on this, as my whole world is turning upside down.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Oh, and that if I want to change something like, say, my screen resolution, I must restart my computer.
That's partly due to Xerox's market place philosophy.
I believe, to this day you can still not buy a Xerox copier, only rent them. Xerox tried to do the same thing with Star, however the costs were far too high.
Do not forget that the Mac was Apple's second attempt. The first (I can't remember the name at the mo.) failed because it was far too expensive.
Oh and to an earlier point on this feed. When Jobs and Wozniak visited PARC, Star was already comercially available.
Not the power-hungry, greedy, egomaniac you once thought. Just a misunderstood anti-Christ.
If they had cut all the 'fact' from the interview then it would have been very short indeed. I feel it was likely that Microsoft asked for certain embarassing bits to be cut (or if not 'embarrasing' then perhaps ones that were controversial (NSA key) or might show the company in a bad light). There is no great conspiracy about this - I would expect the PR dept for any company to do the same. I just think it was a shame that in an interview that was billed as one in which Paxman could ask any questions that they had to go in for such editing afterwards.
What was completley missing from the Bill Gates interview was any element of cross-examination. Take the DOJ case against Microsoft, something hugley important in that it's very prescence has enabled many companies to support alternatives to Microsoft when before they would have dared not.
Bill was allowed to simply brush this off. A politician would never have been allowed to get away with that!
Much was made of the 'promise' that Bill is going to give away his billions but there was no though given to how decisions about what projects in what countries are going to benefit. As any politician knows promises of 'aid' are a powerful bargining tool. Decinding how billions are to be spent gives a terrifying amount of power in the hands of one man. Even if Bill Gates started out as a nice guy I think we will all find the truth of the old saying: "Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutley"
Martin Houston, Linux Consultant - phone (UK mobile) 07970 850961 mhouston@deluxe-tech.com - http://www.deluxe-tech.co.
Saying that a company called "Microsoft" was merely along for the ride in the Microcomputer Software business is a little silly isn't it?
I'll agree that IBM "legitimized" the personal computer as a business tool. But, if they didn't, someone else probably would have (all the pieces already existed), and MS probably would have had their fingers in the deal as well. They knew from the start that there's more money in the blades than the razors, and that personal computing was going to be a big market.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just as an aside, the GUI on the Atari ST range was GEM (from Digital Research), TOS was the underlying OS. GEM was also available for the PC (it was bundled with many 000's of early Amstrad PCs) and I think there was even a port for the CPM based Amstrad PCWs.
In the same sentence - don't forget the Amiga, which had a very useable GUI. One thing I am not sure about is the timeline....I thought Mac was pre-Atari, and Atari was pre-Amiga, but I may be wrong.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I also think it's funny that people can claim MS has a monopoly but at the same time predict Linux will take over the server/desktop market. You guys do realize that it is impossible for both things to be true right?
No, that's not true. Keep in mind they're in an antitrust lawsuit at the moment. That no doubt seriously affects their willingness to "monopolize". Plus, I think it's telling that the only potential competition is one that is being developed and available for free. Not much of a free market when it takes a complete paradigm shift (open source software) to compete.
When we talk of the evil of Microsoft and how it's the spawn of Bill Gates', it isn't, well, very satisfying. I think, the root of the problem is, aye, the stockholders and the investing sharks. Think about it. Prior to the company going public and performed the greatest act of ballooning up to a giant hot dog, it was actually doing something, er, good for the PC community. One could see how this could and probably is the case of it getting to the collective giant heads of Gates and co. However Gates' ambitions are placed, Microsoft's prime objective now is not that of furthering technology, but to make money for the share holders. This scenario always happens, it is the way, it is the American Way (tm).
P.S. In a rush, but you get my drift? Well I hope so.
MS-DOS and Microsoft were a big screw up alright. Except I can't understand why MSDOS was the OS most adapted to by businesses. I can't understand why Windows also inherited this position.
Is there something wrong with us techies that we do not know why big huge (and the little ones) companies choose software that is so messed up?
Is it really just marketing? Or did MSDOS and Windows really have something genuine that made life easier for the average computer user?
If we've know about this oh-so-faulty software, and we are supposed to be the authority, the ones the decision makers turn to when it comes to choosing the OS. Why is it still the most used OS?
Hey... if anyone taped the interview, can they PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE record into mpeg or something the bit where Paxman told that joke.... the one with the punchline "i think you're sitting in my chair". The look on Gates face was priceless.
Jeremy Paxman as ever was a superb interviewer, both men where obviously relaxed and enjoying it - it was nice to see contfronting Bill on some of the more sensitive issues "what's your favourite joke about you" :). No real mention was made of the bugs in Windows (it was briefly skimmed over), which was disappointing but good in a way because we got to hear about something else for a change. All in all a good interview.
I was pleasantly suprised to find out about the charity Bill Gates runs, something I'd never heard about.
Paxman to me was playing the pussycat in this so called interview. There were no hard questions at all and he allowed Gates to quickly dismiss the entire lawsuit with a few glib remarks. My impression was that Gate's people explained that Paxman could have the interview only if he wasn't his usual hard nosed self. This was a public relations fireside chat with homely little jokes about Bills money -- not an interview. Gates needed an avenue to show people he's not such a bad guy and the best way to do that in the UK is to get hard nosed reporters like Paxman to let him off easily as he did. Gates even had the temerity to claim that they released IE free because they saw they could recover the costs from ad revenues. My conclusion: A PR managed whitewash
Admittedly I run (begrudgingly) Windoze 90% of the time because well Its what I'm paid to run, and I am not forced to view quicktime content but Apples QT nag screen pisses me off more than any other. Its the ONLY internet plug I know of that does this definitely the only one in wide use. cant they just sell the server side like everyone else? (BTW does it do the upgrade annoy on a mac?) Just curious
You didn't expect to find any serious discussion about anything concerning Bill Gates or Microsoft here, did you?
The few things I noticed were
1. He's actually very boring to listen to.
2. Paxman was out of his depth, because Bill could just talk about things Paxman didn't have a clue about, and while we all knew Bill was talking shit, Paxman believed every word of it.
3. "All Microsoft did with IE4 was produced an award-winning browser, that they decided to make available for free"....execpt he forgot that to use Windows, you basically have to use IE4/5 and if you don't install it, it'll be installed eventually. Same with Outlook Express. If you don't have Outlook Express installed something will install it at a later date. (Stupid example. Outlook 98 installed Outlook Express as one of the first things it did)
iain
Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.
It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too. :-)
Glen Raphael
(who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)
I play Nerd-Folk!
[Where should the apostrophe go? :-) ]
I liked the dead stare that Gates gave when Paxman told the joke about him. Most people will atleast make a half smile, like "yeah, yeah, very funny", but Gates was stony faced. I think that was the only part where he came off badly.
Most of you Americans won't be familiar with the interviwer, but compared to most of his interviews, Paxman gave Gates a pretty easy ride. Also, he would have been more effective had he a little bit more technical info.
For example, he talked about upgrades, and people being compelled to buy them. Gates was able to handle the question. But if Paxman was able to make the point that when the new Office comes out, people start to get Word documents from others in the new format, and can't read them in their old version. This isn't too technical, but would have put Gates under pressure.
Unfortunately, you can't expect that kind of question on mainstream TV.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
C'mon guys what was Bill going to say? Hello I'm Bill Gates but in reality I am satan and drink the blood of children. Of course he came across all nice and well mannered with nothing but the best of intentions. I mean he looks like he could be knocked flat by a breadcrumb so anyone that vulnerable has to be decent, right? So how did MS get the money and why did so many competing companies bite the dust? Good/Bad luck I guess. It couldn't all have just been PR, set answers to well tried questions? Having seen the interview you would swear black and blue MS invented the internet and networking and even voice and handwriting recognition. The only thing is I can't seem to find any MS speech reconition products and I seem to remember we had networking and ftp and archie and.... on our old VAX clusters long before windows for workgroups.... Anyway if Bill says he is not interested in power it must be true.
Bill Gates is worth 100 billion. Not paid $100 billion. He's not paid even $5 billion. CEO salaries are absurd these days, but they don't reach beyond the 100's of millions, even including stock options etc etc.
But Gates is worth $100 billion because he founded MS and was therefore the (or one of the, Allen was there too) controlling shareholder. So you shouldn't be surprised that if his company has grown into that kind of behemoth he's worth that much. But he was never paid the vast majority of it.
I agree with your point that, perhaps, deep down Gates's intentions are good. But think about -- in excat same way you can argue that deep down Hitler's intentions were also good. It does not take that much imagination to see this parallel. But the flaw of this way of thinking is precicely the fact that the end *does not* justy the means.
One more thing: there is an old saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
How MSDOS got to be on top isn't very clear to me, since I was working on other platforms while it happened. It was funny, I never took the PC and MSDOS seriously, until in '86 I had to get a job and found out, to my amazement, that the business world wasn't using Macs, Ataris, and Amigas. Intead they were in some weird retro craze using machines that had come out five years earlier. I never figured that out.
But how Windows inherited it... this is something I can answer, because I watched in horror as it happened right before my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Preloads and dumping. That's really all there was to it. There was a period where if you bought a computer, if that manufacturer wanted to sell any machines with MS-DOS preloaded, they had to make nasty deals with MS. This involved things like the infamous per-processor licensing, for example. so that they could not viably sell any other OS, whether that happened to be a next-generation system liks OS/2, or a MSDOS competitor like DR-DOS. Then MS gave them cheap (free?) deals on preloading Windows along with the MS-DOS system. The upshot of it was that any user who bought a x86 machine, automatically got Windows whether they wanted it or not. (It was actually quite brilliant and admirable, from a clinical point of view -- sorta like watching a well trained SS soldier commit atrocities with perfect execution.)
Eventually, the users would start using it, because Windows had some advantages over plain DOS, like the ability to run multiple DOS programs. Why buy Desqview, VM386, or any of those other packages when you already have Windows for "free"? And once you're using Windows that way, if you decide you want GUI apps, a larger memory model or other things like that, why switch to OS/2 when you already have Windows for "free"?
(Oh, and I think Microsoft mice (Which were actually pretty decent) came bundled with Windows too. So if you bought one of their mice, you had a "free" copy of Windows. But at least the user had to make the effort of installing it, so that played a much smaller role.)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Did anyone else notice Bill's rocking motions during his deposition for the DOJ vs. Microsoft suit mirrored Hitler's rocking during the 1936 Olympics? At the time Hitler's rocking was atributed to a psychological disorder.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
I also watched the interview and having experienced Jeremy Paxman's Interview technique I would like to say that he held back on a lot of things. From the interview style it looked as though the questions were vetted by Gates before the interview (not just because of the way that he interviewed him but because of the way that Gates was so calm, it was like he knew what he was going to answer before the question was asked). Paxman's style is to go for the jugular in a big way but he does it descretly. He didn't even make an attempt to attack Gates.
[drum roll...] Number 10!
10) the brink of the end of open protocals.
9) the brink of the end of interoperability.
8 the brink of the end of conectivity.
7) the brink of the end of any news outlet not starting with 'MS'.
6) to the brink of the end of open source.(say it isn't so!)
5) to the brink of millions of script kiddies
4) to the brink of BSOD on every desktop, daily
3) to the brink of Steve Balmer without his Ridlin (scary)
2) to the brink of MS locking in broadband
1) the the brink of "paper clip 2.0"
"While that behavior may be tolerable in animals, I find it a little short of what I expect from humans. Businesses are *NOT* creatures with desires, goals, and instincts of their own and with a right to survival at any cost. They are supposed to be voluntary organizations of humans for their and society's mutual benefit." I'm aware that this is off topic, but i must disagree. The lifeblood of any company is profit, and the means, fair or foul, by which profit is derived are functionally irrelevant. They were never, ever, ever for anyone's mutual benefit, nor will they ever be. Even those who control companies can be unhorsed, and the company may stil soldier on with new leaders. I submit that companies are in a way like a single-celled orgaism, with it's employees as organelles or ribosomes if you will. A company eats (profits and acquisitions) excretes (layoffs, downsizing), and even occasionally reproduces (junior companies that spin off, or perhaps simple growth is enough to imply reproduction). The analogy is incomplete, of course, and by and large companies seek to grow themselves instead of leaving offspring, byut his is fine as the companies have no set mortality limit and so need no offspring to pass its genotype along. Anyone, from Bill Gates down to the lowliest corporate drone, is just an expendable part of Microsoft. Microsoft could be killed by the loss of too many critical organelles at the wrong time, or by lack of food/profit, but it may also ditch Gates and Ballmer at the right time and move on. They're money-nexuses the same way living beings are reverse-entropy nexuses. Try seeing the world that way... rather trippy isn't it? I may be wrong, but it's an interesting idea.
To be honest, the thought that Microsoft might be left intact or unfettered, to pursue its and Gates' goals, scares me. Not so much because their goal is a bad one, but because that, in achieving it, they could irrevocably stunt the development of the information age.
I'm puking all over my keyboard. You sound worse than anything I've heard out of Bill "the road ahead" Gates. Please.
Thanks, Dodger. An artful piece piece of writing.
:) Do I win some kind of prize?
Dodger.....artful.....Oh, I get it the Artful Dodger, of Oliver fame
Moderator hints: I find this post to be offtopic, funny, and possibly flambait
The One, The Only
Anonymous C.
I always KNEW Bill Gates was a little nutty, but not THAT nutty. Whether The Dodge was exaggerating or not, if Bill Gates has become this bto the world around him thes we may be in for a ride. A not good ride. This reminds me of Dr. Rappuccinni's Daughter where a doctor's wife left him he was so terrified that his daughter would do the same that he switched her blood with that of a poisonous plant, doing the same to the man she loved so he could never leave her. Whenever they touched a living creature it would die. How is this relevant? Bill Gates puts out the OS and is so blind to the fact that he is furthering the dumbing down process that is now so evident in public schools that he actually believes he is doing the world good, while the opposite is true. He may not be wanting to cause the damage, though he acts like a dictator, finding any competition and purging it from the land. From the way this sounds he may be so disillusioned that it borders on insanity. Did Lenny from Of Mice and Men mean to kill his pet mice and that girl? Of course not. But they were still killed. Maybe this DOJ Antitrust case will be the shot in the back of the head for Mr. Gates and his company, maybe he'll get away scott free. No matter what the outcome, we, the enlightened (if that is what you can call the people who stand against a dictator), have a duty to spread knowledge and undo the damage that Bill Gates has done. Hear the call, and answer.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
Dictators never think of themselves as evil. I've little doubt that BG sees his own intentions as good and his influence as beneficial. I still think "Billzebub" is an appropriate nickname....
I'm afraid we couldn't really expect any better from Jeremy Paxman, he's just not technical enough, and you could see him not wanting to push certain subjects because it might take him outside his area of competence. We did learn that Paxman can with great authority state that Gates earns a lot of money ... we had that point thrust home again and again, ad nauseum.
I *was* slightly impressed that Paxman managed to say "Linus Torvalds" and "free software" without sneering. (Sneering is his forte.) And Gates responded very well, not by denigrating free software but simply by making the point that Microsoft is in the business of making money, so "free" wasn't relevant. [No, there's no way in which Paxman could have brought up the other meaning of "free". Wrong planet altogether.]
Bill Gates certainly came across as genuine. He even corrected Paxman's assertion that Microsoft was responsible for 90% of Internet machinery, clarifying that it was 90% only of the client side.
I agree that Gates thinks that he and Microsoft have taken the world into the information age almost single-handedly. While we know that that isn't anywhere near to being The Truth or even being representative, for people without our exposure to the history of the Internet and a wider view of computing then his arguments must seem very strong, at least statistically.
My take on BG is that maybe he's suffering from the worm's eye effect: he's so close to the ground in Microsoft that maybe he genuinely believes that Microsoft does only good and nothing bad. If this is so then that's a little sad in part, but it can also be exceedingly dangerous. There is no reasoning with people who "know" that they are in the right.
Fortunately, there is the little question of the Halloween documents to spoil that rosy picture. Nice interviews notwithstanding, we know that Microsoft is not populated with angels, so BG is either not Mr Nice Guy at all or else he's out of touch with ongoings at Microsoft. Either way, that's a million light years better than the messiah that Paxman appeared to be interviewing.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Only satan himself could gain so much at the cost of so many...
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
I think Dogers comments are right on. It's scary, but true. The people that are regarded as visionaries are notoriously close-minded.
RMS for example - I believe he will do anything to fight for the freedom of software.(as well as all other things artistic if you believe some people) He sees himself as right and everyone else as misguided.
(note - I don't hold myself to the same level as RMS. I can only dream of being as influential as he has been)
I regard myself as a visionary within my company. I argue for the unpopular options and I speak my mind about things that I think are wrong. I have an arrogance streak a mile wide, and I regard myself as better then most of my peers.
Is this the curse of visionaries? How do we let ourselves believe things like this?
Think about this yourselves... Am I wrong? I would love to believe that I was.
I know I'm going to be sitting back examining my viewpoints tonight.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
What other GUIs _were_ there prior to the Macintosh?
The first GUI I used was GEOS on the Commodore 64. I'm not sure whether that came out before 1984 or not (probably not). The only other one I know from that area is the Atari ST's TOS, and I'm pretty sure the Mac predates that.
Of course, I'm really talking about home use. Certainly the Xerox GUI predated the Macintosh, and w (the windowing system X is an improvement on) might be old enough, but you couldn't get those to run on anything the average consumer could buy in 1984.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Yeah, ok, Bill G got PC's on everyone's desktop and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
No one has a problem with *what* Bill did. It's with the *way* he did it.
How many small companies died so that Microsoft could grow fatter? How many programmers had to either work with the Win32 API or find another job? How many better technologies did he strangle?
The PC revolution happened for two reasons. One was the hardware clone industry. Everyone and their stepsister was grinding them out, and inventing new peripherals for them. The other reason was the thriving software ecology when DOS was king. I remember when the OS was what Microsoft made and there were lots of utilities, spreadsheets, word processors, and programs made by *other* companies. Even competing desktops.
Until the 90's it seemed that Microsoft was a player in this space. The user installable device drivers in DOS actually helped it widen significantly. But then software competitors started running into compatibility problems and vanishing for one reason or another, only to be replaced by a Microsoft product. Until we are left with today's market where "your system will crash a lot unless you use Microsoft apps and approved drivers." And nearly every system comes shipped with the Window's OS like it was a required piece of hardware.
You can admire Bill for his rapaciousness and greed if you like, but try to realize it wasn't without cost to many of us. Windows is to the software industry as the space shuttle is to the space industry, bad technology that displaced possibly more worthy choices.
True story:
Back in 1989, when Windows looked like crap, and they had many competing GUI's (OS/2, DESQview, among many others!), MS hired the designers of the Mac GUI's look and feel to work on Windows 3.0's.
Apparently, this helped MS out because they actually had an 'eye candy' product for the first time. It also had ZDNet getting way too happy.
BillG already knows of Apple's contributions, because he bought the people from there that gave the Mac its coolness factor and used them for Windows 3.0 aka It Looks Nice [but doesn't work and crashes more than Windows 2000!].
Bill Gates, although not a nice man, is nothing compared to the tyrants that exist in other industries.
You see, the thing about a good bastard, is that the public never gets to know about what they do. What's more, they never let you know just how much money, and how many of the cards they hold.
Other industries (oil, automobiles, cancer etc.) posess far more evil people, far richer, and far far far more powerful people than Gates could ever dream of being.
In short. Gates is a prick, but he's only at the bottom of the heap. You don't even know who the big pricks are!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
It's odd the BBC's writeup of the interview contains a one paragraph quote from Bill Gates which was not in the interview - was it edited out from the final broadcast version? See Wah's comment above for the quote.
How many of your started with MS products and went on to better things? Dos? Win3*? Windows95? One of the biggest features overlooked by most detractors of MS products is the way the truckloads of bugs force you to tinker and putz around trying to get it to work, thusly helping you understand the innards of a computer a bit better.
However, the interview has enlightened me as to Gates' motivations. Some people have said he's motivated by money. I don't think so. Others say that he's power-hungry. I don't think he comes across as the sort of person who's massively concerned about power.
I disagree with these statements for a couple of reasons. 1. For being as anti-social as he comes across as, Gates is very good at interviewing. He really knows how to get his point accross in a way that helps his company. So I don't think that this interview necessarily represents what he really thinks. 2. When I lived in Seattle (grew up there, moved at 21 in 94), there were numerous occasions when he proved he really was fairly arrogant and concerned with power. When he used to get tickets in his lexus in Medina, a famous speed trap near Bellevue, he have his lawyer argue, usually successfully, the ticket in court. The paper would cover it, making it a mini-media circus. The only reason that (at the time) one of the 3 or 4th richest man in America would argue tickets in court is out of pure testosterone induced power hunger (IMO). 3. I think he comes also comes accross as not being power hungry, because he is really (and perhaps he should be) convinced that he IS powerful. Those who come accross as needing to be in positions of power are the ones who really aren't in those positions.
-- Moondog
Wrong. We'd all be using DOS because Xerox's workstations were wayyyy too expensive.
--
"I was a fool to think I could dream as a normal man."
B. B. Buick
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
was for geeks to meet other geeks and play games and exchange info. Plain and simple. :-) Bill Gates had nothing to do with that.
If any of you have ever read any "How Microsoft and Bill Gates got to where it is" books, you'd find out a lot about Gates' past and exactly what he did to get where he is today. And, just as Microsoft's marketing department spreads its FUD about how NT is better than Linux, so do many Slashdot readers spread FUD about the motivations of Microsoft, and what its leader is really all about. I believe this thread is an excellent chance to bring information about Bill Gates to light. (NOTE: What I say below this sentence is the result of reading books such as Barbarians Lead By Bill Gates, Harddrive and others.)
Where to start? How about his childhood? From the biographical accounts I have had the chance to read, here is a typical situation in which you might find William H. Gates III during his earlier years: Alone in the basement of his house, contemplating. Not reading. Not working. Thinking. About what? I don't quite remember if the books say what. In any case, what does this say about Gates? Not much I suppose, but it does show that Gates wasn't quite "normal" from the beginning: he wasn't outside playing with friends all the live-long-day. Remind you of someone? Perhaps yourself?
It is also well known that Bill Gates was quite an upstart at school. Why? Because he corrected his teachers. Voraciously. I am sure that many of us have corrected our teachers for everything from a wrong equation to wrong terminology, but Gates is known not only to do that, but with great precision pin-point fallacies in his teacher's thinking. His best subjects, just like most of us, were Mathematics and pure sciences. One well-known anecdote is when Gates was taking a high-level course in math (I forget the particular one, but some form of Calculus for sure) and his professor was proving some theorem or another on the board. Gates, like many of us, was in la-la land (sleeping). However, as soon as he woke up, he noticed the professor made the smallest mistake in his proof - and corrected it on the spot.
So Gates is somewhat like us geeks when it comes to learning. What about when it comes to computers?
Fact: Bill Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter in 4K of memory. Reminds you of your own programming feats, doesn't it?
He met Paul Allen way back in middle school - Allen being the elder of the two. The first computer that the school received was one of those tele-type machines where it was all time-share computing. It turns out that Gates and Allen alone used so much time-share time that the school couldn't keep up with the cost! I forget the outcome, but I think Gates and Allen went to work for the company that owned the PDP-11 that was being time-shared. Doesn't that sound a little bit like us in high school? Playing Quake all day? I remember I scheduled my senior year of high school so well that I had 5 periods a day in which I could play Quake non-stop. That was fun. Speaking of scheduling....
Gates and Allen were once chartered to write a program that would schedule students for classes. And guess what? Gates "accidentally" found himself in a class with only one boy - himself. Don't you think you would have done the same?
Fact: Bill Gates asked his dates what their SAT scores were. Did you ever want to ask, but were too afraid to?
Well, I don't want to turn this into an unauthorized biography of Gates, but I did want to shed some light on his past. With all of us Linux users saying "Gates is the devil! Look, the ASCII characters of his name add up to 666 - It's Proof!!" it's just the same as throwing FUD back at Microsoft, only at a more personal level.
I am not defending Gates' actions, or his company. I'm just trying to show you that Gates might be more like you than you would like to believe. He had the same motivations that we had when we were young - play games, ogle girls. I think where he went "wrong" was that he found he had a really good business sense, and he used it to the maximum. When you were last put in the position of power (I mean, for instance, the power to change something - a test grade, a course grade, etc.), did you? Probably not. Bill Gates found himself in the position of power - many times, in fact. And he found he was really good at controlling the situation. The question then becomes, was he immoral to use his power?
Sorry for the long post, and definitely sorry if you felt that I didn't add anything, but my main purpose of this post was to show that Bill Gates had many of the same aspirations we had when we were young, and he may be more like us than we think (or like to believe).
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Now to defend Gates, I don't think he's very involved in the software development. We can't blame every bug and every glitch on him. We may be able to blame much of the business practices on him, but he doesn't develop the software - don't blame him!
-- start rant --
Now, where did this whole "MS could be replaced tomorrow" idea come from. Is there anything more convenient for a monopoly to say than "Well, we may just up and dissappear in a minute, so don't worry about us having godly power right now." I argue that it's almost impossible to kill off MS. People just buy MS, companies ship MS, and if say (for the sake of argument) no one baught MS products for 5 years, they have enough money to remain operating like nothing happend the whole time! They aren't going away just because some guy in his garage gets an idea. His idea is just another way for MS to make money...
-- more rants --
I think Gates, and his top managers, don't really know what their software is like. I imagine Gates running Windows on a 800Mhz PIII Xeon and wondering why people say it crashes when under stress. I mean, he word processes and reads mail...
As for Windows 2K, why does the operating system require a 300Mhz processor and 64MB (minimum) RAM? Imagine telling someone in the 80's that they won't be able to turn their computer on and word process without a 300Mhz chip and 128MB of RAM.
Gates may think this is okay. His computer can always meet these requirements, but mine can't. The operating system shouldn't require more than a 386! Leave some cycles for the appz!!!
I'm glad that the first perceptions of this response show that Gates is not motivated purely by money or power, and that the overall opinion of him is that he's out to improve humanity. However I don't agree that he is 'disillusioned' and thinks he knows best.
When we see Microsoft jump out and aquire technology, or drive competitors out of business, this is simply the 'business mode' of Gates and his company. I know that Microsoft is not one person, but the whole company must live by a Microsoft-y way of life. Don't forget how many people's jobs are provided, and Gates has a responsibily to keep making money. I think we all tend to forget that sometimes in a hurry to bag out MS.
60% of this response goes on about how dangerous Gates is and that the DOJ really should do something about it. Do you really think that Gates is dangerous? You make him sound like a psychotic!
Despite the response, I think Bill Gates has done a lot for computing, and has enabled a lot of people to get on the Internet -easily-. You can't ignore the level of technical skill required previously to connect a Linux box to the net, configure X and install a browser. Sure, it's getting easier, but it's still not as easy as Windows. People like us have difficulty understanding why the average computer user can't understand Unix.....that's something that we all need to keep in mind.
I couldn't watch the interview since I don't have a TV, so I'm hoping that a AVI becomes available so I can watch it. I give credit to Dodger for his well written response, but I think some people forget the small details like people's jobs, and the fact that Microsoft is a -business-. ie. needs to make money.
Client Software:
~$ 300.00 Windows NT Workstation 4.0
~$ 388.00 Office 2000
~$ 191.00 BackOffice 4.5 Client Access License
Server Software:
~$ 627.00 Windows NT Server 4.0
~$ 1832.00 BackOffice Server 4.5
~$ 745.00 Proxy Server 2.0
~$ 477.00 Exchange Server 5.5 Standard Edition
~$ 1534.00 Exchange Server 5.5 Enterprise Edition
~$ 735.00 SQL Server 7.0 Standard Edition
~$ 3729.00 SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition
~$ 475.00 Systems Management Server 2.0
Other than that, you seem to be on the right track.
When an obviously true theory ("market failure cannot exist") leads to conclusions that aren't even remotely predictive, the necessary conclusion is that there's a conspiracy afoot -- and/or a massive disinformation campaign conducted by secretive parties unknown. This is what Ayn Rand meant when she advised us to check our premises: You can always find the flaws in reality by comparing it to an objective truth (arrived at by pure reason) and looking for discrepancies. Where the discrepancies lie, there you will find the criminal masterminds (e.g. KKlinton and her husband) who secretly control our destiny.
It's as simple as that.
Bill Gates isn't the anti-Christ, he's the real-life version of Ayn Rand's Hank Reardon:
Gates is always being asked to "open" the Windows source code so everyone can benefit.
Reardon was always being asked to "open" the recipe for Reardon Metal so everyone can benefit.
People claim Gates is "selfish" for making his own software standards and saying anyone is able to create their own standards and compete.
People claim Reardon was "selfish" for making his own metal and saying anyone is able to use any other type of metal and compete.
Maybe everyone was expecting the "real life" version of the Randian legend to be noble and lovable, but the truth is more often than not, stranger than fiction. There are many more likenesses between Gates and Reardon, explore a few on your own. Plenty of non-similar attributes, too. Explore the possibilities, why don't you?
a posed-->opposed
protocals-->protocols
conectivity-->connectivity
Ridlin-->Ritalin
How do you know what was in the full interview rather than the broadcast version?
*engage rant mode* :^) Seriously, the chant "Kill Clippy!" is one I find myself uttering alot. If there's one thing MS has cursed us with, it's technology that thinks it knows more than you do. This is why it [Windows] always asks "are you sure you want to do this?" .. as if... DUH! OF COURSE! Clippy is the embodiment of evil... it thinks it's a sentient being trying to be helpful.. when infact it's so useless it makes those "programmable" microwaves look like mini-einsteins!
... Well, it was a nice try.
*disengage rant mode*
--
I'm Italian and I laugh at Italian jokes all the time. I'm sure blacks crack black jokes to each other all the time when white guys aren't around.
Windows 3.0 GUI was derived directly from the OS/2 GUI that Microsoft and IBM where jointly developing.
But if they didn't develop it we'd all be running
a real Object Orientated Desktop that XEROX PARC
where working on at the time of that famous vist by Jobs & Wosniak.
In many ways I think the reviewer has a point: Bill Gates is not an evil megalomaniac, but a man who has the "best" of intentions to be an enlightened leader to the world over which he has considerable power. In many ways, I think that one can really see in him why a despot is always bad, no matter how enlightened the intentions.
One hundred years from now, our complaints of Bill Gates actions will beyond doubt seem petty: the man who left an 80 billion dollar charity foundation behind him (granted, things could go bad for Microsoft, but they are too big to go away: at worst/best they will go the way of IBM) will be remembered as one of the worlds greatest philantropists. It will be hard to explain to our grandchildren why we spoke of that man as more evil than satan: But giving away large sums of money is easy, being a despot is hard.
One of the things that has always scared (and sometimes comforted) me the most about the power that BG has is that he is a man of absolutely no vision. Whenever he speaks of a the future, its always about some technology, predicted for years, that Microsoft thinks is around the corner (for the last two years: voice recognition). BG seems. and he is far from alone about it, to see the information age as a large, shiny playing field of technical gadgets and webpages full of dancing baloney. If I had half his fortune for every insightful comment he has had about he social changes implied by the transition to the information society, I would be just as broke as I am today. Which is not exactly what we need in a leader.
-
Should we cry for this poor guy? "Mommy, kids are making fun of me because I grew up into a powerful money hungry software tyrant.. make them stop making fun of me! I just want to advance the human cause while making a tidy profit on the side!"
There were at least two parts of the interview that were recorded but not broadcast. Paxman challenged Gates over the buying of "Quick and Dirty Software" (he meant QDOS) on which MSDOS was based. I can't remember what Gates' reply was to this. Shortly after this they were discussing how Gates got IBM to use MSDOS and Paxman asked about "IBM's big mistake". Gates said that at that time IBM were given the chance to buy 40% of Microsoft stock and that their mistake was not to have taken it. Whilst this is undoubtedly true in hindsight, I'm not sure why the BBC cut all this unless it was for space reasons. Perhaps someone at Microsoft leaned on them ?
"Where do you want to go today?"
Back to the software store to get a refund!
"Where are we going tomorrow?"
I don't know, but suspect that "thinking differently" won't get you there any sooner!
--
The previous poster is partially correct. Some of Windows 1.0's (!) GUI was in fact invented by a former Apple employee. Anyone who has seen Windows prior to 3.0 knows that the buttons look strickingly similar to the Macintosh's 2D buttons and things like the design of the pulldown menus and the centered headings on the top of dialog boxes, the location of the control box, etc were certainly derived from the Macintosh.
Windows 3.0's "new" look and feel (3D buttons, etc.) was in fact derived from OS/2's. However, the design of the GUI's internals were definitely not derived from OS/2 code...Microsoft wanted to base PM's GUI on Windows, while IBM said no way, we have our own GUI code that we want to implement.
My journal has hot
First off, anyone who suggests Microsoft will be bought anytime soon is on crack- who has 30 or 40 Billion bucks laying around? Not Andover.net, even after the ipo... Sure Gates is trite about his role in the Information Age. But he *is* a good businessman who got his was savvy enough to allowed use of his mediocre product to proliferate and, with the help of Intel, brought about the inexpensive Wintel Machine- which the majority of you Slapdash readers out there use. Not everybody wants to pay a premium price for a Mac, but I digress. As for the role of linux, I doubt you could substantiate arguments saying Linux was a driving force since the beginning. It is now, but not back in '93 or '94. Speaking of evil scary people, Linus comes to mind. HE is truly the one to be feared, not Bill. Those Finns always have something up their sleeves.. Slashdot- News for losers with nothing else to do. Stuff that is inane stuff.
That and smalltalk has no place on a *users* desktop =)
---
Joseph Foley
InCert Software Corp.
I think you may be fooling yourself. I think Bill Gates may morally justify his actions to himself by thinking that he is bringing the world into the computer and information age.... however, I believe, deep down he just craves the power.
Microsoft's main business is to make software. Why do they make such crappy software? Bill Gates and many of the Microsoft employees are very rich people. It shouldn't be all about the money anymore. Microsoft has a unique position... they hold so much market share, and have a lot of money... they could really concentrate on making some quality software... However, they don't.
Let's look at a few things about Microsoft.
1. Microsoft really doesn't have many innovations. They usually take someone else's idea, do it their own way with a lot of semi-useless bells and whistles, and put their propaganda machine behind it.
2. What about that propaganda machine? Instead of just making a quality product, they try to force you to use it or try make you believe it is the standard. Like how they force you to install IE to install Visual Studio. How about how they how they get the media outlets that they own to proclaim MS Product A is better than Competitor Product B?
3. They concentrate on adding more features to their products then actually trying to make an efficient, stable product. They change formats from version to version, pretty much forcing you to upgrade. I doubt if Microsoft has ever re-written a program from scratch. You follow the MS Word path lately?
4. Buggy software.... and they don't even admit to calling them bugs. I am amazed by some of the things they release. I know every software company seems to have this problem, but Microsoft seems to be one of the worst.
Now maybe I am thinking a bit idealistic... nothing can be perfect. However, I think Bill Gates has the influence with Microsoft, so if he really wanted to make some quality products, he could push the company to do so..... but he doesn't. He drives the company to sell the most software and dominate the industry. Bill Gates is in it for the power and control.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
The Purity of your Food is evaded and fraught by the Plastic Forks made of Petrochemical By-Products. The Socialist Control make you forget that, but it is Intrinsic Knowledge not approved or taught by your Government Indoctrination Centers (a.k.a. "schools").
A citizenry of Impure Food Intake cannot thrive or prosper and is Abandoned of God. Fully 1/5 of the Bible Old Testament is taken up with Food Purity advice and Commandments, and you don't think this means anything? What you take in is what you become, and this is why the Government and the Liberals want you to eat processed, dead, or even just plain artificial Food Substitutes. Once severed from the Divine Afflatus, you have no strength to resist immorality dishonesty and the destruction of the Family by the feminists and homosexuals.
A Family that eats only whole foods, unprocessed, unmodified, and never Killed by supposed "germ" (imaginary pseudo-science concept of French "Enlightenment" socialists) reducing processes like Pasteurization and so forth -- such a Family will prosper and remain as one Unit, with the Father as the one true Head of the Family as God is the one true head of His church (which is the community of all believing and correctly practicing Christians and has nothing to do with the Whore of Rome).
The only political unit justified and countenanced by God's Bible law is the family, where the Father must administer all justice. Anti-Christ Religion "Government" can be known by its acts and crimes, one of which is forcing "free" DEAD cooked food down throats of children to control them.
Cooked food is dead food, plastic in food or on Food is ABOMINATION and is guaranteed loss of God, Christ true religion -- it is bowing down to Mammon, Baal, Government Whore of Babylon Iniquity Industry called "Washington".
Now that you know the Truth you can amend your life.
I don't know how many people on here are over 30 and remember the introduction of the IBM PC, but it was not Microsoft that got the PC revolution started- it was IBM. Microsoft didn't really get started on their road until the clone market started. Up til then, it was all IBM. Nobody really thought much about Microsoft until, say, 1985, except for when 123 broke after every new DOS release.
What Microsoft did was to use every bit of leverage they had to leverage themselves up another notch. Up until Windows 2, the market was fairly even- programming in DOS was simple enough that the barriers to entry were tiny, and MS didn't really have any way of hiding anything from programmers. Using the advantages they had (and continue to have, of course) courtesy of being the producer of Windows lead to their position today.
This all gets back to Bill's ambition. Attempting a little bit of cheap analysis, I think that derives from being a son and grandson of people who made something of themselves- Bill's grandfather being a banker, and Bill's father being a lawyer. Bill is pushing himself because he's got to prove he's up to the challenge, which I think he has done.
I'm neither pro nor anti Microsoft- I am an MCSE, but I also prefer *nix for many things. Windows 95 was a remarkable piece of software for being able to deal with the varied software and hardware in existence at the time, and I really happen to like IE5, although its speed may be surpassed by Mozilla when it comes out.
What I would really like to see would be for Microsoft to compete on even terms, using open file formats for everything. No chance this will happen, because it takes too long for Microsoft to code to the point of elegance as compared to others, and their inadequacies would show. Look how long it took for them to come up with a browser that loads pages quickly. So we're stuck with comparing oranges and apples instead of apples and apples.
What slashdot really needs is an NT ombudsman and/or category. It does no good to have so many people so ignorant of NT (and other MS packages) and where it is strong and where it is weak.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Please raise the score of the previous post. The author heard interesting extra bits of the Paxman interview which were curiously deleted from the broadcast version.
"Let me make it clear that I don't think Bill Gates is evil."
I do.
So there.
out of the system, I belive he gets money out ocasionaly, and he's made donations to his 'fund' in values of several billion.
I'm sure there's an upper limit, but he's legaly bound and can't remove all of it with out getting permission from the SEC
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Why does no one remember that MS actually moved the whole industry many years back? The IBM PC was the answer of the established computing world to home computers, and it managed to combine the worst of both worlds.
:-)
Like Linus, I once owned a Sinclair QL. Same vintage as the original IBM PC. Yes, it was cheapskate hardware - uncle Clive would never use a 245 if you could just ploink 8 resistors in the data lines. But it had a decent operating system.
It wasn't the perfect OS, but it was at least done by people who understood the basics of OS design, and applied them. It had did multi processing, had decent device drivers, and was relatively simple to code for even in assembler. Other home computers from that era had decent OSes too - the amiga guys are still lyric about theirs
Home computers were moving from 8 bit / 64K into 16 bit systems, and evolving. Unix was more then 10 years old by then, and the same way that all 16 processors except the 8086 were basically 32 bit processors cut down to what was technically possible the operating systems were mature if cut down to what hardware of the day could handle.
Except for MS-DOS. It was a badly done clone of CP/M. It couldn't do process management. It couldn't do memory allocation. Its device drivers were fundamentally flawed, so everyone bypassed them. It couldn't do serial ports beyond 2400 baud, due to MS-DOS being too stupid. It couldn't handle alternate file systems. It pretty much couldn't do anything except imitate CP/M.
PC hardware was done by someone masturbating over an intel catalog. It had interrupt controllers and DMA controllers, terribly expensive dream parts in those days. MS-DOS defeated their purpose by blocking on every I/O call.
After some years, paying the rent meant programming for MS-DOS. It made everyone who'd ever seen a decent OS puke. Everything was complicated, involved directly accessing hardware, and trying to figure out which of 12 'standards' was currently in use on the machine.
It was no surprise that everything crashed, was difficult to install, and couldn't coexist with anything else.
That lowly QL could have grown quite nicely as more powerful hardware became available - because its OS was a simple and decent abstraction layer. Not so MS-DOS. Remember how many years between the 386 and MS-DOS-alter-ego-windows doing 32 bit most of the time. How many years to virtual memory? How many years and how many horrors before decent networking was possible?
Oh, did you notice that Bill Gates managed to loose BASIC along the way. Home computers of the day always had a simple programming environment available - there was no big gap between users and programmers in those days. It was considered normal that users did a little programming of their own. People didn't do $2000 courses to 'learn' programming - if you had a computer and a bit of talent it was unavoidable to pick it up along the way. We got batch files in return.
COMPUTERS ARE NOT COMPLICATED. It doesn't require magic to get everything to work right. Standards do not have to change every two years. You don't need wizards to protect you from the evil complexity of it all. Simple programming is, in fact, simple.
MS-DOS and Windows made things complicated and frustrating. I'm serious when I say Bill Gates deserves to be tortured to death for pushing MS-DOS down our throats. It caused misery to millions.
So Bill Gates thinks that he is here to serve humanity...
I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one who saw a certain Twilight Zone episode.
Its interesting that you claim to have read Hardrive. Did you happen to notice this little snippet from page 38:
At one point Maestretti [physics teacher at Lakeside prep school] tried to encourage Gates to use his hands as well as his intellect. As a project, Maestretti asked him to assemble a Radio Shack electronics kit, in order to force him to build something correctly and make it work.
"I can remember when he brought it to me, telling me, 'Okay, now I've satisfied my project.' And of course solder was dripping all over the back..." Needless to say, it didn't work."
-- Hard Drive, page 38
More interesting tidbits:
According to Hard Drive, however, Bill Gates and Paul Allen didn't have enough time to get their BASIC interpreter working for the MITS Altair 8080. Paul Allen did the hard work of making an 8080 emulator for Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe computer.
Gates and Allen were then able to enlist fellow Harvard student Monte Davidoff to implement the floating point arithmetic portions of the language. A search for "Davidoff" on www.microsoft.com came up with zero hits (January 11, 1998).
After the demo, someone still had to go down to Albuquerque, New Mexico to (a) convince MITS to buy the code, and then (b) make the prototype into a usable system. Gates stayed at Harvard to play poker with his rich buddies while Paul Allen spent months in a motel room in Albuquerque. Microsoft came into existence because Allen successfully managed both the business and technology, earning him... a minority stake in the company.
What follows is my own take:
I'm not saying Slashdot doesn't perpetuate its own line of FUD every now and then, but there's no way you can seriously compare Slashdot FUD and Microsoft FUD. Slashdot is a community of people who interact with each other and reason things out collectively. Slashdot makes no attempt at changing the public. Its a community forum. MS is a monolithic organization that spends billions of dollars each year manipulating the public. There's an enormous difference between a bunch of people talking in a forum where others can refute and explore ideas and a behemoth that has so much money and influence that it can drown out any public voices it doesn't care for. Thats why MS FUD (their oldest product) is so deadly. There's no way anyone but Sun and Oracle can afford to buy enough exposure to counter their ridiculous claims.
Finally, I really don't care if BG is a typical nerd or geek or whatever. I don't care about his childhood. The reason is that regardless of much of a geek he is, I'm still going to hold him to the same standards of social responsibility as any other CEO.
I appreciated the fair tone of both this analysis and the comments it brought out. There are many things I don't like about Bill Gates, but his detractors sometimes fail to recognize at least one point:
Bill gives it away whenever he tries to lie. This is readily apparent in his court testimony, his Congressional appearance, and the Charlie Rose interview he did the next day. So, those of us who reject much of what he says have to recognize that he believes it.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
my first computer, back around 1989 was a Tandy 1000 RL. It had ran ms-dos 3.x and had a GUI developed by tanday called either desktop or deskmate. i hadnt thought about it for years now, but this discussion has made me remember it!
so this made me look at the timeline. when did the mac's first start getting gui? and wen did win1.0 come out? any other old tandy users out there?