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Gates' Last Day At Microsoft
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jun 27, 2008 03:13 PM
from the keep-it-clean dept.
from the keep-it-clean dept.
mrogers writes "Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft. After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
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Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Funny)
A shiny, new laptop loaded with Vista, of course. He's earned it!
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
When can we look forward to a day without Ballmer? That would truly be a day to celebrate.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
But it's so much fun to watch him run Microsoft into the ground. Don't take that away!
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you're joking ("funny cos it's true" humor?), but - and maybe I'm not giving Ballmer enough credit here[0] - I really can't see Ballmer keeping Microsoft afloat in the long-term. Call it a gut feeling. The man is but an ogre really.
If anything saves Microsoft - aside from its stockpiles of cash - it will be Bill's advice imparted on his one-day-a-week-on-Microsoft-business.
I am certainly not enamored with Gates by any means, but I do recognize that (in my view) he was the brains behind the outfit: Ballmer is Robin to Gates' Batman; Cashman and Dobbin? "Holy developers, developers, developers, Cashman!"[1]
Personally unless Microsoft pull something exceptional out of the bag I expect to see them decline as 'market leaders'. I am interested in hearing others', perhaps more informed, thoughts.
Anyway that's how I see it from my point of view but IANABA (business analyst).
[0] Stop laughing, I'm trying to be impartial :)
[1] That right there is why I don't write comic books.
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Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Was it by making better products?
Was it by gaining market share?
Or was it by making Vista cost shitloads more money than XP?
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust me,I am no Linux or Apple fanboi,having used and made money off MSFT products since the days of DOS and Win3.1. But the simple fact is even teeny boppers that don't know the difference between a PC and a VCR come with their parents to get a new PC and I mention Vista I get an EXTREMELY loud EEEEW!,like I took a crap in front of them or something. Even my local Wal Mart has been making it clear that on every sale of a laptop they'll at no extra charge put XP on it just to keep from losing sales. And after being given a copy of Vista for being a beta tester and giving up after nearly a month to get that POS to run decent on my 3GHz Celeron I gave up and gave it away,only to find out later that it keeps changing hands like a bad fruitcake. So far I've had 4 people install it just to go "Yuck" a week or two later and go back to XP and pass it off to someone else.
The simple fact is inertia can let them go for awhile. But I've had more businesses lately start asking about "This Linux thing"(which for some reason they insist on calling Lienucks no matter how many times I correct them) than I have ever had before. If Win7 doesn't come out a lot more like XP and a lot less like Vista then I predict that those with money will be switching to Macs and those without will either pirate XP or come to someone like me to build them a PC from scratch with XP on it. I just hope that after Jan 2009 I'll still be able to find XP OEM cds or I might be buying a lot of used barebone systems just for the XP CALs. But so far my customers are willing to pay extra NOT to have the Vista "experience" on their new PC. And as always this is my 02c from out here in consumerland,YMMV
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would LOVE to see Ballmer on the way out instead of Bill. Most of what people really dislike about Microsoft is Ballmer's doing, Gates just didn't have the spine to stand up to him and reel him in.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Bill Gates
The WSJ has an article looking at the struggle Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had in switching around their Junior/Senior relationship.
Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Mr. Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.
Once Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle," Mr. Ballmer says. "Use him, yes, need him, no."
Linus Torvalds
Ballmer is also known as a vocal critic of competing companies and their products. He has referred to the free Linux software system as a "[â¦] cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern that the GNU GPL license employed by such software requires that all derivative software be made open source.
[edit] Lucovsky/Google
In 2005, Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became highly enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, picked up his chair and threw it across his office. Referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who previously worked for competitors Sun and Novell), Ballmer allegedly said, "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google," then resumed trying to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft.[14][15] Ballmer has described the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place."
Cut directly from wikipedia (probably one of the reasons Microsoft wanted to merge with yahoo)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Mr. Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.
Really makes you think - what happens behind the closed doors?
Ballmer: We will create a monopoly. The next version of Windows will not run any non-Microsoft software! Muwahahaha!
Gates: But that is wrong! That destroys the market!
Ballmer: What did you say to me boy!?
Gates: B-B-But that'll lower the quality of our product. W-W-We need to take care of our customers!
Ballmer: *narrows eyes* You've been reading Slashdot, haven't you boy?
Gates: N-No!
Ballmer: Don't make me use the chair on you...Have you forgotten all I've taught you?
GateS:N-No!
Ballmer: Then tell me, what matters?!
Gates: Developers?
Ballmer: Indeed. Now run along now. And if I hear any of this nonsense again, I bring out the chair.
~Jarik
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Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea of Ballmer standing on Gates' concave chest and dangle-spitting on his face until he gives in his bullying, triple-Y chromosome demands is quite amusing, but Microsoft was corrupt and hated long before Ballmer was in charge. Or does nobody remember Andrew Schulman exposing Microsoft's monopolistic abuses with "Undocumented Windows" almost 20 years ago?
Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Gates was always a total bastard of a businessman (and only marginally technical at best, just listen to anything he says, he doesn't have a clue) and I don't think you can give credit to the chair-tosser for his long reign of corporate evil.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.
Indeed, it's a myth without the slightest shred of credible evidence to back it up.
"DOS ain't done until Lotus does run" would be a more accurate reflection of reality.
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses". It is completely normal in any non-trivial piece of software.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
So Bill Gates has been held hostage at chair point.
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Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing. I have already given him enough money by paying for his OS when I want to run linux.
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Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Funny)
If you had just bought 36200 shares of MSFT stock back then for $999,844 plus a $362 commission, it would now be worth ONE MILLION DOLLARS today.
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Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Insightful)
The man should be given a Nobel Peace Prize. Windows has done more to make technology available to non-tech experts than anyone else.
The man should be given a Nobel Peace Prize. Windows has done more to make money for techies due to the unnecessary complexities imposed on non-tech experts than anyone else.
There. I corrected it for you. No you dolt. Press control X. Everyone knows that. Pay up.
I credit Windows for bringing the price of consumer hardware down, especially Vista. Just think, if Vista were not so HW-heavy would we have today Dual- and Quad- core processors and _Gigabytes_ of RAM for so cheap? People who use an OS that does not need all that (Ubuntu, for instance) can literally have a system that is four times as powerful as they need, for the same adjusted cost of what a regular system would have cost only three years ago.
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A Mac (Score:5, Funny)
(I mean, judging from Microsoft's product lines for the last twenty years, it's what he really wants...)
Retirement Gift (Score:5, Insightful)
For all my *NIX & FOSS zealotry, I can't help but respect what he's brought to the world. His & MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows
Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Insightful)
...MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows :)
I do not agree with that assumption. First off, Unix was not created because of MS and/or Windows and Linux was created as a Unix clone, not specifically to compete with windows. If the pc hardware was not around it would have been built on different hardware.
Next, even without MS, IBM would have still been looking for an OS for its new computing platform. Because it was IBM, which at the time was the de facto standard/monopoly, there still would have been a clone market even without MS's help. If the clone market did not provide enough cheap hardware, there would have been cheap hardware from either the computers running CP/M or even the home market (Amiga and/or older 8bits computers)
Linux evolved from someone's desire to clone minix, not from a need to use something other than windows.
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:4, Insightful)
Managed to fool Altair to pay them for a non-existent software at that time. Managed to buy DOS and sell it to IBM, managed to get out of an anti-trust lawsuit, managed to recover from disasters such as MS Bob, ME, etc. Basically, Gates couldn't compete with code, so he competed with a business.
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Informative)
What has Bill Gates personally achieved? Note that personally ripping off the ideas of others is not an achievement.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/ [theregister.co.uk]
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Funny)
Without that low cost of hardware Linux would not have taken off, and its extremely unlikely that as many people would have computers, internet access and slashdot accounts with which to slag off Microsoft.
So I would have had a 4-digit UID? Damn it Bill Gates!
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Last day, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Last day, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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640kb!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:640kb!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
That should be all he'll ever need.
Oh wait, You don't mind me karma-whoring off you, do you?
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The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft and proprietary software. What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
Giving any poor organization the first copy of Microsoft software for no cost isn't going to help them in the long term.
To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.
Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:4, Insightful)
What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
True. Although...
When I was a kid I used to dream of being rich and famous. As I get older the famous part gets more and more obvious as being a hassle, and the rich part gets more and more "evil"... money scraped off the backs of others and hoarded for a life of excess (well, also as I get older, mostly for hookers, blackjack, and blow).
Let's face it. There are no people who had amassed Gates' level of wealth by writing a bunch of checks and being nice people.
He did have a vision, and did contribute to some massively impressive things in computing, and got swept up in his business. A lifetime of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Setting in motion the wheels of a kind of proprietary software golem. Point being, maybe he saw that bit of The Simpsons:
"How do you sleep at night?"
"On a pile of money surrounded by beautiful women."
Thing is, if you had that much wealth and power and you grew a conscience (or at the very least it got a hand free and escaped its bindings), how would you fix it? How would you stand to the side of your parents' graves and say, "I've made you proud, and the world is a better place for you having birthed me"?
He can't tear down Microsoft. It's a beast onto it's own. All that's left is to try and compensate for some of that evil elsewhere. Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.
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Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:4, Informative)
Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.
The "Charity" is a front. It makes for-profit investments and has pledged not to review its investments for their ethical acceptability. Everything you need to know about the Gates foundation can be summed up by their response to Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation [latimes.com], an LA Times investigative article (I know, I was as shocked as you must be) which tells the story of the Gates Foundation's investment in big oil that is killing people in the places in which they claim to try to be saving them. This is my favorite paragraph:
Now, keep in mind that the Gates Foundation is not restricted to making holding investments, they are allowed to make them for profit. The profit ostensibly goes right back into charity, right? But here's the issue. As of January 2007 (when the article was published) they'd spent nearly twice as much on sucking oil out of the region (killing people in the process) than on actually helping anyone! And let's not get into what percentage of that money spent is actually applied effectively...
Bill Gates is not interested in helping anyone. Remember how the idea of a presidential bid for Gates was floated in the media? That was not a mistake. It was a test. It did not go over well; millions of the best-connected people on the planet certainly spoke their mind on the issue on every public forum they could find. Now, he is sitting on top of one of the largest fortunes on the planet, in charge of doling out money both to the greedy companies raping the land, and to help people who are being harmed by them. If you follow the money, though, you can see where priorities lie.
Gates has placed himself in a position of power which makes his former position at the top of Microsoft look like the elementary school yard bully on top of the pitcher's mound winning a game of king of the hill, and this is not a cause for celebration. He is not there to do good deeds.
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Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't you think this is a little unfair?
I mean, its obvious that most of BillG's wealth given to the foundation must have been MS stock (or some stock anyhow). Given that, the foundation will just bleed dry if they don't invest for maximum profits. And the more profitable their investments, the more impact the foundation can have.
Now owning stock in some company that does bad/evil stuff hardly makes you the perpetrator of the crime. I mean, the company is not going to behave different with/without the investment from the foundation. It makes to difference to them who actually owns their stock (unless it's a question of controlling stakes, proxy votes etc. -- and that didn't seem to be the case in the article you linked).
On top of that, it's really unfair when you say
Now, he is sitting on top of one of the largest fortunes on the planet, in charge of doling out money both to the greedy companies raping the land, and to help people who are being harmed by them.
Because again -- he did not dole out money to the company -- he has not made a loan or a gift to these companies. He's simply using the profits generated from their share price appreciation. And poetically, it goes into the people being harmed by this corporation.
I'm not sure where you got the presidential campaign thing from. And why you're so cynical about his intentions. Have you heard his Harvard speech last year?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXCVYtYWVyU [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Q1T70VwfM [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXKrQBxJViQ [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rh9Aj7WsKE [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnHkUDxfmXE [youtube.com]
And have you seen the progress being made by GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization)? They have already prevented over 2.5 million children's deaths in the third world. The Gates Foundation was an active partner in creating and funding GAVI.
When you listen to Gates talk about solving problems for people in the most wretched of conditions, you'll realize -- he's got a different and fresh perspective compared to people who have worked in this field before. He's got a lot to learn from them, but he brings unique skills to the table, and a unique problem-solving ability.
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Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Murray once observed, if you want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that's enough.
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Perfect present (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perfect present (Score:4, Informative)
It appears that he already has [slashdot.org] a few [slashdot.org] accounts here. [slashdot.org]
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Re:Perfect present (Score:5, Funny)
But no trolling, please.
What's the point if you can't troll?
Shitcock!
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I got him a charitable donation (Score:5, Funny)
Possible Retirement Gifts (Score:4, Insightful)
A nickel... (Score:4, Funny)
...so he can get himself a better computer. [tomayko.com]
Gift Card (Score:4, Funny)
The *real* question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Gates last day video (Score:5, Informative)
Obligatory Mac reply (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd get him a 20" Intel-based Apple iMac computer installed with the last version of Office (not the newest one, but one before). That way, Bill could at least see that a decent-spec'd, moderately priced yet still well-designed computer CAN actually be a pleasant experience for the overwhelming majority of normal computer users. Maybe then Bill can realize that sometimes less is more and that a long laundry list of half-assed features is no good compared to a shorter list of features that work well.
Re:I would get him. . . (Score:5, Informative)
"Taking DOS which was bought, and advancing it to Windows and then NT "
NT was a clean-room effort spearheaded by Dave Cutler who did Vax VMS; that's why NT sorta works.
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Re:I would get him. . . (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory: A Gold Watch ... (Score:5, Funny)
"... that runs Windows ..." ... ME. Enjoy your watch, Bill!
Upgrade the pain! Make it run Vista... All the gore of WinME with the added pain of UAC!
"You are trying to check the time, Allow or Deny?"
Of course, you'd need to upgrade the graphics card and memory in the watch. Oh, let's not forget more storage space. And it'll probably need a faster processor. ... Maybe a sundial is easier...
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Re:the #1 portable media player on the planet.. (Score:5, Funny)
Odd, looking at the brown Zune I could have sworn it was a number two.
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Re:What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Better yet: a 30 foot tall armour plated robot penguin that launches high explosive packed herrings while shrieking "DON'T FEAR ME!!!!" through a 10,000 watt speaker system, programmed to seek and destroy.
Seems fair...
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Re:Maybe a commodore amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Irving Gould is as responsible for the death of the Amiga as Bill Gates, maybe more so. As much as I adore my C=64, 128, Amiga 1000 and 2000 w/Toaster, Commodore never had the slightest clue as to how to market the Amiga.
In 20/20 hindsight, it was the first true multimedia machine, and could playback video at decent framerates (the DCTV add-on was truely amazing for its time), however Commodore tried to market it as a business machine. As if they had a chance of competing with IBM for that marketshare.
Only too little, too late did they make an inspired version, the CDTV (and later the CD32), which made the Amiga a component of a home entertainment system, (which only now are Microsoft and Apple trying to do), but, typical Commodore, they cheap'ed it to death, and then never threw any money at actually marketing it. As such, almost no one has ever heard of the thing.
Newtek sold more Amigas than Commodore did, by rebranding it as a 'Video Toaster System', and many of those toasters are still in use today (although to be fair, many are also being offloaded on eBay).
But to say that Bill Gates killed the Amiga is to distort history as badly as most people do when they think that Bill invented the computer. Or think that Windows is the only 'PC' there is.
(God, to think that I'm actually defending Bill Gates, a person I'd like to have shot out of a canon more than any other individual in history....) Look what you've done to me, damn you!!!
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Re:A handshake. (Score:5, Insightful)
How does this myth stay alive? There were personal computers before Bill Gates: Macs. There were personal computers during the early rise of Microsoft: Macs, OS/2, Suns. There were personal computers throughout the Bill Gates glory days: Macs, Linux, (and Suns, kinda). And there are personal computers today. And there would have been personal computers without Bill Gates.
That's not to say his contributions are worthless, but let's not start patting him too hard on the back just because he's retiring. He used questionably ethical business practices to produce and sell products of questionable quality.
On the plus side, he's going to spend the rest of his life giving away enormous sums of money to charity - there's not much to dislike about that!
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Re:A handshake. (Score:4, Insightful)
All of which were very much proprietary. The key to the low cost PC as the competition among hardware makers. Go look at Sun, Macs, and PS/2 machines (Commodore, Amiga, and Atari should probably be added to that list of yours). From that era Suns and Macs were proprietary. The moment, Macs tried to license the hardware, the company very nearly went out of business. Sun sold great, solid equipment, and could never get it even close to the price point to compete (I also am not sure they wanted to). PS/2's? That whole line died a horrible death due to the proprietary bus (Micro Channel). The PC world thrived and took when the ISA bus was king, and IBM published all of the hardware specs for 3rd party cards (and thus the hardware that specs for the bus). The PC world thrived and took off when Compaq won the landmark case allowing them to reverse engineer the IBM Bios. The PC world thrived and took off when the Microsoft negotiated the deal with IBM to sell MS-DOS that was licensed to IBM as PC-DOS. The PC world thrived and took off when Intel got competitors in Cyrix, AMD, and other hardware makers creating x86 clone chips.
It was the fact that there was stiff competition for virtually every part in a machine. It was the nasty world evil consumer that bought, cheap crappy hardware, that got the economies of scale going. If you look at the PC world, the PC used to cost $3,000 (probably $10,000, but $3K is what I paid for my first machine in '95). The competition in an open market place (read, not Mac's, not Sun, not IBM's PS/2), are what created and won virtually all of the market place. The competition eventually drove the price of a PC to under $500, all the while getting, better and better hardware. Eventually the price got low enough, that it started to add more and more features that used to be the sole purview of high end "Workstation", or "Server" class machines. There's a reason that Sun sells what is effectively, nothing more then a jumped up version of the modern day desktop machine as their entry level server. I'm here to tell you that, Bill and Co. have a place at that table of folks who were there and part of what made it happen.
Does that make Bill a good person? No (but just because that doesn't make him good, doesn't imply that he's bad). Does that mean, Bill intended this move to accomplish that? Probably not. I think Bill Gates figured out fairly early on that hardware was rapidly becoming a commodity market, and that software was the thing that people had a true affinity for. If they could run the same software on different hardware, what did they care? In the end, he was correct. Just ask Apple. There's a reason Apple nearly went out of business when somebody else undercut their hardware (both because the model was setup all wrong, and that people didn't really care about Mac the hardware, they cared about Mac the interface). Most folks couldn't care less about the iMac, the Mac Mini, the iPod, or the iPhone in the hardware. What most of them really care about is how useful and easy the software is for them to use. I have a Mac and I hate the interface. I find it counter-intuitive, but only because I don't think "if I want this and that to work together, I should drag one to the other".
Windows in all its incarnations, and all of it's vile issues. It filled in the gap that allowed the PC computers to be usable by folks who couldn't have otherwise. For that alone, Bill and Co. deserve a place in history and helping to drive the PC revolution. Would something else have filled that need? Sure, but Bill was there. Would somebody else have discovered gravity? Sure, but we give Newton credit, because he was there and did what he did. If the PC market had been left to Sun, Apple, and IBM, they'd be carving huge chunks of a smaller pie, at much higher profit margins. None of them got that if they sold crappy stuff that was just above the crappy line.
Kirby
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