Bill Gates has gone, what's his legacy?
This week marks another first in the 33-year history of Microsoft - life without Billg. The company and the man who co-founded it and rose to become the world's richest geek have parted ways. Bill Gates is no longer chief software architect and will be checking in only as company chairman. Gates is hailed as the visionary who …
A bit of a quote correction there; while the "noone would want a computer in their home" quote is factually true, it's also completely out of context, since the original quotee referred to the big, clunky ubercomputers with a role more reminiscent of modern-day servers than play-and-surf PCs of today.
http://snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp
I'm no Micro$haft fanboy but the most successful businesses are usually those with the best legal team. I don't condone M$'s actions but history has shown many a time that as long as you can defend yourself in court, you can lie, steal, cheat and bully your way to success and fortune.
"If there is justice in the world, his tombstone will be blue."
Best quote ever!
So when Myra Hindley is so roundly villified, it's because we all envy her?
Or is the reason why rich people aren't ever guilty of crimes because we are envious of them?
This is not envy.
Wipe your nose, there's some clag on it.
Xerox is STILL a huge company. Revenues are higher than Microsoft's.
DEC were, until Compaq bought them out (probably to kill a competitor), another huge company that had revenues bigger than MS. The DEC motherboard tech was purchased by AMD and is far more capable than the motherboard tech Intel uses. AMD have large revenues, despite Intel's leveraging.
It's not just Windows boxes; Samba servers also show up as "blue screen of death" on a Mac.
"Had it been left to companies like DEC and IBM, computing today would likely be a different, analogue, green-screen world."
Rather than the blue-screen world given to us by Microsoft :-)
Bill had vison, all right! Don't forget, Xenix was a joint SCO/Microsoft variant of Unix. All their early development until circa 1993 was done on Xenix, which is why MSDOS 2.x and later had unix-style directories. Somewhere along the line he lost his vision and sold Xenix to SCO. Now MS are chasing a Unix/Linux server market he practically gave away.
Not a bad article, but it didn't include the three words that characterise Microsoft's approach to commerce- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Bill Gates...
[looks down list]
[frowns]
I've done you before, haven't I?
"History will record Gates as a visionary. Gates was a bits and bytes man"
My arse he was. His only real programming was Altair BASIC, Gates is a business man, one of the most shrewd, cunning and ruthless ones that has ever existed, but not a visionary. He had a lucky break selling someone else's DOS to IBM, and has capitalised on it for nearly 3 decades, running rings around the competition and regulators, making a success of Microsoft's late to market, mediocre clones of true innovators products.
Microsoft has screwed over its competitors so successfully, it has taken the rise of a completely different business model of open source development, which can't be bought up and crushed, to emerge and take the running. Gates has shown no vision in the last couple of years to be able tackle this new threat.
How significant was Microsoft's contribution to the popularity of Linux?
IIRC, by the time Linux had spread outside the realms of academia MS-DOS and Windows were a common sight in offices and had perhaps started to spread into the home. I'm wondering how many people have ended up in the Linux/open source community who would never have got involved but for Microsoft's popularization and commoditization of computing.
Billy boy and co wrote Amiga BASIC for the Amiga, and god damn it was awful! It made lots of Amiga users glad they never developed virtually anything else for the platform!
of Little Billy Gates is yet to come.
In the meantime, for Microsoft, he's left Steve 'Get Me Out Of This Straitjacket' Ballmer.
But to come ... The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ...
EUGENICS!
And you thought Hitler, Himmler and crew were baaaaaaaad!
Paris, because she knows a knob when she sees one.
Re. post "Ctrl-Alt-Del and Unix" 1st July 2008 02:45 GMT: The segmented mode you refer to was part and parcel of the Intel 8086 architecture.
The AX, BX, CX and DX registers were 16-bit (range 0-FFFF). To access the full 640K memory range you had to augment memory references with the DS (data segment) and ES (extra segment) registers. The DS register specified the default current segment, so that an assembler command such as MOV WORD PTR [BX],4 was essentially short-hand for MOV WORD PTR DS:[BX],4.
This was nothing to do with MS-DOS per se. If Unix managed to implement a flat memory model on the 8086 I guess it would have done so by abstracting the model away from the implementation details. But on an 8086, even Unix had to cope with the underlying segmented model, however good a job it did of hiding it from programmers.
If anybody actually believes Bill Gates will back out of Microsoft's business, well, I have some great "waterfront" property in Florida I'll sell you. I'll even throw in, at a reduced price, several bridges in large US cities I happen to have for sale also.
BILL GATES WAS NEVER A HIPPY.
Do me a favour, that's close to slander that is.
I spent years growing my hair, not washing and using Linux and this is what I get for it?
To be likened to greatest breadhead that ever lived?
Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm - I am calm.
Its Ken Olsen NOT Olson. He is important enough to the history of computing to get his name right!
As for the implication that DEC didn't much care about software: there is virtualy nothing in a modern OS which doesn't owe something to DEC. Even the BS which Microsoft was shovelling by the bucketload as "operating systems" in the 80's and early 90's only came good when a team from DEC finally developed the NT kernel.
Disclosure: I'm an ex Digit and DECUS librarian.
The PC revolution happened despite, not because of, MS.
We all remember Marc Andreessen, yes? And the Mosaic Killa? Just imagine if Web 2.0 had arrived 10 years ago. As it should have.
"It's not just Windows boxes; Samba servers also show up as "blue screen of death" on a Mac."
Well, Samba was meant to be Windows Compatible..!
Actually another point to make about MS's success and technological progress. A large fraction of the the success of Windows comes from continual performance improvements that allowed the PC to overtake workstations. Think back to the late 80's and early 90's. The performance difference between an x86 PC of the time and say an SPARC or MIPS (let alone and Alpha) based machine was extraordinary. The PC was just not in the hunt. People paid the premium for the workstation for good reason. But as we know, the steamroller that was Wintel overtook the workstations.
And I still remember playing with a Xerox workstation in the early 80's. It had really good ideas, usability, and integration features that are still missing from the current crop of OSs. They really could have owned it all.
There is no doubt that the face of computing would have been different without Bill, but I very much doubt that it would be any less advanced. The market needed a unifying OS to emerge. Whoever gained control of that would have done exactly what MS did.
It was luck that put Bill and MS where they are, the cards could have fallen many other ways. But imagine if the cards had fallen the way of Apple or Sun. Does anyone really think that Steve or Scott would have been any less of a total bastard? Compared to those guys Bill is probably a bit of a pussycat.
The legacy is plain for all to see: the primordial origins of a true 64bit operating system; still heavily reliant on 32 bit extensions for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't handle 1 bit of competition.
PS - Dearly looking forward to painting his gravestone blue.
Which was NOTHING to do with Moore's law meaning that computers would get faster? It was all in software...
Sheesh, that's not even *rose* tinted spectacles!
Of course it will - with his sort of money, he'll make damn sure it does!
All the failures, all the unethical business practices, all the fumbled opportunities, all the lack of vision... that will all be buried and conveniently forgotten.
What 'date bug'? It never happened...
What 'stupidly low memory limit? Nope, never happened...
What 'duhhhh? Interweb? Wot's that? Nope, never happened...
What 'crap OSs (ME, Vista)? Nope, never happened...
That last, well, in a way, it never DID - that's the point though :-)
In a couple of years history will be convoluted so that St. William really DID walk on water.
It's kind of sad though. Because very few people will really care... He's... history.
True or false, who really cares?
That would be the ICL "One Per Desk" then. Conceived in 1981, launched in 1984.
The earliest reference to Billyboy is 1985.
I'm gone already :-)
Sure, lie, cheat and steal your way to the top and hire a good lawyer to cover your ass. It's the American Way after all. I get that.
Doesn't mean we all have to sanctify the bastards who are doing it as "visionaries" and place them up on a pedestal. He's got his money, he doesn't deserve accolades as well
>> "Billy boy and co wrote Amiga BASIC for the Amiga, and god damn it was awful! It made lots of Amiga users glad they never developed virtually anything else for the platform!"
That brings back painful memories. Gates' BASIC made my first computer, a Dragon 32, a laughing stock with the contemporary technology press. At the time I thought that they were just being rather mean spirited towards the Welsh wonder, but the inevitable reality gradually dawned that it was indeed encumbered by a spectacularly crap version of the language compared to many of the other pre-IBM PC home computers. My realisation that Microsoft's products tended not to live up to the hype was a lesson learnt the hard way.
>> "DEC were, until Compaq bought them out (probably to kill a competitor), another huge company that had revenues bigger than MS."
DEC fell victim not to Compaq's taste for acquisitions, but inept management: after the board inexplicably (or at least too hastily) replaced Olsen with the visionless Palmer, the only way was down. Very sad, really, a lot of good technology sunk with it, but they were too busy with in-fighting and endless reorganisations to bother with apparently tedious irrelevances like customers. Who, ironically, were often lining up to buy their stuff only to find that they couldn't even beg DEC to sell it to them under Palmer's regime.
Being a public figure means you can't write your own epitaph. The various stories about Bill Gates--such as the whole Xerox Parc episode, or Seattle Computer Products and 86-DOS, have been repeated so often they've become canon, regardless of whatever may really have transpired.
When the dust is settled and the emotions die down is when things start to take perspective; the trouble is that perspective is rarely an objective lens of truth. Instead, it's all the things people have accepted as correct, with the occasional episode of enlightenment.
I doubt we'll see Bill Gates remembered as a leader or iconic visionary, what I think is more likely to happen is this plain vanilla geek who everyone seemed to hate but no one really knew will just slip gradually into obscurity. Don't think so--anyone know the the founding father of IBM off the top of their head? Eventually, all people will ever really remember is Microsoft.
Yeah, that was actually what I was trying to say, but it didn't come out as well as I might have liked. MS rode Moore's law. Not just to make their bloatware runnable, but, in a way that might have been harder to predict, Moore's law meant that the PC technologically outran the higher end machines, so in an unusual way, the low end outgrew the mid and high end. MS were there riding that wave. So when the PC had credible performance, they were the default OS on everything.
"Microsoft has screwed over its competitors so successfully, it has taken the rise of a completely different business model of open source development, which can't be bought up and crushed, to emerge and take the running. Gates has shown no vision in the last couple of years to be able tackle this new threat.".... By druck Posted Tuesday 1st July 2008 09:46 GMT
A mirror of Uncle Sam's Administration, both at home and abroad ..... and now in catastrophic decline/meltdown?
A Change of Game with Open Source, Virtualised Operating Systems Network InterNetworking in Cloud Strata contains and nurtures the NXXXXT* Generation for Global Command and Control? And Just Simply Perfect for Python and all of ITS Iterations of IT.
And its AIMazing Saving Grace/Perfect Security Configuration? Oh, that is remarkably Simple too. ITs Use of Future Memory for Novel SurReal Application of ProgramMIng .... Media Initiation.
Feed Media with AI and a Novel Picture and they will Paint a NeuReal AI Picture in whatever Phorm they would wish to share.
If one considers the Present Programming, one would have to conclude that their Sources are, at best, Sub-Prime, and probably a great deal worse than that ...... for they Pimp unashamedly for War and Terror .... which is Real Dumb in a SMARTer World which is so Easily Virtualised into Alternate Realities.
And if you can't Virtualise Globally, it doesn't really matter, because you don't need to whenever it can be so easily done for you by Virtual Machinery which Shares the Bigger Pictures with you, through Media Channels, for Viewing/Comprehension/Comment/Feedback/Input.
Comprendez, El Reg?
* amfM NEUKlearer XXXX Technologies for Crystal Clear Reception ..... which is nothing like the Present with its Current in Presidential Deceptions.
And the Alien because ..... well, the Future is Foreign to All if IT is not Transparently Shared.
