Microsoft investors push for Bill Gates defenestration: report Three Microsoft investors that collectively own more than five per cent of the company are lobbying to fire founder Bill Gates from his role as Chairman. The Reuters report containing the news doesn't name the investors but says they are worried that Gates' influence as Chairman is disproportionate to his current 4.5 per cent …
It 'just worked'? You obviously never had the joys of editing config.sys and autoexec.bat, struggling with arcane incantations to put certain drivers into the 'high memory area' so enough 'real memory' remained for DOS apps, fiddling with IRQ assignments to get your Soundblaster card to work, the CD driver to load, the extended memory service (or was it expanded.. hmm...). It was complete and utter bollocks.
" the only drivers being those on the disk, it was an interesting time trying to turn it into somehting resembling a useful machine"
Amen, brother. I had an even worse time when I said "enough with the speculation!" and obtained a copy of Red Hat 4.2 around the same time period.
Step 1) Erase machine's NT4 OS.
Step 2) Load DOS. The real one, a windows command window will not do. Answers to "where the fuck do I find a copy of DOS in this day and age?" were met with shrugs from the years out-of-touch-with-the-real-world RH tech support drones.
Step 3) Create bootable floppies.
Step 4) Boot from floppy and stare at "Error" message. That's all, just "Error".
Step 5) Download fix from -A-s-s- Red Hat. Answers to "How do I do that since I erased my internet capability with windows in Step 1?" were met with shrugs.
(several steps omitted)
Step 74) Run Linux to general "meh" when compared to NT4 running on equivalent machine.
Conclusion: It took longer to install, longer to configure, longer to understand and couldn't run any of our required applications. The GUI looked pretty and did nothing. Pretty much the definition of non-starter.
I've never used Red Hat but I was two years behind you with SuSE 6.1 and KDE 1.something
And it had all the drivers, and almost everything else, on 6 CD ROMS
It was a bit bling lite but hey have you seen KDE 4.11.2?
The only grief I ever really got (save for jumping to KDE 4.0 too early) was waiting for people cleverer than me to sort out handing CD ROM drives. The Mandrake team delivered that IIRC.
"I've never used Red Hat but I was two years behind you"
Well, those two years were a hive of innovation and expansion in the Linux world.
And in those two years saw a most significant shift in the politics of selling Linux to the world: the quiet death of the "runs on old kit" mantra (not before time).
It would be more than a decade before people stopped saying "people won't use Linux because they are stupid", started seriously looking at what non-programmer people wanted from a system and started delivering it though.
I attended a very memorable Suse 10 presentation which featured a lead tech talking endlessly about Blue Screens (until yours truly stopped him and asked for a show of hands for those who'd actually seen such a thing in the last five years), who then went on to describe features added to OpenOffice in such terms it was clear he and the teams involved had no connect with their potential customer base.
He was dismissively unaware that the world used pivot tables as a vital sales tool for example, and could not see any point in adding digital camera support to a workstation even though Madison Avenue and Times Square were only a few miles distant.
The disconnect with the actual state and needs of the current world of application IT in the enterprise was astounding. Either that, or I guess Novell could afford to not have sales departments, newspapers and magazines included in their customer base.
I'm curious to know why you erased NT4. Could you not create the boot floppies by booting DOS from a floppy? And why did you not back up NT4 or at least partition the hard drive and put RH on the clean partition?
I don't know about you, but perhaps the second thing I was taught, a bit after how to use the write tab on a floppy to prevent future pain, was "Never delete a working OS beyond recovery before trying to install a new one".
"I'm curious to know why you erased NT4. "
Because the Red Hat instructions said to do that. Part of the experiment was to test the assertion "Red Hat 4.2 is easier to install than NT4". Test failed. Spectacularly.
"Could you not create the boot floppies by booting DOS from a floppy? "
So you didn't pick up the lack of availability of DOS in the enterprise in any way, shape or form from my "where the fuck do I find a copy of DOS in this day and age?" question then? DOS was several years obsolete and why would any enterprise solidly using NT4 keep a copy? You didn't need it to load NT. It hadn't shipped with a Microsoft OS since forever. Even Windows 95 didn't require a DOS machine to start from for Torvald's sake.
"And why did you not back up NT4 or at least partition the hard drive and put RH on the clean partition?"
Government kit with very small hard drive, less than half a gig. AKA Your Tax Dollars At Work.
"I don't know about you, but perhaps the second thing I was taught, a bit after how to use the write tab on a floppy to prevent future pain, was "Never delete a working OS beyond recovery before trying to install a new one"."
Well thanks for the vote of incompetence but the very first thing I learned was "never experiment on kit you care about", a lesson some of my younger colleagues are forever learning and forgetting it seems.
The whole point of the exercise was to put the widely held and disseminated at the drop of a (Red) hat common wisdom of the day - that Red Hat Linux was easier all round than NT4 to install configure manage and cope with and that it would run on old as in obsolete kit just fine thank you very much - to the test and hold its feet to the fire.
As it turned out the people singing up Red Hat Linux 4.2 in that way were as full of snot as I thought they would turn out to be, and the showing Red Hat Linux 4.2 gave under the most favorable conditions - while still cleaving to the "old kit" mandate - was so appalling that the fire never got lit.
The installation was a nightmare that required the removal of the computer case in order to read chipset stampings to achieve, there being no self-discovery involved, the driver set was incomplete when it was all done, the desktop was wallpaper with none of the embedded functionality that was the point of the NT4 GUI, and the computer ran so slowly as to be useless.
And lets not forget that the installation could not be performed off the CD anyway since the bootable floppy images it shipped with were broken in a fundamental and stupidly avoidable way. That alone spoke volumes about the professionalism of the RH crew responsible, who apparently weren't familiar at that point in time with the "test *then* ship" rule.
I could give the NT4 install discs to the interns and have them install it on the very same obsolete kit and not have any qualms that they'd have a desktop up and ready for me to look at inside three hours, and that the computer would enable the people in that office to do the work they were actually paid to do rather than effing about with the OS trying to get it to do *its* job.
In those days I built mainframe operating systems for a living and I found the Red Hat installation a pile of foetid dingo's kidneys to put it as politely as I can. Your mileage might have varied, but after comparing notes with people who actually tried out the same installation in their enterprises I would put real money on it not doing so.
Which is not to say that the current version is not a fine product when matched to modern, up-to-date hardware.
It's the end of Microsoft.
Microsoft is Gates, Gates is Microsoft. (And Ballmer)
I have been saying this for years, the only reason MS got that big is that Gates was one of the few CEO/CTO/Director of a big IT company at the time who knew about IT and Computing.
He's always being a botcher at things, but knew enough to make sensible decisions at the right time.
He and Ballmer are Microsoft.
If they will get rid of him (probably not) Microsoft will then be a very different company, one that I hope will just fade away quietly within a couple of decades.
"incalculable change, most of it for the good"
Incalculable is a bad word for investors, and good means nothing; all that matters for investors -- and what matters LEGALLY, for a publicly traded firm, is investor ROI.
If a firm, to do good, takes a lower profit, stockholders can fire its management. Stockholders can take company officers to court for neglect of their fiduciary responsibility.
Good? All we want is not getting caught locking schoolkids up in the factory. And our money.
When Gill Bates left, Microsoft turned a corner. Windows started to need fewer resources to run, there was a reduction in FUD and the company became more open to work with others.
Gates was (and som say he stillo is) a snake in the grass, a manipulative slime ball, a heartless automaton who would rather cheat than accept any facts, not only in business. It's because of this, I still suspect his motives now, particularly as he has said that he wants to cut down the number of people on the planet by making his vaccines more accessible.
Microsoft isn't perfect, but without Bill's influence it has become a lot more forward and outward looking.
The biggest difference between Gates and Ballmer is that, for all his faults and foibles, Ballmer can at least feel.
Maybe Ballmer is the Wozniak to Gates' Jobs?
amigas were great. remeber the amiga vs Atari ST fanboy crap that used to go on?? st's were better at sound if i recall correctly.
i had an amiga. therefore they were better.
things dont really change....
but lets not pretend that amiga's were going to rule the world. they were great for games though. my absolute favourite was a car racing game that had rollercoasters in it. cant remember what it was called. stunt car racer or something? you could network it with another amiga with a null modem cable. absolutely fab.
While the vision of Bill Gates of having "a PC in every home" was basically realized, the methods employed to bring about this reality do not enhance any thought of Bill Gates and company as great technology innovators, particularly since a significant proportion of the company's technology was copied, secunded by devious and draconian business practices and spurious litigation against weaker financially insecure rivals - according to dozens of nationally and internationally respected technologists and from most every credible technology organization and publication.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web in the twenty first century has caught them with their pants down and now are in an always catch up mode, as the company has little or no substantive experience and/or expertise in these areas of technology that today govern every aspect of our lives.
Good luck to Steve Ballmer's successor, in trying to turn a presently very rich but cumbersome and outdated pig's ear into a silk purse.
"Microsoft may have made many a mis-step but the company's audacious early goal of putting a PC into every home came to fruition, bringing with it incalculable change, most of it for the good."
"Microsoft may have made many a mis-step" Yes, that's certainly right.
"the company's audacious early goal of putting a PC into every home came to fruition"
Home computing would have come in without that man anyway, I had years of enjoyment and use of "home" computers before IBM PC and the severely crippled M$ software came limping along (remember 640K memory? More than enough apparently!)
I also used acoustic couplers and normal 'phone lines on main frames between universities to communicate before Gates even knew that a PC could talk to another PC.
His attitude towards software -and making money- crippled computer adoption and innovation for decades.
Ask where the smart money is now. Linux anyone? Without that, no internet (check the servers, Google Facebook, etc.,) Linux (Android)? Really smart 'phones without the (again) crippling handicap of another "control freak and computing Messiah" ( the "I" in the name tells you all you need to know about him).
How many other examples does one need to realise that Gates was a one shot wonder, whose one shot made enough money to buy in everything M$ wasn't smart enough to have developed itself. The "Internet" anyone?
Where are the M$ "innovations" of the last twenty years? Sorry, is there an example of one they didn't buy in?
"most of it for the good."
I would like to see you prove that contention!
Sweet dreams...
Well, although the internet was there it was the blossoming of the World Wide Web, a graphically driven environment as opposed to the glorified man pages it was up until the early nineties, that really started the explosion in the IT industry.
And that was fueled entirely by an explosion of new users using the easy-to-understand Windows 95 GUI and gleefully following Microsoft in the dance to make the WWW part of their lives by the simple expedient of showing it off as a way to add an upgrade path for software.
Microsoft seized the initiative in the browser wars too, and pushed the whole thing forward at a very much accelerated pace. In a very real sense the WWW came about because of Microsoft, not in spite of it.
As for "the time being right", well, many point to Unix having had X windows for two decades before MS hit the bricks, but in all that time what was done with it? It remained a way to open multiple consoles and little else.
No inexpensive computers running the hated MS operating systems means no IT industry pushing products, both good and bad, out for them. That industry puts a lot of food on a lot of tables in one way or another. No popular usage of the WWW means no iPad, for example. I honestly doubt that Apple would have created the infrastructure for such a thing on their own. Their focus was on the machine in your house.
The MS innovation I think probably having the most impact is the idea that ordinary people needed affordable computers for doing stuff other than computer oriented jobs.
The next most innovative thing must be the context sensitive menus that bloomed all over Windows 95, enabling the user to self-educate because it had a "I know what I want to do, I just don't know how to do it yet" approach. The wisdom of the day was that if you didn't understand how the OS worked you had no business owning a computer - a laughable premise. And before you start in on me about Apple, I've had my hands on the Rolls Royce of contemporary Apple kit and can tell the world it was about as user friendly as Tax Instructions - three separate help libraries that had no cross integration.
Next up was the idea of plug and play. No longer did you need to be an expert in computer innards to install an external peripheral or internal expansion card. It took a few tries to get it working seamlessly, but WIn 95 and Lexmark managed a seamless, painless printer install experience for me in mid '96, the days when Apple were putting out ads suggesting a printer install on a PC involved dismantling the machine. Ask your Apple user of the day if they could install and configure an extra SCSI card for a comparable experience.
Next up would be the suite of products that eventually coalesced into Visual Studio (and then got nerfed but that is the Way Of Things) and which was so successful as a RAD tool the world plus dog was trying to emulate it in their own tools (Cafe, enyone?) or get in on the action by providing third party plug-ins for VS.
And I can make a very strong argument that MS created the very atmosphere that ushered in the usable Linux desktop, the Shangri-La goal of the OS community, by exploding the potential market for such a thing.
I could go on, but there's no point, really. You come across to me as one of that community who hate Microsoft and cannot see round the red haze that envelopes them at the mention of the name. That's your right.
It's true MS play dirty pool at times, but they learned to do that early on with the experience they had launching Word against Wordperfect, the WP market leader of the day. If you grant them nothing else you have to give them kudos as fast learners.
The fact is that for all Microsoft's products being of questionable quality from a technical standpoint, from a user experience one they set the bar for most of the late part of the 90s and the early oughties. To chant that people only like their stuff because they are stupid is to tread water and achieve nothing, progress-wise, in the fight to wrest the IT world away from them in the new millennium (something I heartily support in principle).
This takes me back to the days I was working for a bleeding edge MS partner on the Beltway. We had two departments: Apps and R&D. The R&D people were enraged that the apps group used Visual Basic to craft front end interfaces to our (mainframe hosted) product instead of Visual C. They used the latter for purist reasons.
Apps used VB because they could make easy to understand and use front ends in sparrow's fart time, impressing the bejayzuz out of our customers and freeing up essential time to discover what they'd forgotten to tell us vis-à-vis requirements. Saved us person days of false starts and freed up scarce technician resources for the real work, but the R&D people hated VB on principle and couldn't wind their heads around the idea that it was a profit game.
It really gets my goat when all I hear is a panning of Bill gates/MS. Every one always wants to bash the the person those who succeed. Whilst I will not claim that any version of Windows was perfect, far from it. What they did do however was make the PC approachable to the home user. It is because they were able to speed up the penetration of the PC into the home market, that we had the huge developments within the rest of the industry.
Most of you are only looking at this from your own view, as someone who is highly computer literate. Someone who is capable and prepared to tit around with a Linux set up. Your average Joe Bloggs of the street would have never been able to cope with even the current Linux set ups, let alone those of 20 years ago.
Microsoft driven by Bill Gates attempted to bring standardisation to a fledgling industry. With out that I dread to think what we would have ended up with. We saw the mess that transpired when standardisation was left to the hardware producers, when it came to VCR's. I would guess we would have ended up with each electronic giant wanting to have there own propitiatory system.
That really would have held up development.
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