Who hates Bill Gates?

[perlone]

If you do, why? I've seen 0 problems from him. ----------------------------------------
There is no Knowledge, That is not power.

Yes, i'm a MySQL Newbie.
Age: 16
E-mail: projectnet01@cs.com
Companynot done yet)
-Aaron
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[kerpow]

It is the way that Microsoft conduct themselves as a business that annoys most people. I think it would be fair to say that they often copy their competitions ideas and then bury them. Examples are Windows 95 - Mac OS, Internet Explorer - Netscape Navigator, Windows NT - Novell Netware etc. etc. Microsoft are too larger a company and should be broken down like AT&T.

 

[pivan]

kerpow...
cleans up the market by eliminating the marginal producers that have good products. If not now, when?
If not here, where?
If not us, who?

Just do it!!

 

[Beesknees]

I think MS have an arrogant attitude but with good reason. At least with a large company the IT industry has standards and MS has made it possible for ordinary blokes like me to become programmers. I thank MS and if a little arrogance is the price to pay then so be it.

 

[MasterRacker]

Exactly to both pivan and markbeeson. Marginal products need to be "bundled" through sonsolidation to make them truly useful by tacking them to a "standard". Standards is what it is all about. IT wouldn't be what it is today without the 90% penetration MS has that has spread a "standard". Without that standard, there's be a lot fewer of us because comnputing would be a LOT more expensive, because everything would have to be custom coded in every shop.


Jeff

I haven't lost my mind - I know it's backed up on tape somewhere ....

 

[Kspade]

erven tho they do use several ilegal methods to accomplish their goals, and yes crus anyone smaller than them that may now be in their way, or might be some day. uh, yea, uh go M$, uh, hoorah...? I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every moment of it.

 

[GeckoAPA]

everyone hates bill gates, because he is rich - If you were that rich, would you care? i know i wouldn't! (and who said money cant buy you friends? if bill gates gave me a million or 2, i'd be his besd friend, so come on bill....)

 

[Guest_imported]

If it wasn't for Billy most of us wouldn't have a job in the IT field. What it comes down to is home users, and if it weren't for Bill we might have millions of internet users instead of billions, therefore the internet would only be a fraction of the size it is today, there superlarge companies wouldn't be interested, therefore no investment dollars. Bill got the ball rolling, abd he'll keep it rolling.

And nobody would have had the balls or the down and dirty business tactics to get this industry moving. Think of it this way, if you had a company, you would want this guy working for you.

PS: Al Gore DID NOT invent the internet.

 

[rycamor]

I don't quite buy that.

America is the kind of country where someone is always ready to take the reins and get things moving. Just take a look at all the innovations Microsoft has suppressed!

The sad fact is that the best computer designs didn't make it, and the most slapped-together, haphazardly-done operating system became the volume winner. This is partly a result of perfectly acceptable business tactics but also combined with some very dirty tactics. There was an in-house phrase, back in the early 90s: "Windows isn't done, until Lotus doesn't run.". You think those bugs in Windows are just from programming mistakes? No, many of these bugs are results and side-effects of Microsoft's attempts to make competing software look bad. This is an established, documented fact.

OK, so I as a Libertarian, agree that a company has a right to do what it wants with its own software. The thing that really kills me is that it is always the end user who suffers the most. No other industry could get away with so regularly screwing the customer!

Yes, Microsoft's buggy software has brought the IT industry many jobs, many of these undeserving. Why should a user be forced to continually seek technical help to keep standard desktop applications running properly? This is a joke, but it happens every day, in companies all around the world.

But in the end, when inefficiency is built into an economy, the economy as a whole suffers sooner or later. Perhaps the past couple years has been evidence of that (and who know what is to come). Most of these wonderful jobs you mention above are not involved in doing positive things, such as developing new ideas, or making a smoother computing environment, but simply in chasing down bugs, fixing mistakes and stupid incompatibilities, etc... How many MCSE consultants spend half their time installing pre-made patches from Microsoft, and billing the end client $125/hr for that wonderful service? Too many. How many billions have been spent around the world just dealing with the cleanup from Outlook's ridiculous vulnerabilities?

All this comes at a cost. Sometimes this is called the "hidden cost of computing", and guess which company in Redmond, WA is the biggest offender. To say that the computing industry would be further behind without Microsoft is assuming too much. I think, if anything, the computing industry would have progressed much faster without Microsoft. All of Microsoft's wonderful innovations are simply window dressing on ideas that were initiated 30 or 40 years ago, by much greater minds.

I'm not saying Linux is the answer, or FreeBSD, or Mac. I'm saying the customer is the real answer. An educated customer should be asking, "Why should I pay all this money for software, when I (according to the EULA) have absolutely NO legal recourse if this software ruins my business?"

I'm saying that we as the customer should demand that our software be made according to publicly agreed upon good standards of computing, such as those determined by ECMA, IEEE, W3C, etc... so that we can have good interoperability, instead of being forced into a "one size fits all" solution. We have been so blinded by Bill's salesmanship that we don't see how much better things could be.

 

[Guest_imported]

I respect that reply rycamor. You have some very good points, but I'm still not convinced that somebody else would have taken the industry this far. I'm currently a MCSE Systems Administrator, working with 2k Servers, RedHat, BSD, Sendmail, and Lotus Domino, and sometimes support workstations and desktops of home users. The only reason I mention them is because without those Home users and workstation end users I probably wouldn't be running my servers because nobody would be coming to my sites. And without Microsoft I don't think we would have home usage like we do today. Get my drift?

I may be wrong, who knows?

 

[rycamor]

Home usage? I guess I am a little older than most members of this forum. I still remember those crazy days of Commodore Amiga, Atari, etc... Each of these in some way had a more integrated, better planned approach to desktop computing. Amiga managed to pack a color desktop, drag-n-drop mouse operations, graphical file management, etc... into 256K (yes, Kilobytes!) of RAM, long before Microsoft ever got Windows into a useable state. Even into the 90s the Atari ST was the most popular home computer in many parts of Europe. Microsoft was originally a software developer, and they did that well. They never really did as well, technically, at developing an OS, but since they provided the majority of mass-used software, they managed to push people into trusting their OS.

But in a Microsoft-less world, there would not have been a vacuum. The fact is, that there was a serious demand for home computing, starting in the 80s, and there were literally hundreds of companies vying for dominance in that market. IBM could have won it hands-down, if they hadn't been so foolish in their early dealings with Microsoft. Ditto with Apple. Before this, Xerox corporation had the chance. At every step, there was someone ready to fill the position. It just happened to be Microsoft by virtue of their hard-dealing business abilities, but really, they only won by a small margin at the beginning. So it really could have been another company.

The computing world could have gone in a thousand different directions. Most people nowadays think that the only two desktop choices are Windows and Mac, and that the only server choices are Windows and Linux. Even now, there is an amazing number of choices, such as BEOS (

http://www.be.com),

or AtheOS (

http://www.atheos.cx),

Amiga (yes, still out there, at

http://www.amiga.com)

and probably a hundred others.

Maybe you're right. I do agree, that (probably) no other company would have done things the same way Microsoft did. My point is that it would have been something, and possibly that something would have been better than what we have now, maybe involving more than one company, maybe with much better cross-platform abilities.

I also am not saying that everything Microsoft does is trash, (see my comments in this forum:

http://forums.devshed.com/showthread.php?threadid=23038&forumid=34).

And I am not putting down MCSE's in general. I know some very capable, productive MS developers, but I think you know the type I was referring to above... ;-).

 

[Guest_imported]

Many good points again rycamor.

One other thing that I think got Microsoft were it is today is the fact that they took most of Apples Ideas and developed an OS that could run on IBM comptible computers. I think this was the most important step they took becouse now they were able to make deals with the Chinese, who then began producing mass quanties of IBM comptible PC's with Dos and later Windows already installed.

I say that this is probably one of the most important steps they took becouse as you know, once China starts producing it's now bigtime, the market is flooded, and the products are more affordable.

And I do agree that IBM and Xerox both made terrible mistakes. But at the time the heads of both these companies were completely uninterested in PC's, it was only small teams within the companies that held on to the "Personal Computer" idea. Who knows how long the CEO's would have held back development.

PS: This has been fun, and yes XP is really cool. It also seems to be very stable, even more stable then Win 2000 (wich I love).

 

[rycamor]

Yes, it has been a fun conversation. One thing I will give Bill & Co. credit for is having the guts to take chances, at times even risking everything. This is my biggest complaint with all these other vendors that often had better technology, but were just never willing to take a risk. (see

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20011101.html)

As Robert Cringely says, Apple could have won the desktop computing war hands down, if they had only ported MacOS to x86, and gotten out of the hardware business.

And later, Be, Inc... developed what I consider to be possibly the best desktop computing environment ever (BEOS), but they decided against directly competing against Microsoft (Their Pres. was even quoted as calling it "suicide&quot. So instead they gave up on the desktop market, and went after embedded computing. Ho hum...

So yeah, many of these other guys had their chance and blew it. They got what they deserved, to a certain extent.

A side note: Infoworld has done a study claiming that WinXP actually doesn't perform as well as Win2000:

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/10/29/011029tcwinxp.xml

. All that fuss now turns out to be essentially over some eye candy? (lol)