I think this is a very interesting and balanced write-up of the life and times of William Henry Gates III. I still can’t believe we gave him an honoury knighthood though. 
Man bites Ogre
I think this is a very interesting and balanced write-up of the life and times of William Henry Gates III. I still can’t believe we gave him an honoury knighthood though.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I forgive Bill for one main thing : Visual Studio!
June 30th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Amen!
July 1st, 2008 at 1:54 am
Come on guys… Windows is not that bad.
You still have an option to go with Apple ( which for many people is just dream come true) but, personally all I can say, I am glad the winner was an operating system controlled by a single vendor.
I can’t imagine living in a world, say with multiple Unix OS vendors serving their own offerings, with a half-assed “source only” app compatibility and a shaky implementation of some sort of X Windows derivative ( each with its own GUI implementation , its own standards etc …)
Scary.
July 1st, 2008 at 5:14 am
Wouldn’t you of rather had a POSIX/standards based operating system reach the level of ease of use and penetration that Windows has? Did you want a one company creating “defacto” standards which stifle competition?
Linux is developed and hawked by many different vendors and its working out just fine. With a tenth of Microsoft’s resources spent polishing a typical Linux release 95% of the general users wouldn’t know the difference between it and Windows.
I also think if we had a fractured OS market with 2 or 3 big vendors and nobody having a majority, everything would of turned out better. You would see every product developed against something like wxWidgets, Java, or QT by default. That would mean that instead of people developing for one platform, they would develop against cross platforms APIs to start with. Which would give end users a much greater choice on what platform to run on.
July 1st, 2008 at 6:18 am
“Linux is developed and hawked by many different vendors and its working out just fine”
The thing is – it is not . Not in the market I am talking about ( home/office )
The way Linux works right now – it is completely useless and practically unsupportable as far as consumer/shrink-wrapped software is concerned.
There is simply no comparison – dozens of different versions of libraries, each distro having its own combo of various libraries , often one or two versions behind/ahead of other distros.
This stuff is impossible to support for a third party vendor like say, Adobe, Valve or dozen of other software houses.
“I also think if we had a fractured OS market with 2 or 3 big vendors and nobody having a majority, everything would of turned out better.”
No. They tried that in the 80s ( Commodore, Atari, PC, Apple and dozen of others) – it was a nightmare.
July 1st, 2008 at 7:14 am
I read some of the comments there, and one of them is pretty interesting
“Those that remember 2001 will recall that there was a rumour that HAL had been named because that by taking the successor letter of HAL you got: IBM. It is left as an exercise for the reader to do the same for VMS.”
July 1st, 2008 at 8:33 am
Yeah, Visual Studio has been cool, although surpassed by Eclipse now for some languages. Office was cool, but has largely stagnated in the last 7 years, upgrades mostly driven by Software Assurance and EOL policies rather than a practical desire from the user to upgrade, in my experience.
The vast majority of MS’s success has been due to the the fact that they lowered the barrier to entry for developers and system admins. This won them a ton of friends in small/medium offices that didn’t already have mainframes / mini systems and wanted to take advantage of cheap PCs. The home desktop was mostly a spin-off of that, it didn’t arise because it was the best home system necessarily (Apple led the way in usability back then too), although the cheap PC clone market fed into that because IBM made some very, very dumb business decisions (like allowing MS to keep MSDOS, and letting all and sundry copy the PS/2 design. For the record, for the first 12 months of my working life I only had a dumb terminal on my desk, and proprietary mainframe and Unix mini systems to connect to - so I did welcome getting a full PC with Windows 3.1 on it! I worked in a mixed environment of all 3 for the next 10 years although MS got more and more dominant over that time.
I think it was good in the 90s when MS was still forced to innovate against the forces of proprietary Unixdom and mainframe OS’s, but they’ve lost their way since then. Pretty much everything they’ve done in the past 6-7 years has been mostly self-interest and nothing to do with advancing the collective vision of where people want to go - or at the least things that have been a good idea (like .Net) were shackled in practice by proprietary business models. The innovative end of computing culture has moved on since the 90’s, embracing open source and standardisation, multi-platform support, service-based approaches and flexibility of deployment, while MS has been stuck in a mindset of only promoting things that further their proprietary platform. They may well be finally changing but it’s like turning a supertanker way, way too late.
Sure, if you’re a regular office user the single platform & supplier is no doubt convenient. But in a macro sense, a strategic sense, a forward-looking sense, that’s an evolutionary dead-end. MS can milk it for a while longer yet for all the conservative companies out there, but that’s not where the growth is, and it’s not where the new & exciting ideas are. The smart money for the next big thing isn’t on MS, as the article says they’re just like IBM was now, an incumbent with too many entrenched interests to be agile enough to see what comes ‘next’.
As for heterogenous environments, I’ve worked in mixed environments all my working life. It’s only a problem if you have no standards, or only proprietary de-facto standards which one vendor can change on a whim and screw you. The 80s (and 90s) were all about being proprietary, the noughties are now about having a core standardised base, and innovating out from that. Look at OS X - the core is completely standard and I can use a zillion Unix apps on it, but when it comes to the user experience, that’s where it’s been polished to a proprietary shine. You can have interoperability and innovation, despite what MS has said in the past, you just need a different approach. You can’t say that because it didn’t work in the past, it can’t work at all - times have changed, and not seeing that is exactly the mistake IBM made, and MS is making now. In the days of ever more variant devices, ubiquitous computing etc this is a key approach - you can’t just retrofit Windows onto everything under the sun and expect it to be the best solution, as MS has discovered to their chagrin.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:04 am
Balanced huh? Hmmm.
Did you see the money program the other week? I think it’s disappeared off of iPlayer now, but that was not quite so full of venom 
July 1st, 2008 at 11:08 am
I thought it was balanced, yeah - credit where credit’s due, criticisim when it’s earned. Just because it doesn’t suck up to him because he’s a billionnaire, doesn’t mean it’s venomous
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 am
If anyone saw Engadet it was pretty atrociousness in there fawning over Bill Gates.
“No. They tried that in the 80s ( Commodore, Atari, PC, Apple and dozen of others) – it was a nightmare.”
Maybe then, but now computers have many cycles to spare and there are several different, competing, ways to develop cross platform software. I don’t think it would take much more effort for a company to chose QT or Java or MFC or .NET for there next product if Windows was only 40% of the market. It would be a no brainier.
Once a new platform rose to prominence all companies using said cross platform bases would get it for “free” when Trolltech or Sun ports there platform there. So both the developer and the user would win. The developer gets a whole new customer base with little extra work, the user get the freedom to chose there OS based on its own merits.