Newsweek Interview of Bill Gates

I just finished reading Newsweek's interview of Bill Gates over at MSNBC.com about the release of Vista. It was funny how defensive Gates became whenever Steven Levy brought up Mac OS X (although not mentioned by name), or Apple. My favorite part is when Levy says to Gates, "In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system".

Microsoft really painted themselves in a corner with Vista, because one of the first things people notice is how they copied Aqua from Mac OS X. My brother is employed as a computer repair tech, & I laughed the other night when he refered to Vista's theme as Aqua. Even if Gates refuses to accept that some of Mac OS X's features have been copied in Windows, most people can easily see where it has. You can find the Newsweek interview here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek/

I particularly like the implication that Mac copied the interface from Windows! Talk about rewriting history!

I liked the interview. I thought the reporter asked some pretty fair questions, and I don't really have anything negative to say about Bill's answers. He's in charge of a multi-billion dollar corporation, he's granted a little defensive leeway when it comes to challenging his entire business strategy. Over all, I think the next few years could be exciting as the major players are all vying to wow us as consumers with the next big thing.

PapaNoHair said:

I particularly like the implication that Mac copied the interface from Windows! Talk about rewriting history!

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It's not just Bill who does this. Living in Seattle, I (obviously) know plenty of people who work at Microsoft, and a few of them are on the Vista team. One of them refuses to accept that anything else is useful (I saw a copy of BeOS on his shelf and when I asked about it, his response was, "well, it's not a Microsoft operating system..." 'nuff said). When he discounted Apple, I rebuffed by saying that Microsoft needed Apple for their R&D. He then proceeded to talk about how Spotlight was stolen from Microsoft because the announced it before Apple did (we all know how notoriously quiet Apple is about feature announcements).

I worked out at Microsoft myself for a short, nightmareish time. I remember sitting in meetings where we discussed problem solving, and the attitude was always, "now what Microsoft product can we use to solve this problem?"

I remember one particular meeting where they wanted to analyze some IIS server logs. They wanted a team of several people and several weeks to develop and test some code in Visual Studio. I told them, "let me install a copy of Perl on my box, and I'll have something ready for you in three days." All I got was a bunch of blank stares. You can guess which so-called solution they went with.

Talk about your "reality distortion field"

I saw this news item earlier today - the thing that got me was this:

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

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Is the part in Red true? about the ability to completely take over a Mac and that these 'holes' appear pretty frequently?

RNDdave said:

Is the part in Red true? about the ability to completely take over a Mac and that these 'holes' appear pretty frequently?

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No, not one bit at all. Those are simply the ramblings of a man who has completely lost his mind and is undoubtedly out of touch with reality.

when i read that part in red, i almost bursted out laughing at is stupidity. it might be a good thing for microsoft that he is leaving (not that i like microsoft or anything)

D3v1L80Y said:

No, not one bit at all. Those are simply the ramblings of a man who has completely lost his mind and is undoubtedly out of touch with reality.

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kman445 said:

when i read that part in red, i almost bursted out laughing at is stupidity. it might be a good thing for microsoft that he is leaving (not that i like microsoft or anything)

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That is almost a relief - I don't want to be buying more of a risk than I already own - however your answers did not come as a huge shock - I thought I would have heard about these 'problems' especially if they were a daily occurrence.

Thanks for reassuring me though

This was my favorite part:

And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

I mean, can't you just hear the 13-year-old nerd who gets beat up every day in the lunch line?

kman445 said:

when i read that part in red, i almost bursted out laughing at is stupidity. it might be a good thing for microsoft that he is leaving (not that i like microsoft or anything)

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He's talking about THIS. In essence, he was not lying as they were coming up with new stuff daily. What he fails to tell you is that Apple was told about all of them and is likely to fix any that pose a serious risk, much more likely that MS would be. No will do this to a Windows machine because a month is not long enough to even start finding the serious bugs.