Bill Gates Retires This Friday

So Mr Microsoft (Bill Gates) Has decided to step down from his Mulit-Billion Dollar Empire and Officially Retire this Coming Friday, Afte a Career Spanning 33 Year years with his School friend, Love Him or Hate Him, Bill has given Nearly everyone something that once seemed Impossible, (The Internet)

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=584374

 

Why should anybody care?

 

Looking at the past, despite MS's reputation of being anticompetitive, it did popularize the home PC.

Looking at the future, Ray Ozzie will have greater control and create a more open MS, adhering to open standards rather than creating closed propritory standards (take MS opening their office document standard for example).

 

Being squashed by Mr. Gates so his interests (money, etc.) are protected...

The issue brought up here is Gates, not Microsoft. But as long as you changed the subject slightly, I would wager that they would just as soon do the opposite of what you say is their future if the situation ever changed again to their advantage.

The article is a puff piece, worthy only of a PR department; you know, people paid to lie.

 

I have to agree here, I don't see Microsoft changing the way they do business. I think Ballmer will continue Gates' legacy myself. Ozzie might be the head honcho, but Ballmer is up there and he knows the way they have done business all these decades has worked very well for them. The way I'm seeing this play out is that Ozzie will concentrate on Microsoft getting into the ad business more than anything else (which seems in stories about him to be a very very important topic to him), and they'll end up failing at that I'm sure.

And no, Gates did not give us the Internet Robert Kahn of BB&N and Vinton Cerf of Stanford laid the groundwork, and then different companies laid out their specific networks for folks to join. Al Gore made it possible to allow access to one big network instead of just being able to access only the networks you were subscribed to. Once that happened, Tim Berners-Lee from CERN, in Geneva, created Http which began the Internet as we know it in 1991.

What did Gates do? He gets the credit for stamping out competition for the browser that would allow you to get on this new wonderful World Wide Web. He also gets the credit for using his money and bullying to make sure his precious, buggy, security-hell OS would be on almost every computer on the planet.

 

The reason MS was able to "quash all the competition" was because Windows on an IBM compatible was as fuctional as the competitors at the time (Apple, Amiga etc) but also cheaper. They were able to commericialize the GUI, keyboard and mouse better than any company at the time.

MS will have to change the way they do business because their model for Windows and Office have been woeful in other areas such as internet services and consumer electronics.

Agreed IE was bad but we have an efficient market system that means we have viable alternatives such as FF and Opera.

Re windows as an operation system, it is not as bad as is made out. All software has bugs, all software have vulnerabilities. Is there evidence to suggest that Windows has more vulnerabilities and bugs than other software?

Not a MS fan boy. It is just a reaction to what seems to be unwarranted negativity to Gates and MS.

Cheers
Jeremy

 

"Is there evidence to suggest that Windows has more vulnerabilities and bugs than other software?" Well, yes, no other software on my computer is still getting security patches every month 7 years after release I know, not a fair example as most non-Microsoft software doesn't even have the same version used for 7 years and it is a complicated OS we're talking....or, is it fair?

 

You can blame or praise Bill for a lot of things but I had always understood that
Tim Berners-Lee gave us the Internet.

As to all those who seem to live to hate MS I guess you all bought 8 track and Betamax and still have a Sinclair QL running outback ? Using MS has allowed me to make a small fortune, not once needing to eat an Apple nor change to Linux. Thanks Bill.

 

"You can blame or praise Bill for a lot of things but I had always understood that
Tim Berners-Lee gave us the Internet." Gave us an easier way to use it, yep, that's what I learned too. No 8 tracks here, but 45 and 78s'

 

Yes a better comparison would be between OS's. Does Windows do worse than OS X?

 

Well, you can answer that question by looking at patches per month...I mean, Microsoft actually set aside 1 Tuesday per month for patches. In a consumers' eyes, that is pretty bad.

 

Not sure that regular patching is always a bad thing ? suggests that a company is actively trying to improve their product. certainly those companies that do little or nothing once they have launched a product are to be avoided.

Does it really matter how good or bad OS X is ? with a market share of less than 5% and falling is it really appropriate to make comparisons ? Not sure I would be able to use it as an alternative to Xp

 

Maybe Dw246 meant they should have a more regular patches, like once a week or something, so in 7 years time it really should have a minimal amount of bugs/exploits.

 

It seems to me that dw426 meant that patch tuesday shows that Windows is insecure because there are all these vulnerabilities. I think this argument is flawed because as Long View said, regular patching is a sign that a company is serious about security rather than the opposite. Here are some numbers from an unbiased source that just counts the number of vulerabilities in MS and Mac

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=758

There a few reports from MS themselves to the same tune but I avoided posting these here to avoid arguments that these reports are biased.

Cheers
Jeremy

 

Right. They won't write a post about us either, when we retire. Retirement happens all the time, what is so special about this ?

 

Hey, if it weren't for Bill Gates none of you would be reading this ... we'd all probably be out getting some fresh air and sunshine!

Acadia

 

I appreciate MS and Bill Gates for suppling the easiest and most security updated OS available. I do like windows os, but I am not a fan to some of their business practices. But how many of us could honestly say that if we were in Bills shoes we would have done it differently. When I had my two shops I did everything I could to protect them, not much difference than the way MS or any big Corp operates (self preservation). You can think badly of Bill Gates and Microsoft but with out them computing would not be where it is today. And I mean that in a positive way.

bigc

 

This isn't what I meant, but yes that would have helped. You're darn right I'm glad they patch up the vulnerabilities, I'm not about to fault them for that. What I have a problem with is the fact that there are so many vulnerabilities all these programmers left behind that 7 years later they still aren't done fixing them. Yes, I'm aware that writing an OS takes work that would probably put me in a mental hospital, but still. I also don't understand that up until now, they just piled code on top of code, it was bound to cause problems. I honestly think that they should have re-written the entire thing before each release. Would that be extremely hard to do and financially a pain in the rear? Yep, you bet. But it may very well have saved them a boatload of problems and public/government scrutiny and finger pointing.

They could have done better, that's all I mean. I don't have an agenda, I'm not a Microsoft hater (hell I use XP), I'm just saying they could have done better. To say that them patching monthly and sometimes more than once a month because of being sloppy and in a hurry is a sign that they care about the issues, is just giving them a pass to continue the tradition.

 

MS security and government scrutiny is entirely different. On security, rewritting code is in fact the worst thing you can do as new code has the most vulnerabilities in them.

Regarding the government, there were/are problems because MS was too dominant and used their position in an anti competive way.

Agreed

 

You're obviously not a programmer. You're never "done" fixing bugs if you ever want to improve your program. When new features and code are added, so are new bugs as well, inevitably. Firefox may tout its security as one of its selling points, but they got busted by a vulnerability within 5 hours of releasing version 3, and they won't be "done" fixing Firefox's bugs any sooner than Microsoft will be "done" fixing Windows'.

 

Never said I was You have a point, and again, I'm not a programmer and have no idea what it entails, however, perhaps they should have done less adding features until they worked on the problems at hand? And, to be fair, I'll agree with you about Firefox. I didn't need an "Awesome Bar" (pretty useless actually), nor did I need any more speed from it, or buttons moved, or bookmarking changed, any of that. What I needed was the memory issues to be fixed, they were, I'm happy. The rest is fluff.

 

Good point. I hope no one actually buys the 'FF is safer' than IE argument. On that note I hope no one buys the 'Mac's are safer than PCs" argument either.

Cheers
Jeremy

 

As far as I'm concerned, FF and Opera are safer for only a couple of reasons:

1. Active X. Neither of them run it. However, I don't truly believe Active X is some kind of evil code. The only problem with it at all is that it's abused too much. And, because it is still used on so many websites for different functions, there are more opportunities to abuse it, hence the public seeing so many bad reports and warnings of the "inherently insecure" technology.

2. Not allowing things to run automatically without warning by default. That's where IE has one of its biggest problems. Out of the box, IE (at least pre-IE7) ran damn near everything on auto-pilot, which meant if you didn't have other measures in place to protect yourself, you were a sitting duck.

 

Unfortunately for the O/S technology which is become known thanks to Bill Gates as Windows. If anyone is listened to Ballmer speak and answer questions, i don't see Microsoft going ahead in newer or better innovation while he's at the helm, but that's just from one point of view.

I have listened and watched Bill Gates both speak and answer questions even in government committee meetings and he has placed an indelible mark on this technology thru his founding industry.

I just don't see Balmer even on the same page with Gates. Not only that, but somewhere down the road i envision a total shakeup in that company for better or worse, hopefully better.

The home/office computer framework is been brought to full fruition IMO, but i see it as stuck in the mud for the foreseeable future untill a weeding out process comes about at some point.

Still we can all either be glad Bill Gates pushed his idea out to the world with his invention or else some might choose to chalk it up as only another in a long list of electronic trends that have fully run their course with no more great expectations to anticipate.

He was looking a couple weeks ago like he was ready for this announcement:

 

ActiveX and extensions are the same thing. The reason it was insecure was because it was allowed to run by default. So the technology was not inherently insecure. Rather it was an insecure configuration. That is no longer the case with IE 7.