Comments on: Gates and the code-jockey elite
Five years after becoming Microsoft's chief software architect, he can finally be judged on a record, CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says.
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Hardly innovative and just shows that Gates is not a leader but a follower. His genius is in how he can copy, and using his Monopoly in one area and moving into another. Although genius maybe too strong a word. Maybe law breaker is more appropriate.
Hardly innovative and just shows that Gates is not a leader but a follower. His genius is in how he can copy, and using his Monopoly in one area and moving into another. Although genius maybe too strong a word. Maybe law breaker is more appropriate.
I mean this is just crap article. Bill Gates pays more attention to Tablet PC then .net my services and the other crap his sales and marketing guys try selling.
May the innovation continue..
What MS failures and flops point to is his ineffective leadership. If you want to judge his programming skills look no further then the memory manager for early windows incarnations. Now there is some skillful, innovative programming! Who other then Gates, would dare write and release a program whose idea of proper memory management is to cause the whole system to crash when an unexpected event happens?
heart just a simple, immature geek who
desperately wants to be respected as a
creative force in the computer industry. That's
why you see the introduction of a lot of
awkward Microsoft products like TabletPC
and MediaCenter which have high "geek"
appeal, but are unable to make much
headway in the larger consumer market.
Although geeks like Bill Gates might accept an
occasional "blue screen of death" popping up
on their TV screen, most people want no part
of it. There seems to be little sophistication or
depth to Bill Gates' thinking concerning new
products, but simply the attitude that "if it can
be built it should be built". There is little to no
discrimination or filtering. There is little to no
thought given to the question of whether the
technology is really polished enough for the
market, or whether the technology should
remain in the lab for further development. So
while MS is putting out awkward, geek-only
products like Media Center and TabletPC,
Apple is putting out polished products like
iPod which the whole world - and not just the
geek world - appreciates.
software comes barely with bugs and works almost seamlessly;
you'll know its not microsoft
As for Gates and MS....
This kind of thinking is evident in many other industries and throughout the mass populous:
What looks good, sounds good, tastes good, or feels good-----must be good.
This thinking does not hold true to reallity, but is none the less used.
You can see this in the auto industry, the entertainment industry, politics, religion, the internet, and most any place else. People have a tendancy to place any real logic secondary to anything emotional or financial.
If you ask me.....
Gates and MS have allowed the power to goto their heads. MS is and has been becoming a controlling force that infects everyone and everything. This company will never see any of my money, respect, or admiration. The truth is that more and more people are learning about computers (and that is a very good thing). With this knowledge, more and more people are not only learning how to hack MS software but also how to fight MS. This is quite evident in the popularity of Firefox and various other programs.
I was a long-time user of WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, etc. and while they worked fine for me, for somebody like my Mother there was no chance. Think about great features like "Reveal Codes" in WordPerfect. It was great for figuring out what was making the formatting work the way it was, but if you tried to get a non-power-user to understand it, good luck!
Same is true for Linux vs. Windows, and even for Apple vs. PC, although in that case it's historically been hardware for the masses, since the Apple OS has always been very easy to use.
I say stagnant as there has been little progress in desktop workstation computing power and features since the mid 80s when MS took control of this market. One could purchase a fast 32bit Indy for about $AUD10,000 at that time. 20 years on it still costs $AUD3000 for a slower 32bit machine with similar GUI, less features and more bugs.
Who really needs a 32 bit Microsoft Moped, when we would all be a driving 256bit Rolls Royce but for Gates' marketing induced stagnation.
Technologist he is not. IBM trained marketing expert, he is.
I was camped out in and about the Pacific Grove-Monterey environs where Billy G. aced out Gary Kildall?s Digital Research to supply IBM with their first PC-DOS.
Trust me, mate, IBM didn?t ?train? Bill Gates as a ?marketing expect.? Harvard drop-out Bill, LEARNED THEM a thing or two about American Marketing & Capitalism that the IBM Execs must have missed in B-School. They either slept through that MBA class or their dog ate their thesis.
As we say here in Yankee Doodle Land, Bill Gates ?bought in? with IBM when he contracted to supply his MS-DOS to them for a mere pittance, while retaining full-rights to the software itself.
Besides out marketing and business maneuvering Gary Kildall, whose CP/M DR-DOS was vastly superior to Billy?s DOS Bugware 1.0, he sweet talked the business & marketing ?moguls? from IBM into letting Microsoft [him] retain full software rights to the new Microsoft IBM PC-DOS.
Who is the Techno-Visionary and Marketer Extraordinaire? Not IBM, they gave the techno-store away to spectacled Billy Boy. Not Gary Kildall, he was off sport flying somewhere while letting his wife handle closing the biggest software deal of the Millennium with client IBM, and he is no longer with us on the planet. By the process of elimination we?re left with our favorite desktop sleepin?, coffee drinkin?, pizza eatin?, code-bangin? jockey, our global Techno-Geek-in-Chief, Bronco Billy. He rode that software business brumby into submission and was, and still is, the Last-Techno-Marketer-Standing.
TECHNO-NEWS FLASH To ALL in the LAND of OZ!!! IBM did not ?make Gates rich,? Gates and American Capitalism made Gates rich.
Yes, I list a ton of products, but I work with all of these as part of my job or in my personal life, and trust me, they really are great products. And I?m sure I missed a few that I rely on but never even think about.
I have replied with more detail in my blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/bgroth/archive/2005/01/14/353476.aspx
This article was about new products that mr. Gates would have conceived in his role as "chief Software Architect" (I think he first thought of the title "God"). Frankly I also haven't seen much of them for the past 5 years.
And yes, I want to see XP embedded (not very original too, BTW), because then I would finally be able to install XP without IE.
So much of your list is known to contain security holes that would not have to be dealt with using something else. All this server technology....HA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_operating_system
In fact the original writer of DOS/QDOS/etc. is Tim Paterson, who worked at SCP at the time. His web site covers a lot of his personal history and the technical history behind DOS:
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Articles.aspx
I believe ultimately he ended up working on-again, off-again for Microsoft for several years, at least until the late 90s.
The technology is MSN Direct Watch. I have been using it for few months and have fallen in love with it. Here is the link to read more about it. http://direct.msn.com/
Watch while sitting on another MS innovation:
The MS iLoo.
(http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-999509.ht
ml)
Innovative......HA!
At best, XP handles graphics better.
I would rather use a Mac or run Linux than EVER run XP.
And again, XP was in no way innovative, merely an evolution of Win98 and NT/2000.
XP uses 2000 as an foundation, that was in turn an evolution of NT, the GUI part is merely a shell. All other stuff that is included is either designed to cover up design flaws (e.g. system restore) or to fix what should have worked from the beginning.
There is no innovation in M$ or Gates, only evolution, often based on the ideas of other people.
Perhaps he really did one innovation in M$, getting security on their agenda. However, this was again only a reaction to a business threat of M$.
Anyone who can mention XP and innovation in the same sentence without a heavy dose of sarcasm is an idiot, pure and simple.
Instead the article highlights selected corporate strategy fiasco's from the past 5 years implying that these marketing snafus prove BG's lack of programming ability. The recent CES appearance was mercifully overlooked. Mr. Cooper also states in the article that "...Microsoft has always been touchy..". & that Gates had an opportunity to "...show that he was every bit the technologist ...". Given the monopolistic realities of the marketplace we're all a little inclined to imagine Bill as the villainous chief software architect/mogul played by Tim Robbins in the movie 'Antitrust' (2001).
Mr. Cooper's comments are interesting and make for enjoyable reading. His editorial, however, serves as an abject lesson in creative incompetence as stated in Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
tempting to agree with the article in many respects, I don't
ascertain that this is all Bill Gates' fault. I mean this seems to
me like a huge company-wide problem. More importantly, there
are always going to be companies, even the best ones, that offer
products or services that will be duds... the difference with the
successful companies is if they know how to get people to be
interested in their successes. I think Microsoft has largely done
that. Of course, function and style can be argued as lacking in
many respects, but they've proven that they can sell their
products.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft's two largest problems are security
and time management. I don't think in its 20 year history it has
actually hit a deadline for a major project. More intersting is the
fact that they actually create the software to do this, so, are they
not using it? Or does it simply not work the way it is supposed
to? Who knows...
- Lack of innovation???
- by May 23, 2005 3:23 AM PDT
- What do people mean by innovation? Is it how many bells and whistles it has? Is it based on how original the idea was? NO. Innovation is something that changes society; that improves mankind. Microsoft is innovative because they have used EVERY business tool available to blow the competition out of the water. Hey, in the business world, ideas cannot be patented. You cannot claim you thought of something first and have it stand up in court. In the business world, an idea is no longer yours the second you make it known. The fact that Microsoft is able to take someone else's idea and make it into something great makes them a great company. Gates is a great leader from having taken a small bunch of nerds into the biggest software company on earth. Microsoft reaches into the lives if each and every person in the US, and most of the world.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(44 Comments)I am not a Microsoft employee, nor am i an MVP, nor is my company a MS partner. My company, and I for that matter, use everything Microsoft. No other company has such a complement of differenet technologies that ALL WORK TOGETHER. I can, from anywhere in the continental US, access any piece of business data with my company from my Pocket PC, with Pocket Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or IE. I can connect to my corporate network, built using ASP.Net, SQL Server, Active Directory, all running on Windows 2003 Server. Out corporate Intranet can, using native ASP.Net technology, manipulate Excel spreadsheets, e-mail them through Exchange, and manage them via the very intelligent resources available on Server 2003. Yes, there are other companies offering other technologies that may be able to do the same thing. But MS works, and they have everything the modern business needs to compete.
Now lets talk about Open Source. Innovative, right? After all, the licensing model is considered to be something revolutionary, bound to change the world, right? I don't think so. When my software breaks, who do I go to? Who do I call? Who is accountable for the development of Linux? The fact of the matter is, no one. No one can be BECAUSE of the license. So how does that make Linux better?
If people are claiming that real innovation has to be original ideas, then fine. Microsoft is not innovative. I say innovation is what Microsoft does with its software. .Net is faster than Java, both in development and execution; Windows is more readily available, easier to install, is SUPPORTED, and there is more software available for it; Office is the easiest-to-use office productivity collection ever; the list goes on.
So, my point. Microsoft is innovative because they've changed the world through their products. And Gates has been leading the way since Microsoft and the software industry began.