I cringed when I read Richard Stallman's comments against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's fine for him to write for the BBC that:
Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now. Dismantling them is up to us.
Three cheers for freedom!
However, it's not so fine to then start picking apart the intentions behind Gates' philanthropy:
Gates' philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people's good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.
He may be right. He's probably wrong. Regardless, it just demonstrates poor judgment and bad taste to try to kick Gates on his way out, especially for the charitable work that Gates and his wife do.
Despite returning to the familiar refrain of why the open-source community is broken, Open Season Episode 19 was perhaps my favorite to record. We had sound effects, Kermit vs. Bill Gates contests, discussion on how to make open-source businesses viable, Red Hat and its leadership role, and more.
We also pondered why Dave Rosenberg has been taking shots from former employees, and lauded Bill Gates for his monopolistic practices. A great show. Enjoy.
It's nice to see that Microsoft's Bill Gates experiences the same frustration with Microsoft's software that many of us do. In a fascinating email that Gates sent back in 2003 (which came to life through the antitrust proceedings), he takes his executive team to task for making it amazingly hard to buy and use Microsoft's Moviemaker software.
After weathering a storm of pain to download the product, feeling like he's finally on the cusp of getting his software but discovering instead that he was being asked to download garbage, Gates writes:
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information....What an absolute mess.
I don't cite this to criticize Bill Gates. If anything, this candor is wonderful and indicative of what any software executive should be saying about his company's software in an effort to make it better. Intel's Andy Grove used to suggest that "only the paranoid survive." In Bill Gates' case, he might insist that "only the hyper-critical survive."
Microsoft has its problems. It's good to see that the company may well see those problems more acutely than its customers do.
It's also interesting to peer behind the Microsoft firewall to see that there may not always be some grand, nefarious plan behind the things Microsoft does.
... Read moreIf you haven't yet, take a few minutes to watch the second set of highlights from Walt Mossberg's and Kara Swisher's interview with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the All Things Digital Conference. As the interview opens up to audience questions, Tim O'Reilly asks Gates and Ballmer a very pointed (and poignant) question:
Microsoft has been playing "me too" these past few years, following the lead of other innovators. Do you have any "big, hairy [audacious] goals" now, he asks, or do you need to?
In other words, where did all the famous Microsoft ambition go?
Bill Gates blundered through a response about "Quests" and such, and then honed in on putting a tablet PC in the hands of every student in the world. Ambitious? Perhaps. Inspiring? Not even close. It's just a tired extension of Microsoft's current dominance, without a thought for interesting new vistas for computing (pun intended).
But where things got really odd was when Tim followed up with a question about why Microsoft spends so much time talking about search and the web when these weren't mentioned by Gates as Microsoft's goals.
... Read moreMicrosoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most recent product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with Vista it is definitely following...but who it's following, nobody knows.
Now Bill Gates has declared that Windows 7, the next release of the operating system, won't be nearly as bad as Vista:
We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there...[which will require] lower power, take less memory [and] be more efficient.
Great! So...why buy Vista in the interim, which is by all accounts a memory and power hog, and is grossly inefficient? Customers seem to get Gates' logic, however, and have been buying Macs in droves which requires less power, less memory, is more efficient, and is a heck of a lot nicer to use. Thanks for the advice, Bill!
As but one more piece of testamentary evidence that the old guard at Microsoft needs to be shown the door, Bill Gates has demonstrated conclusively that he has exactly zero understanding of open source, or at least zero desire to have an intelligent discussion about it. Speaking to a pharmaceutical industry group, Bill Gates took time out to utter irrelevancies and inaccuracies about the GNU General Public License:
There's free software and then there's open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries [largely in response to open source, I might add]. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with." Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
Ahem. It's the exact opposite, Mr. Gates. 100% the exact opposite.
... Read moreI have to admit that I found the irony stifling in this CNET article on Bill Gates and his efforts to bring compassion for the poor to capitalism. Gates, who for years resisted pricing Microsoft's software lower for developing markets has suddenly become a big believer in helping the poor.
In every industry, Gates said, businesses need to start thinking about how they can use some of their energy and resources, say 6 percent, to expand their reach to poorer segments either in their own country, or globally. Food companies need to focus on micronutrients, while drug companies should devote some energy to diseases that affect largely the poor, such as malaria and tuberculosis.
But not in software, apparently. It wasn't until 2004 that Microsoft - more in response to the need to fight Linux and piracy than any increase in the size of its heart - started to lower its pricing for markets like Indonesia. Until that point Microsoft continued to price its software above the annual wages of people in these developing markets.
... Read moreBill Gates welcomed the world to a new breed of "kinder capitalism" at Davos this week. Conveniently forgetting his past, Mr. Gates declared:
We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.
We have. It's called open source. Open source is "kinder" by design, no matter how capitalistically/self-interestedly it is used. Here's why:
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