Do you have a cite for this? Gate’s book the Road Ahead would contradict your assertion that Gates was a) still at Harvard and b) started Microsoft at the behest of IBM. Admittedly, the book was written by Gates but I’d like to see some contradictory evidence.
The automobile analogy is perhaps a good one. That industry is consolidating from IIRC hundreds of makers down to not a lot of global players in the mass market. Look at Daimler-Chrysler, Ford-Mazda, and the Korean producers. If this progression continues, in 10-20 years, there will only be a handful of merged players.
As for copying other peoples products, well, remember how if you bought a word processing program like say Word Perfect, you had to buy a seperate spell checker and later grammer checker. Now, a spell checker and grammer checker are standard functionality. Guess what, those niche guys that came up with the spell checker program are out of business. Bad monopoly, bad monopoly.
Which is not to say I think MSFT is a knight in shinning armor. They are a damn big company, highly profitable and extremely aggressive. I personally don’t see how there is room for 2 competing and mutually exclusive operating systems given the high R&D cost and user investment.
Sorry, just something I saw on a PBS special one time (don’t even remember the name of the show). Also, I didn’t say that he started Microsoft at the behest of IBM, but that IBM wanted him to write the operating system for its new line of computers. It was that job which led to Gates starting MS, because IIRC Gates’ contract with IBM was that he got to keep control of DOS, even though he was developing it on IBM’s dime.
What about BASIC, though? That’s what got Microsoft noticed by IBM. My understanding was that Gates was somewhat the geeky kid working out of his garage to get Microsoft started, BASIC developed, and all that. Then he gets an incredible stroke or two of luck, and gets hired to develop an operating system for IBM’s entry into the PC market. Afterwards, he relies more on his business skills (and ruthlessness) than his abilities as a programmer.
Well, do you remember when the government started its first investigation? I was younger at the time, and as such didn’t pay much attention… I don’t recall much brouhaha around the days of Win3.X, however. For the record, the William H. Gates Foundation was started in 1994, before Win95 came out. Again, my memory may be skewed (I was 13 in 1994), but that wasn’t exactly when the shit hit the fan for Microsoft, was it?
Or I may be wrong. Perhaps there were government investigations in Microsoft since the late '80s. But the big ones centered around the bundling of Internet Explorer to Windows 98, which would have followed the inception of the charity organization by four years.
If you wanna talk about suckin off “dick” how about suckin down XP.
It seems that there are more problems with XP than being up river without a paddle for us web developers. Apparently, any web published code you create with XP, microsoft reads through and automatically replaces any non-affiliates of ms with their own as you know. (What about us?) Although one of the anti-trust accusations decrees that m.e. had the ability to send ms info on the software used by your home pc, XP reads what you have on your hard drive and sends this info to ms(why?)…If you upgrade your hard drive, XP must be reinstalled and upgraded in some instances. There are no crack codes for XP, any piracy inactment will be placed within manufacturing constituates in foreign countrys. Basically Bill has made it almost impossible for anyone whom had hopes of developing new computer based interprises to succeed. The man is now worth half trillion dollars god damnit! What has our population sucked in itself from this guy? I know from what little I have learned about ms at 24 years of age, I’m not impressed. I’m disappointed.
I’m a college student learning “the best” computer integrated system technology. So far what I have found is that ms cannot keep up with itself. My textbooks for this semester came a month late because we switched to office XP. Know what we got for text? We had to buy cheap print outs of what the text was suppose to be like. We have yet to recieve the whole text for office XP. Sure ms promised to to “give” away all corosponding text relating to office XP. But what the fuck? My graduating class and I can hardly read what we have from cheap print smug. Boo Hoo I know.
My neighbor is a manager at DELL. He is a devout christain with a gun. heeheehee. Although he and I don’t see eye to eye most of the time, his opinion is(rather silly)that ms is the beast. These are his words, “One world government, mark of the beast, could very well be the prophecy is being fulfilled.” Although I do not share his system of belief, I think we are fucked for now. What of ms becomming our only source of personal information, buisness practicality, system development, educational forgivness, God(sarcasium), and of course money?
In the mean time I will be writing code for servers that accept affiliates and flavors that do not fuck with my hard work, untill the horrible terror(Bill)decides to bite us again…All the while he sucks off the world for some more cash.
This is due to their anti-piracy efforts. It’s meant to keep people from casually making dozens of copies of Windows and passing them out to their friends.
And just a quick suggestion (not a criticism)… press the “Enter” button a bit more often. Large blocks of text are difficult to read.
I think he’s talking about smart tags, which don’t “read through and automatically replace” anything; they scan the text of a page displayed in IE or Office, and create diferently-marked links (without disturbing any that are already there) to whatever MS provides as the target.
Beehive, Microsoft critics have a hard time being taken seriously by guys like SPOOFE. It doesn’t help when you’re a complete loon.
This just in…
I like to loiter over at FuckedCompany.com once in a while, they make the SDMB Pit seem like High Tea with the Queen.
Anyway, they are passing along a rumor as to MicroSoft (a wholly owned subsidiary of MammonCo). A feature of XP can be selectively used as a surviellance method, and The Gates offered to cooperate with the Guv in this regards, in exchange for some slack from Justice.
Not that I believe it, you understand. Just something I heard. Not that I was likely to install XP anyway, I hear it eats more than a gigabyte of hard disk. OINK!