[Technocrat]

I for one have always admired Bill Gates for his business acumen.

The common man's PC is a reality because of him.

[kaushik_s]

I've this feeling that many of the people(not just in TBHP, I'm talking in general) who speaks ill about BG, mostly do it because others are doing it. It's kind of a fashion i've seen in IT industry to beat MS to death and shower praise for Unix/linux etc. But if one see from the perspective of a common man to whom Bill has actually paved the way to the cyberworld I feel he has done a great job. Computers were never so easy to reach for common people before. About user-friendliness, huh anybody saying Unix is more user-friendly then Windows, must be kidding.
And Apple, they can keep on claiming whatever they want but will they ever try to make their computers/notebooks easily available to common people? I've heard a joke about full form of Ipod that is Idiots Priced Our Devices. And so true it was, yes now they are trying to mend their way and I'm really looking forward to it. But who showed the way, that;s everybody's guess.
Oh yeah, and probably many of us here won't be even have been posting in Tbhp anything if Bill was not there. Forget about posting, I doubt if there would've been things like T-bhp or any other forum in that sense so easily accessible to masses.
And btw, I'm not working for microsoft nor related to it.

[Thad E Ginathom]

It's possible that Team-BHP might not have existed if Gates had had his way, except maybe as a corner of MSN on some horrific half-working set of MS-specific protocols that no site other than an MS site would have proper access to.

Of course MS wanted to own networking too. It's one area in which they did not succeed.

Just be glad that TCP/IP, the internet, the www, were never owned by microsoft. Internet Explorer may give that impression, but it is not true. Hey! The big news about the next IE is that it will adhere to standards, isn't it? leaving people wondering what to do with all the development that had to be twisted to fit IE?

I'm not a www devloper. I'm sure someone else around here is...

Credit to Gates where it is due. He is not to be thanked for the internet.

It's a shame, isn't it, that there is no Good Guy in the story, so no point in bringing Apple into it.

The Unix v. Windows argument is a non starter. Remember that Unix had multi-user, multi-tasking sussed and working, when a single file copy effectively locked up windows until it was done --- but attempting to establish any sort of user-friendliness winner between cp and COPY, mv and REN, cat and TYPE, cd and ...err, cd just doesn't make much sense. Command-line shells are intuitive to those who get to know them. Getting to know them can surely take some hard work.

What can be said, is that Unix came complete with a vast array of tools and utilities, including complete text-processing systems and development tools. OK, all pretty useless, unless one happened to need them, but the fact that DOS came with DEBUG never caused people to cry out against its massive unfriendliness! It also came with edlin. Friendly? Sheesh, how pleased we were to get EDIT when it finally happened.

It can also be said that the unix shells worked well, that interaction between the tools, such as pipelining, was streamlined, all manner of stuff worked in the unix environment while Gates was still figuring out that his USP would be putting the slashes the other way round (or maybe that was already there in the OS he bought in.

Excel is good....

Here's a link to an xkcd strip. "Real Programmers" to lighten us up

emacs, eh? Now there's one thinh I never could make head or tail of !

[given2fly]

Hey Zappo,

From someone who has vehemently denied MS softwares being crap to actually working for them and respecting their vision, I salute the vision of Bill Gates for what he has to an otherwise mundane human life. We lived before We had computers and lived very nicely, but could writing a letter with a word checker inbuilt or making business presentations with nice pie charts & big P/L statements have been easy. Yes, Lotus 123 & Wordmaker and all the other softwares that I don't remember, didn't make a difference untill Bill transformed them to actually help us.

Looking at it the other way, Many of the softwares that were initially buggy and so called incomplete as quoted by many, has anyone bashing them actually tried to see the end result of it. They are finally turned out to be wonderful products with their 2007/2008 series lineup. Rome wasn't built in one day and same goes for this great modern day hero.

One last angle of looking at Bill's Legacy would be his philanthropic ways. He is retiring at 52 to pursue some actually good ideas which are in some ways linked to India as well. Could we imagine Indian businessmen even thinking of such things. Nah, you gotta be kidding. Our businessmen don't usually know what charity is, & philanthropic is going to be . Let it be, I am opening a can of worms and many will jump at me for this.

Originally Posted by Zappo

I agree samu, people who spew venom against BG do not understand his many positives. He lives behind a legacy that probably turned India and its IT revolution around.

Thad & others, I would really appreciate if we don't go MS bashing here. If you want to claim all the goods for Unix, it is long dead. It is only Solaris, HP-UX & AIX left. SCO filed for bankrupcy long ago & Linux is still to break out as from Business Supportability point of view. Microsoft survived this long because they created an ecosystem where the customer could come to them for anything and get it fixed anyway. Open source sure does work and in strange way, you do get the fix, but it is crazy to look for solution in forums than looking it up in docs by the makers. Most of us don't have that much time anymore.

PS: They never tried to own networking. NetBIOS was a protocol which didn't become defacto simply because it wasn't scalable and they acknowledged it by redesigning their strategy.

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

It's possible that Team-BHP might not have existed if Gates had had his way, except maybe as a corner of MSN on some horrific half-working set of MS-specific protocols that no site other than an MS site would have proper access to.

Of course MS wanted to own networking too. It's one area in which they did not succeed. I still doubt Steve Ballmer a big lot but as long as he is carrying on with Bill's vision, he can't hurt us big.

Just be glad that TCP/IP, the internet, the www, were never owned by microsoft. Internet Explorer may give that impression, but it is not true. Hey! The big news about the next IE is that it will adhere to standards, isn't it? leaving people wondering what to do with all the development that had to be twisted to fit IE?

I'm not a www devloper. I'm sure someone else around here is...

Credit to Gates where it is due. He is not to be thanked for the internet.

[lancer_rit]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Just have to loose that circus-show guy Ballmer, now!

Agree :-) He seems more from WWE !

[given2fly]

And do you know that Warren Buffet has bequeathed majority of his fortune to "Bill & Melinda Gates" Foundation. That is in tune of 45+ Billion Dollars. Now that is an impact impossible to beat.

From Wikipedia,

Buffett is also a noted philanthropist. In 2006, he announced a plan to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[11]

[kaushik_s]

First of all, I was trying to make a point about Windows not DOS and about common people not computer nerds like you, me or someone else. Just give a normal person without much computer knowledge a unix terminal and tell him " this is the best ever and most user friendly OS and use this to browse the net" and you'll have your answer there. That person will either break the terminal out of frustration or go to sleep ;-).And yeah, probably he will never come back to touch a computer again.
Come on, no-common-person likes to use to command line when there is a gui. And who gave that to the masses ? Well we know that although we try to frown at that thought.

Oh btw, I still use vi mostly to edit my files, ok it's actually vim. I still do 'mv' or 'cp' or 'rm' while earning my bread and butter but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

[tsk1979]

Most "genuine" opponents of Bill gates are about his Business Philosophy and monopoly practices of M$
The EU has already found MS guilty of monopoly practices
But after all this too, little has changed. You still can't buy a laptop without windows installed.
In the US you have an option of clicking "No" on the EULA and then asking for a refund. In India getting a refund is next to impossible.
United States Microsoft antitrust case - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Criticism of Microsoft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most of the criticism is pertaining to business practices, and MS was fined by EU in 2008
I am sure most people on this forum are not at all aware or have followed up on the cases against M$.

On a personal level, I don't mind windows. Infact I am a XP user and it fits my needs pretty well. Linux also fits my needs, in some cases better than XP, but since I paid for XP, I keep on using it. People make XP to be the harbinger of doom which it is not, its actually a pretty robust and user friendly operating system from a normal user point of view. However if I was doing programming on my home system, XP will have to go out.

Another point to be noted is that microsoft ignores piracy in emerging economies like India/china.
though my point was "good riddance" I doubt M$ practices will change overnight.
Having a monopoly only stifles innovation and benefits nobody. Monopoly of any kind is bad for the consumer.

[msdivy]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Since Ballmer, who started his career in Microsoft as business manager in 1980, became CEO 2000. Since then he has increased revenue & profit, but has failed to see emerging technologies, let alone profit from it.

Known as Teflon Ballmer, he had to reorganize Microsoft just last month. Probably that was not enough - he had to go.

In last few years, he spent billions with no returns:
1) aQuantive - $6.3bn, on online ads publishing house
2) Skype - $8.5bn on a loss-making VoIP biz
3) Surface RT - $1bn on unsold tablets

He messed with Windows too, twice:
1) Disaster of Longhorn, Vista
2) Touch friendly Windows 8 desktop !

Being from business background, he hardly talked about technical details. When quizzed, his answers were, "nobody’s sleeping at this point" (on iPhone success), "Microsoft will answer as soon as they are ready" (update on Windows Phone).

BTW, as soon as Ballmer announced his decision, Microsoft stock rose by 9%. Ballamer holds so much MSFT stocks that he instantly made $1 billion for this rise - Ballmer Quits, Instantly Makes (Almost) $1 Billion

PS: Apart from his famous "Developers, developers, developers, developers.", quote, enjoy some of his other quotes:
1) Failed to see impact of iPhone in 2008
"$500, fully subsidized, with a plan! That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."

2) Failed to see the importance open source software in 2001
"Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."

3) iPod as seen by Ballmer.
"The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."

4) On Google's employ friendly policy of letting employee 20% free time to do their own thing.
"I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."
(Ballmer is big fan of "arrive early/leave late" policy)

5) On DRM, (obviously people don't like DRM)
"DRM is the future", "puts food on the table"

6) Predicted slowdown of Apple laptop sales in 2009
"Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction."

7) Restricts use of non-Microsoft products at home (imagine his kids have to use bing for homework)
"I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."

8) When he found one of his employees is joining Google.
Quote will be flagged on this forum - check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky