Microsoft's Lost Decade 603
theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you) explains why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, arguing that what most hurt Microsoft was BillG's decision to step down as CEO in January 2000: 'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.' And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots. So while Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
Also like how Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:1, Informative)
and that was promptly replaced by GW Basic (of George Washington University) by MS DOS 3.x because it sucked.
They didn't develop BASIC, they wrote a compiler for the 8088, along with Davidoff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
Perhaps doing a bit of reading might help after all?
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:2, Informative)
Apple? Technological miracles? Care to name one?
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Informative)
The current CEO of Palm is the inventor of the ipod, not Steve Jobs. While at Apple Steve Jobs sent him out to find a hot product to make and he found the 1.8" hard drive at Toshiba that was considered a waste of resources and about to be killed. He made the ipod around it. iTunes came from a company Apple bought and they just renamed the software.
I'm confused. Are they lucky because they hired good people or because they made smart acquisitions ? They completely redid the GUI for iTunes by the way, Soundjam looked entirely different and they develop it in a a novel way by making it into an interface for their store.
iTunes took off because Microsoft couldn't get their DRM strategy right and iTunes worked out a good deal with the record companies. the Ipod was one brand from a company everyone knew.
True, but again that they were able to get right what MS couldn't just proves they were smart not lucky.
the iphone was a sales disaster until they cut the price and added the subsidies from AT&T. even then it was a slow niche seller until the 3G came out with the AppStore and Exchange support.
This one is just blatantly false. The iPhone hit all Apple's announced targets, 1 million sold in the first 80 days, 10 million sold by 2008 [macworld.com] ("Apple hits 10 million iPhone target two months early".)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can a good manager manage anything? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I'd bet a really good manager probably *could*, because part of being a good manager is knowing your limitations. And the skills needed to get the most out of people working for you are valuable and transferrable.
The thing is, there are lots of *lucky* managers out there who think they're skilled.
Think of the science museum display with the thousands of balls and pegs that gradually builds a normal distribution as the balls drop. That ball in the far right bin isn't really any smarter than the ones in the middle. I'm not saying there aren't good managers out there. I'm saying there *are* lucky ones.
"that's Fake Steve to you" (Score:5, Informative)
Not Just Fake Steve (Score:5, Informative)
"Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you)
Or more likely to be recognized here as Forbes Magazine's massive and unrepentant SCO shill.
(Unrepentant in that his excuse for his ridiculously one-sided reporting was the flaming he got on the topic in the first place).
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists [wikipedia.org]
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Informative)
Gates was a big fish in a small pond back in the day. Try reading the code of that BASIC interpreter. BG can't hold a candle to Woz or Chuck Moore or Dennis Ritchie.
How many people of that era CAN hold a candle to them?
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:2, Informative)
"He developed an early version of BASIC."
which Kemeny and Kurtz, creators of BASIC, tended to refer to as "gutter BASIC."
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Informative)
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [whitehouse.gov]
Oh, did you perhaps mean http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.php [whitehouse.gov]?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.asp [whitehouse.gov] and http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.aspx [whitehouse.gov] both return '404 Page Not Found'.
Interesting .Net app, that one. :)
Tip: There's this tech news aggregator site called "Slashdot". Makes it really easy to keep up with stuff like this [slashdot.org]. You should try reading it sometime.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Informative)
Windows also has open-source components. The one that pops to mind is the BSD IP stack used up through XP.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Informative)
He is also the one who gave us the "freetard" expression to describe users of open source software.
Keep such things in mind when you read his stuff. It appears that his motive is not to inform but instead to influence.
IMHO he's lying scum as likely to be correct by fluke as a stopped clock.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:2, Informative)
It's still used in the latest pile of rubbish. The original NT kernel, thrown together in a matter of days (for demonstration purposes, not for official release) by Dave Cutler is still there in the middle of their Windows 7. Gates decided that it was good enough and that no further development was necessary.
Game Over!
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:2, Informative)
According to the bechmarks made by INRIA (French scientific & supercomputing outfit) the Sun Java Hotspot VM has surpassed C for speed in many applications and is now approaching FORTRAN (which is considered the fastest in supercomputing circles). Please see: http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/current_state_of_java_for [sun.com]
Your post is very misleading. It's not "for many applications", it's for a very specific class of applications, namely HPC. The report with the benchmarks is titled "Current State of Java for HPC". As for the paper itself, the only place applicable to JVM proper is when they review the performance of int and double arithmetic in Java, and find it fast (which is kinda not surprising - any JIT can do those just as well as a C compiler can). The rest of it is about distributed computations, with an emphasis on efficiency of inter-node communication; they are also effectively cheating to disable GC by presetting the heap size to a very high amount.
Oh, just "ui tweaks," huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
The attitude that mere "ui tweaks" aren't innovative or important is the reason why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will forever be a joke.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:3, Informative)
And the fact that I am replying to someone on the Internet is the result of a NeXT computer. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer workstation at CERN, and that machine became the worlds first webserver.
It may not have sold huge numbers, but NeXT had a major impact on the machines which followed in its footsteps. In 1988 The NeXT was a machine that had 64MB of RAM, when a high end PC had 4MB.
Jobs did have uncanny insight regarding the NeXT computer. When asked if he was upset that the computer's debut was delayed by several months, Jobs responded, "Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!" [wikipedia.org]