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, Insightful)
Even if that was true, he understood what other geeks needed. Plain business men probably aren't going to understand that.
And if you're ever read some book by Bill Gates, you'd notice he does have quite (interesting, I might add) ideas. Not just with OS and such, but with technology general and how to combine it with everyday life.
Yeah but (Score:5, Insightful)
It must really suck to be a billionaire and yet realize if you had been smart you coulda been a trillionaire.
Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Fake Steve Start Your Copier (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice piece, but he probably got the idea from James Kwak [slashdot.org] via Gruber [daringfireball.net].
"Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results. Even when you don’t have the generational issue that Trillin talks about, the problem is that the sociology of corporations leads to a certain kind of CEO, and as corporations become increasingly dependent on complex technology or complex business processes (for example, the kind of data-driven marketing that consumer packaged companies do), you end up with CEOs who don’t understand the key aspects of the companies they are managing."
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates was a pretty good hacker back in the day. Even though I'm sure he hasn't flexed those particular geek muscles in a long time I don't much doubt that he knows technology about as well as anybody in the business.
What worries me is the direction he has always pushed software in. If those old ALTAIRs had the guts to do DRM you can bet his BASIC would have been locked down tighter than the iPhone.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I always thought that was required from *all* CEO's of multi-billion dollar corporations.
eBay,google,xbox. (Score:2, Insightful)
This also happened with eBay, and is likely to happen to Google should they ever chance the CEO.
Formula for failure:
Have the CEO drive a business into the ground by paying them in cash. Pay them the average employee's wage + bonus in stock, therefore they are only sabotaging themselves if they drive the company into the ground, or increase customer resentment. Maybe apply this to board members too.
In Microsoft's case, the Anti-opensource/anti-linux zealotry, and delivering incremental upgrades as "new operating systems" with only improvements made to the bells and whistles has made customers who even buy windows still refer to Microsoft (the company) as bad.
What could change Microsoft's standing, and stop eroding customer confidence is doing what they did with Windows 7, and open-beta each operating system for 90 days to get feedback on what people like and dislike. Had they done this back with Windows XP, we might never have seen the terrible Vista.
And Vista was not Windows ME. Vista was stable, ME was not.
eBay runs afoul of the not listening to customers, especially with the CEO change. It went from relatively listening, to completely ignoring. (As soon as John came on board, departments were getting outsourced left and right, and plenty of forced-use-of-paypal attempts were made.) The final straw on this was the giving discounts to bulk listers. In effect John in one year turned eBay into Amazon, stripping a lot of what made eBay good out.
If Google were to follow the same route, you'd see that 20% project time gone first, then innovations would stop flowing. Then ads would be stuffed into every part of the site until it resembles Yahoo. And we all know how well Yahoo is doing (not well at all.)
Bill Gates at least knew what direction to take things, Microsoft is a software company. Ballmer doesn't seem to know what direction to go, hence the "New version, now with shiny new bells and whistles." The moving of software into "Live" is a horrible mistake that is trying to encroach on what Google does well, that being "offering free usable services." Microsoft is trying to charge money and offer unusable services.
Microsoft only does Windows and Office well, and makes some slightly-better-than-average hardware for the PC. The Xbox/Xbox360 development must have hired the same people who worked on Windows ME. Pushed unfinished, poorly tested hardware out the door to meet some business agenda.
Microsoft's Windows Mobile is becoming increasingly irrelevant with the iPhone and Blackberry eating it's lunch. Again with the "move services online" aspect that is failing. If they can't do it right on the mobile platform, they sure as hell are going to fail to make paywalled office software.
Classic case (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is a classic case of what you get when the problem is dictating the solution.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
Jobs is not a geek per se but he talks our language, that's how he got involved with Woz. That and he has an uncanny insight into technology and how it can be used and popularized even when he lacks the technical skill to develop it himself. He's not a salesman (bullshit artist) like Balmer, but someone who can genuinely see how cool a technology is and then transfer that enthusiasm to other people.
Microsoft: The "Me Too" company (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than .NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps. .NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Tripled (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has the money to buy the best techs. So it becomes a failure of management if they fail to do so.
So in the case of Microsoft I would say that blaming the management for failure is reasonable.
What a good manager can never manage.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ;)
So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability
Wait, when did this become about Steve Jobs?
Re:WTF planet is the author from? (Score:3, Insightful)
A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade?
Putting short-term profit over long term has been a standard policy for failing companies driven by short-sighted management.
Sure, Microsoft make a lot of money now, but over the last decade they've gone from being one of the most important companies in IT to 'so what?'. How many people really care about anything Microsoft does anymore? Does anyone get excited about a new version of Windows? Or a new version of anything that Microsoft produce?
So Microsoft may be making plenty of money today, but what will they be doing in another decade? Where are the new products they should have been developing since 2000 that are going to make them billions in the future?
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think instead he appreciated the NDA he had to sign to gain access to the source(*), which coincidentally is how Microsoft operates. Except their recent open source offerings, but we can't mention those here, they're obviously a trap or something.
(*) Yes, this is pure speculation, much like the parent.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs is basically that guy who may not be very artistically inclined himself, but has absolutely uncanny taste and runs a gallery in SOHO that turns unknowns full of potential into superstars of the art world.
Only instead of starving artists, it's technologies.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Insightful)
To say .NET is unproven is an outright lie, and we both know trying to pin the LSE's failed IT upgrade on .NET is bullshit as well.
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine how much further ahead we'd be now if the 1990's Microsoft RAD IDE were C++ instead of Basic, and Microsoft Office Scripting were Lua or Perl instead of VBA? ...probably about in the same place. The biggest problem with VB was the fact that a bunch of noobs who didn't know much about programming were using it. The language really wasn't particularly inhibiting, even if it's not quite expressive as C++. That problem would have remained.
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... wow. That doesn't fit my recollection at all.
No (sane) person claimed Jobs invented the iPod. Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh either. He directed the final product to what it was, but he didn't start the process saying "this is exactly what we're building".
iTunes took off because of the iPod. The iTunes Music Store and DRM didn't come until years after the iPod had been out. MS screwed up with FairPlay, but they didn't have the market share to compete with the iPod at that point, so I'm sure it would have succeeded even if they hadn't scrapped it to make the Zune.
The iPhone wasn't a sales disaster. People lined up for the thing. People loved the thing. It was never going to capture 100% of the market at $500/$600, but for what it had, it wasn't a horrible price. High end smart phones often cost $300 or $400. The iPhone just didn't have the subsidy.
But it sold.
But Apple didn't keep it there, they dropped the price pretty quickly. The price probably helped keep the shortage from being worse. Either way, people were certainly willing to pay the premium, so economics says it wasn't a disaster. I don't know where you got "slow niche seller". It sold very well, and it's niche was "high end smart phone". It sold better when the 3G came out, but by then it had a year of people raving about how nice it was. If I was one of the other phone makers, I would have started shaking when Apple started selling the 3G at $99 this year. If Sprint/Verizon customers weren't locked out of getting the iPhone, do you really think they'd have sold so many of their "iPhone killer" phones in the last 2 years? I doubt it.
Is it really surprising Apple wants you to buy an Apple product to develop for the Apple platform? MS used to make you do the same thing.
Actually, at this point in your rant you seem to have switched from "Jobs got lucky over and OVER and OVER again" to "insert random Apple complaint here."
Then at the end, you go close to fanboy mode. You switch from Apple is evil and doesn't know what it's doing and is only succeeding because everyone else is screwing up to "Apple makes very good stuff, you should buy it".
Let's just pretend that Apple did get lucky over and over and over again. Lots of companies get lucky over and over and over again. Very few repeatedly capitalize on it, especially as well as Apple.
Either Apple knows what they are doing, or they know how to take advantage of everyone else not knowing what they are doing.
The first iMac could have been luck. People in the industry said it was, that it was Apple's last breath. They've managed to hold that breath for a long time now.
Apple isn't just lucky.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on how do you write a 4k BASIC interpreter and editor in assembly and not "know technology"?
I don't care how buggy Altair BASIC was, Bill Gates knew what he was doing back then.
I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree that it's about a tech-oriented CEO. MS's problem is that they are good at leveraging dominance of one market to conquer another. They are bundlers and package-oriented wheeler-dealers. However, the internet relies on open standards to function, and MS simply hasn't found out how to work smoothly among open-standards. Their instinct is and has always been to to kill them off via manipulation, and their reputation surrounding standards has hampered them. They simply came to the end of the leveraging-of-proprietary rope. This would have happened with or without Gates.
They would have to almost completely change company personality to get out of their rut, much like IBM did when they decided that services, not hardware, were going to be their thing. But IBM had to have it's face shoved into the boiling calderon of death before it realized it had to start over. MS is still a ways from that point.
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:2, Insightful)
since it's the only decent desktop ^nix and there is no crapware like on Dell's and HP's
Yeah, because you get to decide that. Right?
OSX is a playtoy for those who deliberately do not want to understand the very thing they use daily, and even accept the grossly limitation of their freedoms too keep that state, done right.
Windows is the same thing, done wrong.
The Linux desktop environments are somewhere in between. Gnome is trying to be like OSX, ideally having one single button reading "Do whatever I just think of right now". But as they have weak realities, they listen to the mass of retards, demanding it shall be more like what they are used to: Windows. So it acts and looks *exactly* like Windows. Including every tiny crap like whatever feature MS stole in the last update of Windows.
KDE on the other hand, wants to offer all the options. Which would be nice. If only they knew the meaning of the word "defaults" (as in: frees the user from *having* to go trough every setting, to change *one* thing). Also, because they don't want to be OSX, but are just as pathetic as Gnome, they imitate Windows even more strongly. From time to time, a nice idea gets through (like the semantic desktop), but gets fucked up beyond reality, right after that. Because the Wintards scream so much louder, when something that unusual comes their way.
I must say though, that Apple are the only ones of that bunch, who try to lead the way. Who have a strong reality, and stand behind it. OSX is not made out of looking at how others do it. That's why it's so great.
Linux though, despite the crappiness of its DEs, still beats everything, for its total and complete freedom, and scriptability. You can actually *use* your computer with Linux. For what it was invented for: To *automate* *your* work.
Windows is so successful because it's the OS for the pathetic masses without own opinions and extremely weak realities. Those who prefer to live their lives in a walking daze, voting whoever "others" would vote for (meaning: what the media tells them is the top candidate), preferring comfort over every other thing in their life. Over freedom. Over wealth. Over everything. Yelling "Hey, stop being so loud. You're disturbing my comfy TV session." to the guy who just bleeds to death, crying for help.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like you're guilty of the same thing. He doesn't do anything overtly technological anymore, merely spending his days doing philanthropy with his billions of dollars, and that means he's not a geek. Never mind that you have no idea what he does in his spare, private time. Never mind his geeky, green house. Never mind his previous efforts.
If he's not publicly geeky, according to you, there's no shade of gray, and he must not be a geek.
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. Apple did this with a graphic based OS. They did not create it, but they did figure out how to package it so that many people could afford it and see a reason to buy it. Not everyone could afford it, as it still required high end hardware like a dedicated GPU, but more people could. Importantly, like higher end computers, one was not sold a just a machine, but a system that would do something. Lower end machines cut prices by not including full functionality. The iPod and the iPhone is the same thing. Sure there better machines out there, but myu iPod mini was the price and had 10X the storage of the music player I had bought just two years before. And it could hold my addresses and dates to boot.
MS, OTOH, has been the company that has taken long existing technology and repackages it, usually in an extreme proprietary format, for commodity sales. Their products have support a wide variety of hardware because they do not sell any compelling hardware. They hold an important positions because allow a structure where people can buy the absolute cheapest pieces of hardware to meet their computing needs. This often is a benefit as people often consider their time to be worth nothing. In addition, MS supplies very good tools when you need many hundreds of people to have the same machines to do simple tasks, such as IBM did with the typewriter.
The software MS provides is very good, and there it suites many people needs, but they made two mistakes, neither of which is BillG fault. First, they did not provide a compelling reason for people to remain loyal to the Office products. The big reason to upgrade is collaboration, but collaboration is not a huge market. Mostly I see people writing memos in MS Word, and I don't think collaboration helps that much. There are other authoring tasks that people do need. For instance, I do not know why office does not include an real image editing program. This is what people want. GIMP is free, so why can't MS put a GIMP like program in there. I think it is the same reason you can't get into some MS web sites with cookies turned off. One takes what MS gives, or just go away.
The second reason is that they got too cocky. MS is very good at taking existing technologies and making them available to the masses. The only issue I have with them is they do in such a way to break everyone elses product. IMHO the problems started when MS decided MS Vista was going to the OS that took MS into the big leagues. Rather than supplying an OS to the masses, a OS that did what people needed at a cost that allowed very large deployments, MS got uppity and decided that the knock off business was not good enough. Nothing demonstrated this lack of business competence than the decision to create WinFS, which ultimately lead to the demonstration of technical incompetence. Now one had done a RDFS in a commercial product, so it had to be done from scratch, something that MS is not so good at. This distracted them from doing things they were good at, and ultimately lead to a OS that did not work with the hardware. Since MS OS is expected to work with hardware, and is not judged on it's own merits, people pretty much were dissatisfied and MS had to make a Herculean effort to get a new OS out in two years.
If anything, I would say Ballmer was a very good business person, as he has saved the company from what could have been a fatal decision made by his predecessor in 2003. If can get people to buy MS Windows 7, in spite of the mess that has been made of the company from 2004-2009, he should enjoy a good reputation.
Revised history (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of how it got there, having a mass market platform to develop against surely made many projects feasible that would otherwise have cost too much for niche markets.
UNIX was handling that just fine before Microsoft came along. You also forget there were other perfectly viable user platforms until that point, like Amiga or the Mac, or for that matter even OS/2. Any benefit gained was lost in the terrible issues we have resulting from a security monoculture.
Java is a tragic missed opportunity.
Given the number of jobs and active server side development going on, and the fact that Android is based atop it, and the fact that until now mobile programming such as it was was J2ME, and the fact that Java is in the Blu-Ray menuing system... I'm almost afraid to see what an un-missed opportunity looks like (apologies to Strunk & White for the numerous "fact that").
Buying up experts and stuffing them into R&D is always hit and miss. Generally you'll take a lot of misses to get the one big hit though. It takes time and even with the recession Microsoft is still spending over 9 billion on R&D this year..
The ultimate Ivory Tower, that doubles as a dungeon - despite all that money spent they have very little usable output to point to compared to Google or Apple or just about any other company that does R&D. It's more a place to try and keep smart people AWAY from other companies than it is a productive force.
I can honestly say that I don't think anyone cared much that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD.
It's not about you or I caring. It was all about Microsoft financially backing the format, and the companies that would have leapt from the sinking ship staying about because Microsoft was still there. It's a shame they didn't do further study on the fates of other Microsoft partners or many billions might have been saved (not that I shed any tears for the movie studios)...
Re:Bill Gates was not replaced only by Ballmer (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS [wikipedia.org].
Well, MS did develop Amiga Basic and I thank them for that.
Amiga Basic was so horrible that made me give up programming in Basic and switch to Pascal, then C.
The Best of Both is better (Score:3, Insightful)
.NET is way better than Java in many respects. In fact, now Java is implementing many features of the new C# version. And I thought competition led to better things and a single language led to stagnation?
Competition within the framework of a standard is better. Competition around competing resources is inherently wasteful.
To use the beloved Slashdot car analogy, would the competition among automakers be as good if everyone needed different roads or kinds of gas?
What I am saying with this is not anything about the quality of .Net or Java. What I am saying is, imagine if both camps had not wasted time working on the same parallel tracks and instead everyone had worked to define a better base Java, and then competed around the JVM's. Microsoft would have had a kick-ass JVM and probably a lot more people would be using it. Microsoft even started to do that but then decided to enhance the JVM outside of the community framework, and that was that.
Danger is that big of a deal? huh?
They were, if you were paying attention to feature phones at the time. They were on the road to becoming just as much of a success as Blackberry, they had a great mobile OS (for the time) and really well done UI. The fact you think so little of them proves my point.
R&D with no pressure to create real world output can give freedom to academics instead of always concentrating on the almighty dollar returns.
Or it can also lead to academic masturbation. Even in profitless universities, you have the pressure to publish which drives research to publishable results. Microsoft R&D doesn't have to publish. They don't have to do anything but deliver the equivalent of a $10k table computer once a decade or so.
They were pushing HDDVD how exactly?
With millions of dollars in backing? With a huge push to publish menus for HD-DVD using the Microsoft defined standard? By continually proclaiming to the press that HD-DVD had the "full backing" of Microsoft? By producing an HD-DVD player for the 360 (though actually that was a moment of weakness for if they had included it in every 360 the format may well have won, and it certainly would have meant there was even a fight at all).
How did they NOT push HD-DVD? Go back and read the news articles man, Microsoft is in every other story on HD-DVD.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers
Well before Microsoft made computers "standard and cheap" (and I am glad you used the term "cheap" instead of inexpensive as it is so much more fitting) I was paying far less than $3k for a computer. Apple? Amiga? AtarI? Even around the time of Win 3.1, you had OS/2 and computers were not much - and they could run Linux easily too... There's a reason they were actually declared a monopoly, and the fact that unhealthy monopoly was never addressed has been a huge drag on the industry.
The world has lost too much time at the hands of Microsoft to claim there was ever an overall benefit. You can see the proof of this in how healthy competition is finally occurring on the web thanks to XHTML and the rise of alternative browsers, and how much more vibrant the world of smartphones is with Web OS, iPhone OS, and Android now that Microsoft is not stifling competition in the sector out of fear of what they might do.
Re:Can a good manager manage anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Pure" managers are good - if they understand that they know zilch about what the company actually does and leave that to the people who do. Unfortunately, most CEO types don't have the character for that (hard to fight your way to the top when you're conscious of your shortcomings). Balmer certainly isn't one of the guys who knows what not to do himself. If nothing else convinces you of that, consider that he could've hired an actor/dancer for the monkey dance.
In the end, if you can delegate and trust people, you can do anything with any knowledge or lack of that, because in a large enough company, you have people to do the stuff you know nothing about. But you have to trust those people, and that's the hard part.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Insightful)
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
what have they done for us lately? (Score:2, Insightful)
What was the last innovative thing MS did, where you got order-of-magnitude coolness for upgrading? 3.11 to Win95? Active Directory? Other than driver support, new themes, and building more applications into OS-level stuff (hello IIS) where are they?
Where is a real volume manager? Where is virtualization? Where is workload balancing?
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
As a long time MS employee I can say that what the article says is only partially true. Because Ballmer is no businessman either.
He would rather save a dollar than earn 10. He is so focused on reducing costs that he leaves billions in the table to save millions.
His management style could make sense in a company whose main problem is low margins, but when you have >50% operating margins and your only threats come from your competitors being able to outinnovate you (in many cases, simply through investing more, such as in mobile), then focusing on cost is not only absurd, it is irresponsible. If it wasn't his money as well I would claim he's a crook. Since it is, he's just a jerk.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Insightful)
They tried that. It's called getting sued by Sun for trying to actually exploit features on your operating system.
If by "tried" you mean "implement features not in the standard and claim to be implementing the standard" then yes, they tried.
In reality they should have gone through the JCP, which was and is the Java standards body. Many companies besides Sun were definining extensions to the Java language and VM using that process just fine, which results in the Java you see today. Microsoft had a standing offer to join that body and be a contributing member.
You just can't step outside of a standard and not expect to be slapped down.
Danger... really? They bought them like 2 years ago. What exactly do you think Danger had planned to do in this past two years that would have revolutionized the cellphone industry?
They had a decent OS that a lot of users really loved. Then - nothing happened. All we know is that a company with a popular platform and a lot of very smart developers was taken out of the game, so we can't say what might have been from them.
Can you give me one example of this? Most of the people doing R&D are researchers. Microsoft researchers have free reign to publish whatever they like, and they do.
Having the ability to publish is NOTHING like being forced to, regularly. They have they freedom to do anything, and so like a guy laid off with a bunch of videogames - nothing happens, they just play and the world is not made better as a result.
The example I give is every other company that uses R&D to produce real products and thus has actually advanced the state of the art in real life.
Product developers almost never go to MS R&D -- at least no experts that I can think of.
And that, is why they fail.
Your history on this is screwed up. If you recall HD-DVD was doing quite well until WB announced right before CES (or maybe during) that they were going to support Blu-Ray.
I recall pretty well, since I followed the whole war multiple times per day for the entire duration.
The HD-DVD war was totally lost from day 1 with Blu-Ray having Disney and Fox and Sony totally on it's side. Any way you did the math they were never going to have a compelling advantage without those studios on it's side, at best they could drag out the war and die slowly. It just so happened that WB woke up that both formats might well die instead of one and decided to end the pointless struggle. The WB switch was only a surprise to people who had need seen the writing on the wall a year earlier. If you "paid attention" to player sales well before that point HD-DVD was screwed as it had an order of magnitude fewer player sales than HD-DVD, (and yes you have to include the PS-3 in that equation but it does count as a player, as much as HD-DVD people liked to stick heads in the sand and claim it did not). Furthermore at that point there was almost an order of magnitude fewer HD-DVD sales for the same movie in both formats (using Amazon rankings at the time). Again, that was months before the WB switch that all was true.
If HD-DVD had convinced a studio to switch, things might have been different - but it wasn't going to happen, and even there Microsoft played a large role by not putting an HD-DVD player in every 360 sold. That might have got critical mass to where a studio would have considered switching.
The funny thing is that part of the reason the studios went with Blu-Ray is because it has much tighter DRM.
BD Plus is why Fox stuck with it. But the reason WB sent there is, it's where the installed player base was. You can't sell movies in a format no-one has players for.
All you need to know (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft mission statement under Bill Gates:
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software".
Translation: we want world domination!
Microsoft mission statement under Steve Ballmer:
"Help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
Translation: none: no meaningful information conveyed; incomprehensible marketspeak.
Everything else is just following from that, really.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that Gates only knew 1960's and 1970's tech doesn't change the poster's point. What languages does Ballmer code in?
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
Uncanny insight? Lisa? NeXT? Let's not try to rewrite history here...
The Lisa was the competitor (internally at Apple) to Jobs' baby, the Macintosh. I think we all know which one won that battle.
Wikipedia has the following [wikipedia.org] to say on NeXT's impact : "Despite NeXT's limited commercial success, the company had a profound impact on the computer industry. Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXTcube and NeXTSTEP, when other companies started to emulate NeXT's object-oriented system."
There's a reason why the first browser was written on a NeXT cube you know. Berners-Lee says [w3.org] : "I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)"
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Insightful)
.Net is just a language and some tools. Where the problem lies is that many .Net developers have no history or grounding in designing or working on high availability systems. Afterall, they are used to having their workstaions reboot for patches and updates, 8)
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:4, Insightful)
A good boss knows that he doesn't know it better than people he hired exactly because they know better. Else he would not have hired them.
A bad boss doesn't know that.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think that Microsoft is responsible for those viruses? Virus makers target Microsoft products because they have the widest user base and the greatest number of users who aren't computer savy (and are therefore more likely to fall for the tricks).
To be sure - a lot of the current issues are squarely on the shoulders of end users; the dancing pigs problem. But that doesn't completely absolve the platform. There are times when people do dangerous things that simply shouldn't be dangerous. Often these come down to poor decisions on Microsoft's part. Couple that with a history of ignoring security issues and Microsoft's history is full of issues that, yes, I would put squarely on Microsoft's shoulders.
It's difficult to see that now. If your perspective is short, one could dismiss so many complaints as FUD. Microsoft has improved a lot over the years. It's a pity they didn't pick up on these things earlier. And they could have.
You see, neither Microsoft nor Windows should be credited with trivial exploits, trust by default (enable by default?), worms, or even (arguably) botnets. Most of this ilk had very clear examples in the Unix world. Lessons were (reluctantly) learned and the Unix world started to grudgingly shuffle their feet towards a more secure reality. Microsoft had excellent object lessons to learn from. One of the many sins of Microsoft is that they ignored these lessons. With abandon.
Re:The problem is not just Ballmer (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is successful because they are delivering the business and home markets the products they want at the prices they're willing to pay.
Why would you break up Microsoft?
Consumers are free to move to Apple any time they want. I did years ago. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. I was worried when I brought home my first mac that Bill Gates would turn up at my door with hired goons and "buy me out", but much to my surprise, nothing happened.
The problem continues to be not Microsoft, but that Microsoft's competitors do not deliver the products most consumers want at the prices they're willing to pay.
Re:Bill Gates was not replaced only by Ballmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus the fact that Netscape fucked up and turned their browser into that bloated, bug-ridden net suite called Communicator.
"Lost Decade" - Not (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch.
And this was a "lost decade?"
General Motors had a lost decade. Microsoft did not.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs is not a geek per se but he talks our language, that's how he got involved with Woz.
And by "got involved" you mean befriended, used and stabbed in the back?
I didn't get that impression when I read iWoz (Woz' autobiography.) He says Jobs was his best friend and was hurt when he later found out Jobs (allegedly) didn't fairly split their first earnings but there didn't seem to be bad blood between them. In fact it sounded rather Peter Pan-esque, as if Woz was an idealistic big kid and he stayed true to his hippy ideals while Jobs went off into the grown up world and they grew apart. On his website he does say he cried tears of joy [woz.org] when Jobs returned to Apple : "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was spotted walking over to the exhibit hall after the speech. "I cried," said Wozniak, in reaction to Jobs' decision. "It felt just like the old days, with Steve making announcements that shook my world."
[...]
Woz: Well, I did actually cry at two places. The imovie with the kids was so good, and then when Steve announced his CEO plans it felt like yesterday's dreams had returned. "
So they're not exactly sworn enemies.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. Jobs is a salesman. Ballmer isn't. Jobs is a salesman with vision. Ballmer has very good business sense, and a competitive streak a mile wide. But I'd argue that Ballmer has far less vision, and isn't really a salesman as much as a businessman at the end of the day.
-Peter
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
Writing an interpreter for BASIC is 70's equivalent of writing a phonebook application in PHP. It may sound difficult because modern geeks are unfamiliar with assembly and interpreters, however this is merely the result of the area being too far outside of the current range of practically useful problems.
Not that I would ever recommend against studying assembly, languages and compiler theory (the latter two still beyond what Gates knew as all BASIC implementations are mostly ad-hoc) -- this knowledge is always useful, just does not automatically translate into an immediately useful project.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work
And what exactly is the job of the CEO in contrast?
He didn't write code, but being a software geek, he could tell [joelonsoftware.com] if his employees actually knew what they were doing.
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra.
Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.
If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support .innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ? Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes)...
That's one of maybe a handful of things they may have gotten sorta right, depending, of course, on the viewpoint of whichever web developer you'd ask...see here [wikipedia.org]. Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including /. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray. Further, we can see here [wikipedia.org] that IE, in fact, also supports it. Even further, when reading here [wikipedia.org], under 'Nonstandard Features', the article notes...
'Nuff said.
and the competition had to make a choice between :-
1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed to failure)
Lolwut? Aceepting? How is that done? When & how did the W3 standards become "out of date"? What's the qualifier, oh, great all-knowing master of teh vast intarwebs [encycloped...matica.com]? Oh, also, here's a tip. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're an IE user based off your enthusiastic support [encycloped...matica.com] for Bill & Steve, or at least their browser. If there's no spell-checker in IE, there's always wordpad. [WINKEY]+R, type "Wordpad", hit Enter. Voilà! That way you won't seem quite as idiotic & incoherent when you post. Unfortunately, the content of your post is just something for which I can't render proper assistance. But I do wish you and your IQ the best of luck. You'll need it.
or
2) Risk having the world saying "Firefox / Safari / Opera sucks because the DHTML don't work like is does in IE".
Yes, everyone is saying those browsers suck, in the form of using them more while abandoning IE [w3schools.com]... This should be obvious, amirite?
So what it really boils down to is a case of the other browsers playing a game of "you should follow standards like we do, unless MS or someone else do something better, in which we'll ignore the principles we were founded on and simply follow the leader instead".
LOL, disproven.
Or perhaps would you have all browser development forbidden until the HTML5 spec is finalized when ? 2025 ?
I guess you're an expert [encycloped...matica.com] on these things, yes? I think listening to someone who can't even spell-check would be a good idea.
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:3, Insightful)
That's indeed correct and the way it should be ... what annoys me is when OSS do something, it's "innovative and wonderful", but when MS do the same thing, it's "non standard and bad" ... regardless of whether it's later adopted as "de-facto" or not.
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:1, Insightful)
If it wasn't his money as well I would claim he's a crook. Since it is, he's just a jerk.
As another MS employee, seconded.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:1, Insightful)
You can convince me that Java is faster in a few specialized code snippets but you are fooling yourself if you think a language that is interpreted through a VM, contains a garbage collector, and other Java inneficiencies runs faster than a language that is compiled directly to native assembly. If you have ever written both a C program and a Java program you know Java is, in practice, leaps and bounds slower than C. The only real exception is if you are HORRIBLE C programmer and a godlike Java programmer.
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe that they even have multiple projects going on for the same thing and one gets picked and the others get scrapped.
That's an old IBM strategy and, if you can do it right, it actually makes sense when you are at the top of the industry. Firstly, there's always the problem that your developers don't feel the fear of competition on the back of their necks and so don't strive to be the best. If you know you only have a one in three chance of your project going through then you will never have that situation. Secondly, most software development fails. Despite what some "software engineering" people tell you it is nothing like building bridges and small almost random aesthetic decisions early in the development process can completely change the long term logic of your architecture and so how easy it is to use. Developing things three times and independently theoretically means that you have three times the chance to get it right. I think in Microsoft's case this falls down for two reasons. Firstly, it seems that they don't actually cancel all but one project; the office group chooses their own and the OS group also chooses their own. Secondly, the common company culture likely means that all three development efforts come up with similar designs with similar problems.
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.
Hmm, let's see ... how's Flash for one ? For sure in terms of video streaming, it's been adopted worldwide and will never change even when HTML5 is widely supported ... too many corporates have invested too much time and money in Flash to convert everything to an open source format just for some OSS ethic that gives them zero added benefit. There, no waiting required.
Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including /. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray
Not the *entire* DOM model, I didn't say that now did I ? I was referring to the insertNode, appendNode, deleteNode methods that allow manipulation of a node within the tree and can all be avoide by use of .innerHTML. And while we're on the subject of AJAX ...
In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element to HTML, which also enables this (asynchronous loading of content) to be achieved.
In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which is now supported by Mozilla, Safari and other browsers as the native XMLHttpRequest object.
On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
Maybe you get my point about "standards", trying to quantify (first draft only) some technique that has already been available and working fine FOR 7 BLOODY YEARS ! (10 if you count iframe as an older mtheod of achieving the same thing).
As to the rest of your post, having obviously run out of coherent things to say, you resort to a spelling Nazi attack on "Aceepting" ?
It's called a typo, ffs. As there seems to be nothing in the W3C spec (yet) regarding the mandatory use of an inbuilt spell-checker before posting a comment to Slashdot, I'll carry on posting my thoughts as is, typos be damned.
Really, if that is the best you can do, then there's nothing more to say.
Re:Bill Gates was not replaced only by Ballmer (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus the fact that Netscape fucked up and turned their browser into that bloated, bug-ridden net suite called Communicator.
Hear hear. At the time of the respective 3-4 versions Microsoft was delivering a far better browser than Netscape, no contest, hard as that is to believe for the folks set in their mind about all MS products being bad and all competitors loosing despite superior products.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
By "artistically inclined" you mean he's a slick talking con artist right?
No, I believe they mean that Jobs has taste and considerable insight; even if he is not technically inclined himself, he recognises talent and good work. Perhaps you don't understand what that means, but equating artistic taste with 'slick talking con artist' as a joke simply demonstrates your ignorance.
Marketing or tricks are not at the heart of Apple's success - they sell because the products are of good quality, holistically designed, and have a good UI. They have other faults, and are not a good choice for everyone, but to dismiss Jobs as a con-man is to completely misunderstand the reasons people buy Apple products.
Re:It's not about Java or .Net. It's about progres (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd say the competition of .NET made Java progress.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:3, Insightful)
Quoting: "Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that."
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft failed to recognize the importance of the internet long after it became important to myself and people I knew, like a friend at Tektronix. I remember downloading something from a computer at a university in Japan and being hugely impressed. Remember that there was an internet long before there was a fully public internet.
Next sentence from the comment below: "Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft."
That program was very limited. It was, of course, NOT a "traffic control program". It only counted switch closures and recorded the data for later analysis.
Consider the history of Windows, as recounted in the books about Microsoft, such as Hard Drive. Microsoft had supplied DOS, an OS originally bought from someone else. According to that book, Microsoft stopped competition by announcing Windows long before it was ready. The first version of Windows was worthless, in my opinion. The second version was a toy. The third version was the first that was actually useful. It crashed a lot, and handled fonts badly. Windows version 3.1 was the first acceptable product.
Wow, how deluded can you get? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, since when has MS EVER promoted standards?
They didn't write the basic compiler, it was copied and badly copied at that.
And then there is the real joke that shows you have no clue whatsoever about computer history. It was Compaq that created the IBM-clone. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next time you read up on history, don't do it at microsoft.com.
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:1, Insightful)
no, you're simply wrong. 100% wrong. You're like the guy a few years I ago I heard on Slashdot moaning that "not buying a house 9 years ago has cost him $185,000" (or whatever figure). Because that's how much the bubble in his area drove up prices. Only, in the time since (since this was a few years ago) I know that bubble popped, and I can only assume that original poster is the one now laughing for not being stuck with a monthly mortgage payment higher than his gross income. Same with you. Now, you moan how someone is "leaving trillions" on the table (why not quadrillions, if we are allowed to just make shit up?) whereas the truth, the reality of the situation, is that the money you spend is gone, but the money you are going to earn might never come. And if the financial crisis of recent times has proved anything -- and it looks like it hasn't -- it's that thinking like yours, the bubble mentality, is stupid and irresponsible. People, and companies, should spend what they have, not some of what they hope they will get.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:3, Insightful)
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than .NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps. .NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Actually he's quite right. As a professional Java programmer that has been doing it for a living for a while now, I tell you that .NET pretty much has many of Java mistakes *fixed*, in particular support for multiple languages and a common type system.
As for the benchmarks, you have to differentiate between Java, the language and the JVM. The JVM is far superior to anything else, including .NET. Java, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. The London Stock Exchange decision had the JVM as the contributing factor, with OS-specific performance factors coming second, not the language.
For any argument to make sense, you *must* separate Java factors from JVM factors. For most of my Java career I spent it on the back-end, first on CORBA and then on J2EE, trying to get it as close to the metal as possible, taking the OS (mostly Solaris and Linux) and network into account, which you have to in high performance (or non-mediocre^_^) enterprise computing. In the last couple of years I've had the fortune to look and evaluate Java vs .NET and other non-Java JVM solutions.
It really gets you to understand the short comings of Java and on how lucky we are that we have the best VM available for enterprise computing.
bjourne is right on the mark that Sun has fucked up the Java language - it is a wasteland of missing opportunities where unproven standards designed committee and academic/tool-vendor driven syntactic salt and bloated, fringe-case scenario solutions were force-fed to the development community (remember the *Pet Store* in EJB 1.0?
The entire community has had to fight that back and come with their own solutions to solve real problems in enterprise computing (Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Velocity, Wicket, Jakarta-*) And the community by itself has had to explore non-Java alternatives for the JVM for addressing actual gaps in the language - compare that to .NET which from the start attempted to support that with a common type system.
Your reply about bench marking is non-sequitur as it applies to the JVM (seriously) and about the London Stock Exchange, it is about cases where the utmost in high performance and throughput are required. It's like XA - more often than not, it does not apply.
For the general case in enterprise computing, either JVM or .NET do fine, and it has to do more with making the right choices in integration, architecture and implementation than on the platform itself.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
He just wrote a compile in machine code? Just?
Do you realize that *that* is a lot more than most of the self-proclaimed "geeks" in /. have ever/will ever accomplish when it comes to genuine geekiness (installing Linux to run gcc to complete homeworks and posting on /. does not count as geek ingenuity, at least *productive* geek ingenuity that is.)
Hell, that's more than the average CS senior student has done in the last 2 decades <rimshot/>
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive carefully. (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people have become enthusiastic about computers when they were young. The differences in the case of Bill Gates are that he had rich parents, and that he wanted to start a business.
The later chapters in the book give a better understanding. If I remember correctly what was in that particular book, it was quite clear that Bill Gates was not particularly knowledgeable about technology. That's something he apparently has in common with many technology company managers.
The Road Ahead is typical of the thinking of Bill Gates, it appears to me. He was one of the authors, so it should be.
Re:"that's Fake Steve to you" (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no bile there. The man has proven himself a shill who will take any position on any given subject if it gets him enough attention. He doesn't have any special information or well-reasoned arguments in this or most anything else he writes. The positive contribution here is raising awareness of the writer's scruples when it comes to tech reporting. I'm no 'GNU/drone', whatever that is. This piece attacks Microsoft/Ballmer because that is what will get the attention of some readers. It hardly has any basis in fact (see I'm defending MS here).
Daniel Lyons is a disingenuous shill-or-hire and attention whore. I contend that he contributes nothing positive to the discussion of technology issues and should be ignored. Now, where was your positive contribution to the discussion?
It's obvioius (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates: Buys out your company if he perceives you as a threat. Your employees might be screwed but you're set for life.
Ballmer: Throws chairs out the window and shouts death threats "I'M GOING TO F$^@ING KILL YOU"
-
Gates: Works with developers in a cooperative fashion, making feature suggestions and helping architect back ends
Ballmer: has for years been trying to turn Microsoft into a cult, much like multi-level-marketing companies, what with his stomping around like an orangatan while chanting "developers developers developers" although he couldn't code his way through a batch file
-
Gates: is actually somewhat friendly and down to earth even though he's cutthroat in business
Ballmer: Douchebag to the core