Bill Gates's Last Speech 389
Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.
Re:don't let the door (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness though - I think Bill got all he can get out of MSFT... the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."
The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.
From here on out, any further news will be tacked onto Ballmer's reputation, both inside and outside the tech community (even though most of us in the tech community already know who to blame/praise --depending on your viewpoint).
Innovation ProTip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Innovation ProTip (Score:4, Insightful)
Most everything today is incremental improvements, rarely does true innovation come along now. Where is the Woz when you need him?
And, just to clarify, i wont be leasing my processing power thank you very much.
Devil's advocate (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're going to play devil's advocate than you have to play up Microsoft's strengths. Say what you will about Office, but it dominates for reasons aside of lock-in.
And what about Surface [microsoft.com]? I'd like to see the folks at apple come up with something as cool as that. There is a *nix variant, but it's not nearly as cool. And no, the puny widdle scween on the iPhone dosen't count! Sure, the cost of a Surface unit would be prohibitive to average Joe User but people may re-respect Microsoft if they get to play with a Surface coffee-table at their local Starbucks.
Disclaimer: I'm OS agnostic as long as all o' them are contribute to the idea pool.
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:2, Insightful)
So far, Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success".
(Oh wow! Best.sig.ev4r.)
Re:Flamebait? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey! What's one million minus 991730? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer Is All That Is Holding Back MSFT (Score:5, Insightful)
Win32 is often confused with the steaming pile of MS APIs on top of it: MFC, COM, etc. Those indeed need to be exiled to a virtualization layer.
Re:don't let the door (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.
Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?
Re:Hey! What's one million minus 991730? (Score:5, Insightful)
And to stay on topic - Microsoft plays catch up in a lot of areas, but from what I hear their research divisions still put out some pretty neat stuff, some of which actually making it into their future products. Unfortunately (for the really neat stuff) most of their products are still encumbered by these giant backwards-compatibility or easy marketability things, or at the very least the illusion of them. These are also coincidently a large part of why so many people and companies still buy and use their products - compatibility with the status quo plus incremental upgrades.
Their developer tools tend to be less encumbered by this don't-disturb-the-status-quo thing, which is why they tend to rock - but these have another downside - then you generally end up tied to Microsoft platforms, which allows them to preserve keep selling their software and your software to continue to run in backwards-compatible mode on everyone's desktop without as much as being recompiled for a decade or so. Funny, huh?
Re:don't let the door (Score:3, Insightful)
Sane? If the decision makers at MS were sane, chairs wouldn't get thrown, the ISO would not have tampered with, and there wouldn't be millions (or is it billions now?) of dollars worth of fines on them.
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:5, Insightful)
the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."
Pffft. Get over yourself, pl0x.
At peak, Microsoft held $64,000,000,000 in LIQUID CASH ASSETS. Think about that. (source) [nwsource.com]
At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves. In terms of gross domestic product, that puts Microsoft's cash reserves 80th (out of 180 sovereign nations) when compared worldwide to yearly GDP. (wikipedia). And it's only dropped to that level because Microsoft, after it won all the antitrust battles, instituted a stock buy-back.
If Microsoft were to never, ever sell another product or acquire a business or accept a licensing fee, and simply put that money into a money market account at a bank pulling 8% interest, they would make 2,300,000,000 yearly. Wikipedia lists Microsoft as having 79,000 employees. Just with the interest they could make without any strategic investing, they could pay each employee at the company $30,000 a year. For nothing. Before the stock buyback, that number was around $70,000.
Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.
That's how "not in trouble" Microsoft is. Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't. Microsoft is not in danger.
~Wx
Re:don't let the door (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.
Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:3, Insightful)
A serious "Goodbye" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding. I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. I *wish* I had the left hemisphere brain activity he did. But you can only GET that activity if the passion to do it drives you.
For that, I applaud Bill Gates, as he is like many of us - he's passionate about technology.
Business is a completely different arena, and we all know that big business eventually corrupts - that isn't most directly Bill's fault - he's just a bad business man, in that sense.
I use Linux every day. I absolutely HATE Windows (and most other Microsoft) products. I hate them with a passion. I avidly try to get as many people using Linux as I can - my grandma, my wife's friends, you name it. That doesn't mean Bill Gates wasn't revolutionary and awesome because his drive was to create software. If it were all him coding Windows, 100%, you'd have to admit it'd probably be a lot better than it is today. Too many chefs in the kitchen just burns things when the ultimate goal is profit.
I dunno, I just thought I'd throw that into a whole ocean full of flames toward someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st.
Re:don't let the door (Score:5, Insightful)
Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run [proudlyserving.com]. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?
In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog [msdn.com]. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!
Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War [joelonsoftware.com]. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that Microsoft is wealthier than my country is not in question. They have a shitload of money, but they no longer wield the kind of influence and strike the kind of fear into the hearts of competitors as they once were able. Paul Graham put it very well in this article [paulgraham.com].
Microsoft will likely persist for a long, long time indeed, but people at the leading edge of software development need no longer be afraid of what they might or might not do. They have, in a sense, ceased to matter for those engaged in software development, a lot like the way IBM and SAP are too. Sure, they've got lots of money, and they aren't really going to stop making more, but there's no way in hell that they're going to use that massive war chest that dwarfs the funds available to some third world countries to bring themselves back into serious relevancy. Their very size makes that impossible. Their shareholders would never allow the immense risk doing that would entail.
You too can program like Bill Gates (Score:3, Insightful)
He never was as much of a coder as a shrewd businessman.
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:1, Insightful)
All in all, judging from their behaviors to abuse their monopolies to gain more monopolies, you can't honestly said that MS avoids monopoly and that they like to compete. Competing means having better products, service, prices. Not FUD, stealing, screwing partners, blackmails etc.
Re:A serious "Goodbye" (Score:4, Insightful)
One of Bill's very first public appearance was his "open letter" where he showed a great passion for money and business, and very little for software and coding.
You've got this guy absolutely backwards.
Re:A serious "Goodbye" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You will be missed bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates did not put low cost PC's into the hands of the masses. IBM did that and it would have done it without Microsoft. Without MS they would incidentially have offered a better product as the competition was technologically superiour (yes, I have used both).
The main thing Bill did was to create, aquire and push mediocte technology on everybopdy and to ignore the state of the art, thereby slowing innovation sgnificantly. My beef is not with MS marketing. These people are scum almost anywhere. My beef is with the appalinbgly low quality of the MS ''OSes'' and ''productivity software'' and the inordinate amount of time beging wasted, when alternative approaches, that work better, are available. If you want easy, look to Apple. If you want powerful and cheap, look to Linux. If you want reliable, look to both. If you want slow, unreliable, expensive, unintuitive, complex to operate, full of stupid design decision in the presence of better alternatives, look to MS productes and Bill Gates was involved with these bad design decisions. With regard to technology, Bill Gates is, at best, a mediocre engineer with a hugely inflate ego, that is unaware of his true skill level. He will not be missed and his era has lasted far to long.
Actually not. Admins are expensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, Windows pretty much has to be installed onto a hard disk. This means there are thousands of configuration settings, hundreds of libraries of specific versions which all have to be kept synchronized on tens or hundreds of thousands of hard disks. This is a fucking nightmare once you get past a few dozens of machines never mind 200,000. There is at least a linear increase in admin effort with increasing numbers of machines, and with that increase goes cost. Active Directory and Ghost are pretty much de rigueur but don't really fix the problem. Notice that Ghost isn't even an MS product, but a bandaid to fix something the OS can't do (Yes, I'm aware of the MS deployment add ons).
The problem is location of state; on 200,000 hard disks or 1 boot server. Simple maths. Basically, Windows will have to be redesigned so that it can boot and run over the LAN or from a ramdisk or whatever. That's the point when it really becomes "Enterprise ready" rather than being a pretender.
Re:A serious reply, but even shorter... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A serious reply, but even shorter... (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Office was star office, which was based off an older product, but in the end the spreadsheet was based off of lotus 123 older than both.
MSFT doesn't innovate, they let other people come up with good ideas and then implement it themselves poorly. or as the saying goes MSFT reinventing unix poorly for 25 years. While there are time when MSFT has been ahead in some departments. the infamous database filesystem(now winFS) was started because of the database filesystem BeFS way back in the mid 90's.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)