OK, I've just read the infamous Bill Gates Newsweek interview, where the man tells some of the most embarrassingly bold-faced lies ever heard.
As the interview went live, like, five decades ago in internet years, it has since received most of the flak it deserves, for example, by the excellent Macalope.
However, I would like to reflect on a few things now, when the dust has more or less settled.
It has been covered that the interview sounds like a frustrated rant about Apple and the Mac, even though the whole piece was supposed to be about Vista, the brand new shiny Windows version that should have licensed the "65 million years of adventure in the making" slogan from Jurassic Park (at least, in internet years). Yet I find it noteworthy that in the interview, it was Gates who brought up Apple first:
The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.Boom! He is talking about Windows security, and suddenly, he has to leash out against Apple, apropos nothing.
When did Microsoft become the underdog? Is it the beginning of the end? Is Microsoft growing tired of playing catch-up to Apple in just about everything except sheer volume? Is Bill Gates relapsing into the state of mind of his youth when Apple was the big guy and Microsoft was the poor wannabe? Does he fear that his company is going full circle after all these years?
But the real shocker comes later. When asked whether there will be another major version of Windows in three or four years, Gates has a staggering, unbelievable thing to say. I had to read it like four times, just to make sure I'm getting it right, and not missing a comma or a word somewhere. Here's what the chairman of Microsoft is saying about the latest and greatest version of Windows, the ubiquitous operating system that powers (yeah, right) 90% of all PCs worldwide:
Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Microsoft knows that Vista isn't good enough. But it has no idea how to make it better. So check back in about three or four years.
Um... If you're this bad about what you're doing, Dear Microsoft, and even your chairman knows… shouldn't you just quit?!
This is not humility or modesty. This is a flat-out admission of incompetence.
Looks like Microsoft has no quibbles about manufacturing the operating system for people who don't care. Hm. Maybe they should trademark that and use it as a slogan.
