Bill Gates in Newsweek

if you haven’t seen the Bill Gates’ Newsweek interview I would recommends it. If nothing else just to see how out of touch the guy is with the industry he was so pivotal in establishing. When he was asked for the Vista elevator speech the best he could do was say he wanted to sit down with the customer and explain the new look and features. It’s basically admitting that the value of upgrading is a)not obvious and b)requires some amount of training. It’s not a compelling marketing statement in the least, and particularly disturbing that the recognized head of the business (in title or not) cannot boil down the value of the release in any tangible way. Searching ‘a lot of photos’ is not even remotely close to a compelling reason to upgrade your OS, no matter the platform.

I also think his beefs with Apple are more than laughable, particularly his take on the adoption of Mac features in Vista. “If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is.” Interesting, Jim’s on a boat somewhere, but maybe someday we can read about all of it in his memoirs, likely written on a MacBook somewhere. But if you want to know who the real Bill Gates is I think this quote sums him up pretty well:

“I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.”

I don’t know about you, but to me taht sounds like a kid who had his candy taken away. What the hell does any of that even mean, it’s schoolyard nonsense. Really disappointing drivel.

Continuing…

When asked what to expect from the next version of Windows, Gates responded, “Well, it will be more user-centric.” When prompted he clarified that he doesn’t mean the interface will better serve users, but that the users’ profile and home ’stuff’ could possible be more portable and accessed from many machines. Oh and also higher-level built in graphics, so that you can’t possibly dream of having the hardware to support the coolness of their WiMP visualizer, at least not for another few years. The best he can do for whipping us up into a frenzy for the next OS is that you can access your fonts from any machine (seriously he said that) and there will be more intense graphics built-in…stellar.