Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

["David" <iamdavid@iname.com>]

I would like to take issue with some of your points....

> Bruce Baker (Bruce.Baker@juge.com) wrote:
> : I didn't see this movie but people who poopoo Bill Gates are missing a lot.
> : Gates obviously does a lot of things right or his company wouldn't be where
it
> : is.  This is the pure and simple fact.  Now you may not like the man, or you
> : may be jealous of the man and his wealth.  But the fact is he has kept
quality
> : very high and he has satisfied his customers.   Otherwise people would have
> : bought other software.  Now they may not have a choice about operating
systems,
> : but they do on software.

How can you say that Gates has kept quality very high...... Win98 was a
2000+ bug fix of Win95 and Win2k a 5000 Bug fix of Win98. That's very  high
quality????? You are easily pleased.

The whole point of the objections to Gates and his philosphy is that quality
DOESN'T matter to him, numbers do, especially if they have the "$" in front.
You have to bear in mind that a very high proportion of computer users, Mac
and PC do not play with their systems and will use whatever defaults are set
for them in the factory. Hence most will use Internet Explorer as it is the
default browser in Windows.

However for the more advanced user, the beauty of the MacOS is the ease of
use and the simplicity of customization. On a Wintel system it is nigh-on
impossible to know what was installed with any application. Whilst it is
true that later versions of the MacOS tend to get bloated, this can be
avoided with prudent installations, and it is only Microsoft programs that
drop all sorts of crap in the system folder without an installer log file so
you can find it all later. In general, all the parts of an installation are
placed with an application in its folder. I was asked by someone why there
isn't and uninstaller bundled with the MacOS, and when I showed that that
all you have to do to delete a program from the machine was to delete its
folder and it preferences, they were amazed.

Gates' organization first of all conned the Seattle company out of their
operating system, and then stole the MacOS. When Jobs & Co went to Xerox, it
was all open and above board, and the level of development of the Xerox
system was hardly at an advanced stage. They could not for instance have
more than one window open at a time, and had to fake it for the demo. So it
not really a fair comparison. I did see the movie on Father's Day, and am
sure glad that neither Jobs nor Gates is my Father. Neither is a nice
person, but in my opinion, based on what I have read and observed over the
years, Gates is little more than a crook, and at least Jobs has a streak of
genius in him.

Just my 2 cents.