Ok thats all I had to say.

earl

Get a job.

Think.

John: As stated before, it was certainly not my intention to downplay Gates’s efforts in philanthropy. This article just focused on his role as Chief technical guy at MS in the last 3-5 years.

Waffles: Gates’s management of Vista is a failure. Windows Vista itself has become a fraction of what it was supposed to be. It will certainly be better than XP if they can make it a quality release. But it is faaaar from what was promised in 2003. And in that regard, it is a failure.

And calling Vista a failure seems incredibly uniformed in my opinion. Its not like it was just supposed to be XP with WinFS tacked on. Its a MAJOR rewrite. WinFS would have been NEAT but there are so many other more important things they are accomplishing with vista.

*shrug*

ActiveX: M$ only web app api
MSN IM: closed standard so only M$ platforms can talk on it ( I’m using a couple of linux IM programs that support M$ protocal but M$ keep changing it to block Linux & Mac clients).

Hotmail : bought my M$
Skype: all the features now in Windows Messenger Live.

Graphics API: couldn’t gain control over OpenGL so bought out another company that had something close and renamed it DirectX

Virtual Machines: Needed to compete with Connectix and VMWare so bought Connectix’s VirtualPC product.

WebServices: Tied to make everyone believe they invented it, renamed it .NET

Open Document Standards: One was agreed and approved using XML and adopted by OfficeOffice, StarOffice and another I can never remember the name of, but M$ don’t have control over it so the next M$ Office will not support it and it instead will use a M$ XML format for documents.

Now Vista is coming ( sometime before the end of the world, the two things may be connected )
Apart from a flashy desktop ( Fedora 5 & Suse 10.1 both can do transparent windows and such already, so big deal there ) what does Vista offer?
Just look at the min reqs for Vista then compare to other OS’s. it a joke.
I can run a full server install of Suse 10.1 complete with transparent windows and all the nice effects in a M$ VirtualPC with only 512MB memory and no graphics hardware.

If Bill is the man with the vision then he went blind a long time ago. He’s forgotten what an OS is and what it’s used for.
I have an old laptop at home which reports only 59mb of memory. I can run a full OS on it complete with GUI, I can play Mp3’s using a gui media player, I can browse the web using FireFox, I’m running Apache2 and using it has a live web server. All of that takes a real OS one that doesn’t need a ton of memory just to run. The OS? it’s DamnSmallLinux.

Bill should move on and spend more time with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation because there he can do some good for the world because his impact and control on the Software industry has not been positive. I mean most free software products can get to point where they are better then the M$ version but for a non-free product you have two paths:
If your product is original: M$ Buys you or M$ Kills you buy releasing a competive product, it may not be better but will have that all important M$ sticker on it.
If you product is not original: M$ will copy all the things that makes you product better than theirs and watch you wither.

Outside the Software industry – Keep up the good work Mr Gates.

Gates being able to create and nurture Microsoft to where it is now, goes a long way into showing how well he did his job. However, times have changed dramatically since then. The company did not grow in the ways that time demanded. There comes a point in a corporation’s life where the means a company used to get where it is, has to change to keep the company alive.

A lot like how an empire has to expand to stay alive, but with the flawed empire method, it gets so big it cannot sustain itself – somewhere in there the empire has to change to another form. That, in my opinion, is how Gate failed the most. He needed to step down long ago, and the company needed to adapt to the new world that it created, with fresh faces.

The computer industry out-evolved Microsoft, arguably the company that gave it the energy to evolve

“You do realize that these so-called ?unrelated things at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation��? are in fact a modern day crusade against some very big problems facing humans now, not only that but funded completely by private people to the tune of over 60 Billion dollars,. One of the tasks is aimed at whiping out Malaria (a disease which kills about 20 million people a year).”

I’d have more respect for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation if Bill didn’t give India 100 million for AIDS and MS gave India 400 million to use MS products on the same day. Not to say they haven’t done good things, I just wish there was not even the hint of a question to the motives.

Ya I get what your saying Karel, I just dont think that the state of Vista one way or another really had any impact on Gates leaving. Does anyone seriously think that Gates had any significant “hands-on” time during any of the dev cycle of Windows 2000 or XP? If so, I think everyone is fairly well deluded. The Chief Software Architect is an idea guy. These are the guys that take market data and sit in meetings trying to decide which direction a product should be heading. They are rarely if ever involved in whatever is cooking NOW but rather ballparking ideas for future developments. Powerpoint presentations as opposed to Visual Studio Projects.

In most companies the Chief Software Architect title is given to one of the most savvy, appreciated coders in order to keep them around and semi-active once they no longer desire to activly code. It is in my personal experiance a soft position, one for keeping the ideas in-house rather than letting them go to a competetor. In Gates case it was a natural evolution.

The state of Vista is fairly typical of any large commitee designed software, the hardest part of that project is going to be tying all of the many thousands of small applications together. Personally I have no opinion on it either way, I am far more concerned with the practical realities of the Microsoft Licensing policies than I am of how wiz-bangy Vista will be. For me personally XP suits all of my needs for workstations and Windows 2003 Server is a damn fine OS for servers. I dont want to get into an OS discussion those tend to be quasi-religious anyway (the ol Linux vs Windows vs VMS vs…etc).

I just dont think you can read Gates’s stepping down in the way you have interpreted.

There ya have it,
Gooney

R\:mrgreen:

Vista being late is not a bad thing. New versions of the OS do not need to come out every couple of years despite what Microsoft and bitheads would like you to believe. The only folks crying over a delay is Microsoft and hardware vendors.

The guy is probably bored doing the same thing for 20+ years and is getting a bigger thrill out of his charity work. It seemed that way when I saw him and his wife in an interview.

If he has failed then GIVE ME SOME OF WHAT HE HAS GOT!

I can\’t villify a guy that spends that much of his personal wealth (and time) for the betterment of others, but portraying Bill Gates as some sort of modern saint for his contribution to software world does not mean that he can escape blame for being the chief architect of the current shambles known as Vista. From your post:

“I think its hard to put accross just how much impact this one man has had on human history. He is by no means alone in this, but so far he is the only one that had decided to dedicate a bulk of his wealth for the betterment of the human condition.”

I\’m curious, does this give Bill a ‘get out of jail free’ card to avoid his responsibilities re: Vista? Just like any other person who collects a wage, Bill is responsible for his job. And if he fails at a task that he has set for himself, should he not own up to that failure?

Oh yeah, and there was a fellow recently (2nd most wealthy man in the US iirc) who donated 80% of his net personal wealth via trust over time to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, estimated to total some 38 billion dollars. Philanthropy is alive and kicking and the measure of charity is not how much you give, it\’s how much you have left afterwards.

I think there’s a difference between calling Gates a failure and saying that he has failed. I’m sure everyone agrees he’s doing great things at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and that he has achieved a lot with Microsoft.
However, he has failed his role as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft during the last 4years in any case. Anyone can guess what the reasons were for that. But that he has failed to deliver what he promised, especially when Vista is concerned is a simple fact. I think that’s why he is stepping down as Chief Sofware Architect. Maybe he’s just not up to the task anymore or the challenges are too big.

So I’m not calling him a failure in general if that’s what you think. When I say “unrelated things at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”, I also don’t mean to say that those are unimportant. Just that those things are not related to his job at Microsoft, and that if, like he says, he is so excited about his work at Microsoft, he’d want to be a bigger part of, and more involved in, it. Knowing passionate people, that is what they do. If they are REALLY excited about something, nothing’s going to stop them to be a part of it. Gates just isn’t that excited about it anymore. And if you look at his recent performance as Chief Software Architect, and the issues at Microsoft, it’s easy to understand why.

I find it very difficult to classify a man literally worth BILLIONS of dollars a failure at the very profession that earned him those billions. And then to suggest that the dedication of a huge portion of these BILLIONS of dollars as anything other than a task worthy of his attention, is something I find…unbelievable.

The man has “been there, done that” to the tune of creating the single largest software producing company on the face of the planet.

You do realize that these so-called “unrelated things at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” are in fact a modern day crusade against some very big problems facing humans now, not only that but funded completely by private people to the tune of over 60 Billion dollars,. One of the tasks is aimed at whiping out Malaria (a disease which kills about 20 million people a year).

Now, to presume to call Bill Gates a failure is something only a digital pundit could have the audicity to do.

I think its hard to put accross just how much impact this one man has had on human history. He is by no means alone in this, but so far he is the only one that had decided to dedicate a bulk of his wealth for the betterment of the human condition.

He has in effect, put his money where is mouth is and extended that maxim to include his time aswell.

-Gooney