The day Bill Gates didn’t call me a communist

But see, people were actually forced to buy Windows. Not the consumer directly. But a large part of the whole “antirust” complaint was that Microsoft charged PC manufacturers a license for every machine they produced/sold. Not every computer they produced/sold with Windows, but every single one. To ship a PC with another OS meant paying Microsoft, anyway. How many other OSs could survive with those terms? This was at a time when there was still room for more options. One of those options was backed by IBM. Without these practices , who knows what the competitive landscape would have been like. Look how well Apple is doing now that the market is mostly free of blocks to competition (most things people do with computers these days revolve around platform-independent technologies — web, email,photos, video, etc.).

The Gates Foundation is designed to extend the reach of Windows even further than Bill’s anti-competitive, MS machinations can. Proof is that it refuses to provide non-Windows PCs to organizations that request them, and only provides grants to purchase Windows PCs.

His foundation is happy mask on a skull face.

And the purpose of this article is what…

Gates lasting legacy will be that nice guys sometimes do indeed finish first!! That gives me great hope and inspiration.

“Later I would see another side of him through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”

So why don’t we get to read about that side, too? Where are those interview transcripts?

It appears PED was not interested in balanced journalism, but instead aimed to fulfill a need to feed a long-held grudge. The journalist appears less the man for his efforts.

Here it is, thirteen years post-interview, and Bill G. probably doesn’t even remember while PED can’t forget it.

What is “pwned”?

1. I’m curious, how many of the anti-Bill G/Microsoft posts were done with Internet Explorer, Windows or Word Spell Checker?

2. No one was forced to buy or use Windows, it was seen as the best tool for the job and in many cases still is.

3. Competetive Edge is a fundamental business principal.

4. Hope all of you have paid for and registered every version of Windows, Office or any other software you have or are running.

5. If you think that Microsoft is going away because Bill G is retiring, then you might have agreed with IBM when they said there was no need for personal computers.

5. Nothing is “Free” (Linux), there are costs associated with everything. Sooner or later you will pay for it one way or another. BTW, Linux was not developed to be a desktop operating system to begin with, it was meant to be a way to connect and interact with a larger system, Unix. Bill’s visions was much larger when he rolled out Windows.

6. Why is it that Microsoft still makes Office for all of those Bill G/Microsoft haters out there? Oh, because they keep buying it! Why hasn’t someone stepped up and really challenged Microsoft in the office software arena? Open Office is nice, but would you bet your business on an “Free” open source project that has no guarantee of backing or longevity and is not widely used in the marketplace? I think not, besides, it’s just a knock-off of MS Office, sounds kinda familiar doesn’t it?! Yes, I’ve installed it and recommend it to individuals on a budget.

7. Anti-Trust no Anti-Trust, chances are had Bill G and the gang not done what they did we would see the world in a whole different way than we do today. As in most things we take the bad with the good as long as it is mostly good, if it wasn’t Bill G, we’d be talking about someone but the sentiments would probably be similar.

Reading the comments, it’s obvious that a lot of people were pwned by Microsoft.

It must really sting to lose to someone you consider intellectually inferior.

I agree “history will remember him kindly.”

To Mark M. Washington DC: Your comment says a lot about your moral character, specifically that you think it’s ok to defame someone with a laundry list of accusations (”mafia-like tactics…intimidation, stealing, harassing, lying, etc., etc.”)about which you have no first hand knowledge and, based on the publically available facts, aren’t supportable. My work involved a lot of contact with Microsoft, and later, when Microsoft produced a major new product to compete directly with my company’s product, that was really bad news. Looking back, I can state they competed very aggressively, but ethically, and without “stealing” even though they had intimate knowledge of Essbase. I’ve never witnessed any verifiable instances of the tactics you list, only people like yourself complaining about things that any reasonable business would feel they had the right to do. Microsoft isn’t a charity and the people who invested in Microsoft stock deserve a CEO/Chairman who doesn’t lie down when people start whining. The IE anti-trust business was taken to the finish line and Microsoft lost, but in a world where the outcome of such complex laws is always uncertain, no one could be sure exactly what the courts would decide the interpretation of the law was until it was finished. That doesn’t make Microsoft or Gates unethical, it makes them a business, competing against other businesses who want to beat them. While neither you nor I have any way to know if Microsoft has ever truly and intentionally behaved unethically, the difference between you and I is that you apparently don’t need to know with certainty to abuse someone publically. Most people will just figure you’re a hypocrite who feels more self-worth when trashing someone else, and the more lofty the target, the better.

What a jerk, manipulative media monkey. Make the headline “he called me a commnunist”. Most people skimming headlines will just read this. Then retract it for the 20% that read it.

Another example of the media just manipulating the masses.

ummm.. I’d like to see your i mac run crysis..lol people use computers for different things. mac’s can not play games..except for solitare maybe

Bill gates and Microsoft have nothing to do with hardware prices .. LOL

A $500 PC is worth just that but it’s not the OS that makes the price..
if anything everyone that has bought a copy of Windows
for either personal or corporate use knows MS pricing is pretty fucking steep and they have very strict licensing..
OSX on the other hand is much cheaper than windows and also the multiple user licenses are priced lower than MS windows ……
Obama in chicago maybe never bought a copy of Windows

People hate Gates, people hate Microsoft. How many of these very people actually choose NOT to use Microsoft products? If Gates represents some unnecessary evil, then why not just choose some other operating system? Some other method of conducting commerce? Just remember, that computer you are using is likely running Microsoft products, unless you are completely boycotting those very products, it truly makes you a hypocrite. Gates may or may not have done everything right, but the proliferation of computers into society isn’t because he forced them into our businesses, then our homes; it is because we have CHOSEN to use his products, likely because they were the best alternative. There are competitors, and they are also great companies. One day, Microsoft may not dominate the market as it does today, but that will only happen when others CHOOSE a product from a competitor that proves better to their needs. Until then, Congratulations Bill Gates and congratulations Microsoft…here’s to years to come!

oh come on, big deal. Bill Gates was feeling angry, and let this clown have it. So what? I prefer that to the santized PR version of everyone these days.

I want to be like Bill Gates and crush everyone too.

I see some of you guys pointing fingers at Bill Gates like he’s a monster or something. Think of all of the ISV’s and mom’n'pop ‘PC Clinic’ shops that popped up around the globe to do what? Service Microsoft platform machines. If you think that by standardizing folks on one platform and consequently spreading the ability of people teach each other how to do things on a computer (i.e. Joe can tell Fred over the water cooler how to do some trick with this program or that, because it’s a safe bet they’re both using windows, and thus can use the same procedures.) High schools can actually teach computer apps classes and cause computer literacy because the platform expected by employers is relatively standardized. This makes it hard for new word processor manufacturing folks to break into the market, sure, but why should a new businessman try to sell a product to solve a problem that’s already been solved without offering some groundbreaking market disrupting new feature first? (I don’t mean one product should rule forever, but if you don’t come up with something smashingly better, why in the world do you expect to do well at all in that space?) If you’re smart, and starting up your own company (ie a software vendor) don’t sell something that is in a market space occupied by a huge vendor with a defacto standard solution. That’s called using common sense. It’s not anyone’s fault if you choose a bad business strategy but your own. That includes if your business is writing software.

Not a communist — but probably a socialist. Either way, businessmen (especially successful ones) are the culprits.

Its so funny most people hate Bill Gates for his product and all the update and upgrade one has to do. His product is the same as all other products you buy. Imagine you buy microsoft product for $150 and we complain and that is good for about 2-4years before a new version comes out. But we buy cars for $20,000 and above and the moment you buy it and out the lot the value has drop by 20%. So everyone is complain of losing $150 how about the car you purchase. It gets updated every 3-5years also making your model obsolete.
Just ponder on that and think and before you make a comment think again.

To BCA
Get a job that pays more.. so you can update your computer every 2years not 5years.
If you cant find a descent job due to your HS diploma only. Go to your local library and Goodwill maybe they can offer you a new computer.

In response to some… the people who hate bill gates are the people who keep buying microsoft product and have to upgrade.
Well dont we all do that.. imagine you keep buying a new shoes cause it wears off so its the same as microsoft product.
I love bill gates… why.. he made my family RICH. How by stocks… and right now we are well off.
So i vote bill gates… all those who hate bill gates… thank you for buying his product be in win 95 or vista cause you made him rich and me rich…
So the more you buy his product the more he makes money and me and all the people who has stocks on Microsoft. And the more you hate bill gates the closer you are to getting heart attach and its going to make me rich too due to stocks on pharmaceutical and ohhh bill gates has stocks in those too.
Either you like it or not… You Loose.

A fairly nice example of the contermporary auto-infant v. greater society [Gates in the interview, that is]. He was later to find that governments — of, by, and/or for the people — have more clout than he reckoned with. Indeed, the idea that government exists at all is something of a challenge for his pre-school sort.

Being able to twiddle a “computer” (in Gates case, by implementing something as inchoate as BASIC) is no more impressive than mowing a dirt pile with a Tonka — especially when you start out with the money and the legal fiddle-faddle of your pop to support you. Functionally and emotionally the actions are the same thing. No wonder the working class in this country despises people like this, and good riddance.

To Brad, Indianapolis, IN:

You attack TomB. However, while he explains his train of thought, you limit yourself to trying to be “funny” - quite unsuccesfully, I should add.

People like you are the ones targeted by corporations and governments in their efforts for domination. People like you lack the mental ability to think critically and to argument.

It is a pity that people like you would not understand the move “Idiocracy” if you saw it…

This interview does not cast a very favorable light upon…the interviewer. Surprised you re-ran it — oh, probably to be able to say “communist” in the headline. And another thing: a laptop in 1983??

It is quite interesting to note that a number of the comments absolve BG of all wrongdoing because he made billions. BG is, therefore, a brilliant businessman and not to be questioned.

Do you suppose that these admirers take a likeminded approach when evaluating the rise to power of many dictators, including our newest African boywonder. Did their amazing ability to rise to power outweigh the means that used to gain that power.

In any event, I am sure that BG revels in his billions and opines that his detractors are declasse and only angry because they never got any for themselves.

Wow. That’s a reporter with a big head; putting himself in the headline. A reporter shouldn’t be part of the story. If you think you’re part of the story, then turn it over to someone else. That’s Journalism 101.

Max, check out OpenBIOS.

Bill Gates gave the world a gift,some might say its helping to destroy the world by some of the technology it has helped to create. I believe in the end it will help create the technology that saves the world.As for that anti-trust stuff is it Microsoft’s fault its competitors lacked the talent and ingenuity to compete many of them became lazy and complacent and then cried fowl when they got their butts kicked by a young savvy business man who they under estimated because of their narrow limited view of the future of computers and software.

To “TomB., Lake Havasu City, AZ”

How’s life on the compound with the other nutbags? You think inventory systems have limited value because the use electricity? And you end comparing Gates to Hitler?

Better put that aluminum foil hat on extra tight tonight — Bill might use his government connections to have aliens come and abduct you…

in response to obama in chicago -

you may pay 500 for a PC, but not much of one. And then in 18 months, you have to buy another, and then another. What you have done is fall into the trap MS has laid. Make a poor OS for cheap PCs, then make it obsolete every 2 - 3 years. That was, and still is their plan, and you are making it easier every time you plop down your 500 bucks for a new PC.

It’s 1199.00 for my iMac and I won’t have to buy another for 5 - 7 years.

Not to mention the money I’ll save on virus software and the time I will spend enjoying my Mac rather than just troubleshooting a windows PC!

been there, done that, after windows 95, I said goodbye to MS and it was the best computer related decision I ever made.

I like to know how Bill Gates devolved from being an opportunistic entrepreneur with his finger on the pulse of consumer demand into becoming a virtual “corporate and philanthropic communist” who wants to close the door to anyone who tries to do what he did. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

Interesting how people have forgotten WHY we created antitrust legislation in the first place. At a certain point, when a handful of companies have complete domination of a market, laissez-faire economics completely breaks down. It happened once, and you can be damn sure it will happen again unless a lot of willfully ignorant people wake up. Unless you like the idea of a manufactured dictatorship ruled by CEO’s, in which case keep it up. A couple more decades at this rate, and monopolies will just buy the congress and stop pretending to care what we think.

I am old enough to remember the world without computers, now we carry them around in our pockets. I think history will remember Bill Gates kindly and he will be one of those eternal figures, like Columbus or Newton. Remember he is human with all that comes with that. And he has reshaped the entire world. For better or worse only the history will tell, not this yahoo who wrote this article. I have come to hate reporters and much as politicians.

It is amusing! Most of the comments are either biased non-arguments or just plain stupid. Hardly anyone knows what the law suits were about in the first place. Somehow, we have come to hate (distrust)bigness in the business world. Just ask two questions: Does windows provide a good working platform for your PC? and does Outlook allow you to get and send your E mail every day, mostly without any interruption? Then just go shut up!

As a businessman, I’m just amazed at the comments here - mostly, I’d guess, by IT people who have found out the hard way that either a) their technology skills just aren’t that valuable (i.e., I’m to pay a higher price so a tech can make more money) or b) that they know IT but can’t run a business or c) both. No one outside of IT cares about the latest gizmos and how techie-cool you think you are. Mostly, most people send email and surf the net. Gates and Microsoft gave us what we want for a great price - which is why we’ll only pay $500 for a PC laptop rather than $2000 for a Mac. He is RUNNING A BUSINESS - you must CRUSH your competition or they’ll crush you. I suspect most of these boneheads were crushed.

LCC Corvallis-
It’s Called Shift+Enter.. Or the Shift Key to Capitalize Letters…

Ah, this takes me back to the days when Bill was so easy to hate! Things have changed a lot. Windows is actually a functional OS for one. Also, a lot of innovation comes out that MS doesn’t have under its control. We’re better off and MS is probably better off too. Notice how he never did answer the ‘vaporware’ quation…

What on earth is “Conferential posturing”???

The Osborne was around since 1980. While you can’t call it a laptop (unless you had a substantial lap), it was a portable. The one in my basement still works fine!

Microsoft and Intel have combined, for better or worse, to do what no other computing platform could - they gave millions of people access to information they would not have otherwise have. Personally I would say more information in the hands of anyone able to gain access to it is a good thing. But once again all the victims of the world are whining about how unfair it was that Microsoft dominated the PC market in the late 20th century. Now that google is poised to dominate the tech landscape, when will all you pussies start griping about them?

Little people always try to bring down big people. It has been going on since the days of Jesus.

I find it amazing that so many of my acquaintences who call Bill Gates a criminal are the same ones who use pirated versions of Microsoft software and download copies of movies and music for which the artist doesn’t get paid. They won’t use any of the free linux based operating systems because it takes a little research and effort to get it work properly in a “Windows” world. This speaks volumes about our culture today.

bill gates has asgers it is very ovious

I love the title of this article.
http://thegooglehouse.blogspot.com

To see exactly how Gates got started in business everybody needs to see “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” It shows him beginning in the same way he always conducted business — shabbily opportunistic, predatory, and skimming along the outer edges of legality.

Frankly it shows that the guy has a guilty conscience that he thought he claimed him a communist. Or some crazy hang up. Pretty sad he touts this decades later… he should be ashamed of it as proof of his own unprofessionalism.

This is a transcript of an interview. PED didn’t actually pass judgement, so the pro Gates reactions are simply denial of the transcript.

Here is a later-convicted Bill Gates saying his trial wasn’t about Microsoft, but about society’s prejudices. Imagine a convicted murderer who had said his trial wasn’t about him! This is close to psychopathic in its denial of responsibility to social norms and the law.

Talk to anyone who was there when Microsoft wiped out their industry, and you’ll get the same story. That’s why Microsoft still pays a billion or two every year in compensation to the remnants of competitors. That’s the best they’ll get in this lifetime.

Fortunately, it’s over. Microsoft is finished, apart from the damage it can do with twenty more years of monopoly revenues as the PC era fades into history.

One must be either a computer programmer or a relative youngster to comprehend all the computerese concerning what Gates has or hasn’t done with Microsoft. I get the fact that he has been accused of noncompetitive business practices, but beyond that, its rather confusing. Therefore, I must approach the question more directly. When I was entering adulthood around 1970, it was very clear to me that the proliferation of computers was going to give Big Brother an awesome tool in its ongoing attempt to better control our minds and our behavior. It wasn’t yet evident that personal computers would proliferate to the extent they have and alter society in so many unpredictable ways. But my opinion of guys like Gates remains unchanged. He has foisted his personal priorities upon everyone else, purely for personal gain, and it has caused all sorts of disruption and mayhem, as well as delivering undeniable benefits. There was a time, for example, when you could saunter into a hardware store and buy a small bag of nails, zipping through the checkstand in a matter of seconds. Now, you have to stand there for about five minutes while the checker runs the item through the store’s computer system so that the pound of nails you just bought, along with those bought by others, are duly recorded and may be replaced by a regional warehouse as soon as is required without additional inventory being kept at the store, itself. Obviously, such a high tech system for tracking purchases and inventory is excessively vulnerable to attack, of questionable increased efficiency, and it consumes more electrical energy. Similarly, take the case of a photographer: When you make thousands of dollars of his accumulated camera equipment and thousands of negatives or slides suddenly obsolete simply because they aren’t digital, you begin to understand why sweeping “progress” isn’t always good or necessarily as much progress as it might appear on the surface to the uninitiated. Sure, the new kid on the block who is just starting out may revel in the fact that it gives him a real advantage over the old hands, but all the experience they have that he doesn’t ends up being wasted. That is not good for society no matter what Generation X thinks about it from the perspective of their relative youth, inexperience, and naivete. Finally, the fact that Gates reportedly bought up an entire neighborhood in the Lake Washington section of Seattle, installing favored colleagues in nearby houses around his own home and bulldozing other homes to make more space for himself, just like Hitler did at Berchtesgaden, ought to tell you something about the guy and his psychological makeup.

Microsoft is a great company. It’s too bad they don’t have competition, but Linux-lovers don’t understand the value of starting your own business and selling a product. Instead they expect their programmers to all be volunteers.

And there’s nothing wrong with Internet Explorer. I use it and it works just fine. So does XP.

Most of the posts taking Gates’ side are ad-hominem attacks on the reporter. The posters assume that a poor man has no moral right to ask awkward questions of a rich man.
Morals are human inventions, so I won’t call that attitude objectively ‘wrong’. But if Microsoft broke the law, that WOULD be objectively illegal; and every American citizen has a free-speech right to ask about it.

To RJ Earle, Medina, WA:
Yes, the yardstick for measuring a business’s success is indeed its bottom line. But that bottom line can be increased by ethical or unethical means. Microsoft did the unethical thing, by using mafia-like tactics of intimidation, stealing, harassing, lying, etc., etc., If *that* is the kind of thing you approve of, I already know a lot about your character…

His real last name is Gatinski.

Well done Mr.Gates, just continue to outsource american jobs by hiring cheap foreign labor and you and every other so-called american business can continue to build your anti-american empires.

What I dislike most about Microsoft: Inability to understand the Typist’s point of view. Microsoft Word is an unwieldy piece of software that should have been updated eons ago. Let’s have some WOMAN-FRIENDLY SOFTWARE. Dozens of times a day, year in and year out– I, the poor WOMAN TYPIST, has to struggle with WHAT SHOULD BE AUTOMATIC: I want CAPS AFTER COLONS. I want: CAPITALS AFTER ALL PERIODS, PERIOD. EVEN AFTER NUMBERS WITH PERIODS AND IN THE NUMBERED LISTS WITH TABS AFTER THE NUMBER AND PERIOD. Thank you. And, some easy key to hit that will automatically DROP DOWN AND START A NEW PARAGRAPH. Thanks

It will be decades before the true history can be written about the rise of personal computing. The recent debacle of Vista is instructive as to how we are still very much in a state of flux. We are just now beginning — in fits and starts — to focus of accomplishing tasks with tools that are as transparent and reliable as possible. Software still lags far behind hardware. Standards are far from being settled. One of the most integral uses of technology - email - is plagued, inefficient and based on a simple 20+ year old model that was never designed for multi-megabyte attachments, etc. I am reminded of a Star Trek episode from long ago that contained a line about their computers operating system “only” being 200 years old, so it still had some bugs. Our generation is at times obsessed with the self absorbed assertion that “we are making history” … perhaps, but history has a lot of footnotes.

Gates as a businessman, operating within the law?!? I can only chalk this comment up to ignorance of the facts.

I guess it should come as no surprise that Walter Mossberg, the highly regarded tech guru of the Wall Street Journal, proclaimed in his new millenium article that “Microsoft was the biggest corporate criminal of the 20th century.” Most of us who are deeply involved in the industry would have no argument with that.

As an example to my earlier post, my lead SW developer — the one who begged the client not to force us to author in Windows — later took a job as the CTO of a well-known Internet company (you all would recognize the name). His company signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Microsoft and then found that their IP was pirated and embedded in Windows Media Player. If you use WMP, you are using that pirated code. His company sued and Microsoft settled out of court for one-tenth the value of the IP, long after booking millions on the stolen IP.

I guess one has to wonder if being a “good businessman” includes ETHICS. Apparently, to Bill and Company, it doesn’t. That leaves the rest of the “blind admirers” with quite a lesson: It’s ok to steal as long as you don’t get caught, and if you get caught, make certain you’ve made enough off your theft to pay for the settlement.

And his dreck is seen all over the world.

Bill Gates is RICH and all of you are not. Alot of us just envy to have all that money so the only thing we do is complain.

So all who hate bill gates are losser. Look the man is giving his money to the poor. What you expect him to give it to you lossers complaining. Business is business you do what you have to do to survive and all of you didnt..
ha..ha..ha..
haters.

Phil and David,
You had the opportunity to interview the Chairman of Microsoft, on the cusp of the Internet AND the cusp of the release of Windows 95 and how did you spend your opportunity at this unique moment of history? Conferential posturing. Here’s an idea for you. Next time you get the chance to interview Steve Jobs maybe you can spend your time hounding about him how gaunt he looks.

Microsoft was the company which jump started the sale of millions of microcomputers. Apple wasn’t, though they had produced their system previously. Apple’s first OS was, with hindsight, crap, too. Gates’ industry-standard PC-DOS offered the first, and for a long time, only bankable platform for software development success on a large scale on PCs. Microsoft’s development kits were far superior to Apple’s–my company loathed using Apple’s development sofware in the early 90’s because it was very inferior. I wrote the first version of our business client-server database on my back porch using the Microsoft C developer’s kit although I hadn’t been programming for 15 years, and then only in Fortran. I didn’t even know “C” at the time and had never worked with networking. Essbase became the core product of a billion dollar company within 5 years and I give a lot of the credit to the Microsoft platform. Business has many benefits and moral aspects, but the only “objective” measure of business performance, a yardstick no one can manipulate, moralize, or pontificate about, is profit. If it’s not what people need, people don’t buy it. Gates is the champion, hands-down, and the guy deserves a lot of credit.

To Philip Elmer-DeWitt:
Phil, take a quart of Prune Juice and call me in the morning.

The only “genius” in Gates is his ability not to play by the rules and get away with it. Microsoft’s predatorial tactics - which continue to this day - have done nothing for the consumer.

Of course the right-wing, pro-business-at-all-costs folks won’t agree with me…

Waa Waa Waa… Get off your highhorse in smacking Microsoft and build one of your own. He’s a business man with fierse ambitions. All within the law! I appreciate hard work, and that’s what he did.

Phillip E-D, thanks for sharing this insight into Mr. Gates personality. I can imagine vividly how difficult it is to conduct an interview with a hostile subject who defends his actions with vitriol rather than reasoned arguments. Under these circumstances, the best that can be accomplished is to give the reader an accurate picture of the event itself. And you did so.

There were no laptops in 1983.

ex ped: Except the TRS-80 Model 100. See here.

I have been in programming since the 80’s and have seen Microsoft kill their competition by giving away their software tied to their OS.

Its hard to beat free, even if it does not work quite as well.

It took some pretty unorthodox methods to go after Gates. Now, with Open Office there is a free product better than MS Office.

For the internet there is Firefox.

For databases there is MySQL.

For OS there are various Linux flavors, now the favored server OS.

For the desktop there is Mac OSX — not free, but dosent have to be when competing against Vista.

If you want to run Windows, there is VMWare which allows you to host Windows sessions on Linux or OSX…

So now there are lots of choices… and folks are gravitating to them because they are better.

Bill Gates originally stole the PC operating system from the guy who wrote it: Gary Kildall.

Check it out in Wikipedia.

I hope Bill Gates goes to India and stays there. Plenty of cheap slave labor their.

When an email reads like this: pelmerdewitt@mac.com, one could see a reason for the suggestion that Gates stifled competition. But remember, only the fittest and best survive.

Everything Gates said is accurate and plain common sense. The interviewer’s questions, on the other hand, seem slanted, combative and off topic.

I find it extraordinary that so many people still seem to think that Bill Gates is a hero. His company has been fined OVER A BILLION DOLLARS for its unlawful behaviour.

And, by the way, I use Ubuntu at home and unfortunately have to use Windows at work. I can assure you that Ubuntu is far, far better in all respects.

Gates handed their own you know what back at them. Bravo Gates! Didn’t let these 2bit punks and their nonsense get by him.Gates took all their carefully worded nonsense and threw it right back at them. This is how you handle punk interviewers.

Reply to “Eric”:

I was not my desire to use “Windows”, it was the client’s. My SW developers *begged* the client not to use Windows because they knew how buggy it was. Even after buying the SDK, Microsoft steadfastly refused to help us solve *their* problems. We spent over a year trying to fix that POS.

There was no way we could have saved the product or the company given what we had to work with. Microsoft again foisted an incompetent product on small businesses and failed to support it. There is no business plan that can guard against that kind of incompetence.

Gates is one of the more interesting characters of the computing revolution, an individual who arguably has had the most impact in the technological sphere. What both his boosters and detractors seem to forget is that Bill G. is not a two-dimensional character. He is neither a saint nor evil incarnate. It’s really too soon to tell whether he advanced computing overall, or set it back with anti-competitive practices. Ask me again in 50 years. ;-D

Is it just me or can everyone tell which comments came from MacHeads and which came from PCers?

I dont know how people like you get to write on these prominent newspapers.

Talk about reporter bias and envy-driven abuse of a fine man in Mr. Gates. Wow, Phillip still carries around a 13 year old grudge, and clearly can’t see past his own viewpoint.

Time Warner, can’t you folks hire better writing “talent” than this guy? PCs and Macs are just tools, not religions.

Gates is giving away 95% or more of his wealth… Why not you, Phillip? Start with your typewriter.

Worst article yet to-date.

PED has lost it.

Keep this up, you’ll be in the soup line outside the new Apple Store on Boylston.

TIME magazine is like one dimesional thinking…

I think I’d respond as Bill did! :)

“TIME: We’d like to ask you about some of the charges that have come out in court.”

“Gates: This is old, old stuff.”

“TIME: We’d like to have it on the record, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Gates: Are you, like, a historical publication or a newsmagazine?” :)

Now, the reporter always needs his story, but it’s hard to blame Gates for his response, especially when you sense the tone set by the interviewer. Many in the media has been consistiently negative toward him, but that is not surprising; those who accomplish things, typically, must watch for those who look to capitalize from a misstep.

Example: The journalist, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, is capitalizing on his past experience w/ Bill Gates, which finds Bill a bit testy. Hats off to Bill!

Mr. Dim Witt

It is not about you.

To Jenny Spaghetticode,

Just as Microsoft ripped off Apple, Apple ripped off Xerox. Apple didn’t invent the modern GUI. They were the first company to build a successful mass produced product based on it, and they did it very well.

Bill Gates is a genius, not because he puts out great products, but because he created a dominant business. Look how long people have been saying Microsoft has crappy products. But yet, he still sells billions a year. When you can sell crap for billions, I’d say that makes you a genius.

Jenny Spaghetticode –

You’re too young to remember the Apple II and the Apple IIe? Apple didn’t start with the Macintosh. They started with the same command line OS that DOS did.

Apple didn’t invent the ideas behind the Macinthosh. Not one of them. Google up XEROX PARC and educate yourself a bit.

Microsoft did (in my opinion) conduct anti-competitive practices — mostly in terms their “partner then compete against” model used with Databases (see Sybase), online community (see CompuServe), the certification market (see Microsoft Press) and others.

But quit repeating the myth that Apple did anything special. They’re latest OS? Unix with an apple UI. They’re latest hardware — can you say “Intel Instide”? They’re special like the kid in class who chooses to screw up hair.

It was a good interview. The objective of an interview isn’t supposed to be to defeat the guy you’re interviewing, or “nail” him as Colbert would say. Rather, you asked questions that gave some huge insights into the way Bill Gates thinks. Well done.
Although, the fact that you thought he called you a “communist” does show that he rattled you a bit.

Remember folks, VISTA = written by indian h1b VISA and Temp workers.

Oh, I thought the title of the article was… “The day Bill Gates didn’t call me a Columnist”… not “a communist”

Either way it works I guess.

I’d argue that if you lost over $1 million of your own money and your company solely over a flaw in Microsoft’s OS, you may want to re-evaluate your business plan. Of course, my opinion is useless…

This jornalist is a really big idiot.

I just hope Bill’s tombstone is a monitor with the “blue screen of death” on it.

In the beginning, DOS sucked. Then, Apple created the Mac. Then, Bill the Great swiped as much of it as he could and called it Windows. FF 20plus yrs and we have VISTA, this paranoid little mass of bugs and patches that masquerades as an operating system and has to be surgically altered before WORD will run. Yes, nerds rule the world, we have emerged from the shadows and our machines will control the new order, but why is this man considered a genius–I mean, yes, apart from the fact he has a lot of money?

To Mr. Jonathan Smith:
In your relentless commentary on Bill Gates you mention he has “practically zero skill at the English language..” It is interesting to note YOU have zero skills at grammar and punctuation. Perhaps if you cleaned up your own back yard you would have more credibility and might be taken seriously. If or ever you accomplish a miniscule piece of what Bill Gates has done, you have little room to talk. You may not agree with some of his practices and that is your choice but I suspect you don’t know much about it other than what you hear or have been told. Until then, find another product that suits you and GO AWAY.

Gates is, and always has been, a 2-faced cheat. He rants about free markets and capitalism, but Microsoft’s entire business model has been built on subverting free markets and capitalism.

Cases in point:
Internet Explorer - a total piece of crap from day one. He gave it away, and quietly kept extending it with non-standard behaviors, progressively increasing the PC’s operating system dependance on it, and intertwining tons of convenience features between it and the O/S. All this was to destroy the other browser companies that had to SELL a product (i.e. NetScape). He did this because he could not create a better product. He had to force the others out of business some other way.

Windows itself:
He forced PC makers to pay for a Windows license for every machine they sold, whether it had Windows on it or not (this was circa 1989). He HAD to do this, or they might sell machines with OS/2 or other OS’s on it. Instead of letting Windows 3.1 compete on its own merits, once again, he had to strong-arm its monopoly into place.

MPEG-4:
Heck, why support a video standard, when he can create “Windows Media”, which of course, will only work on a PC? Yes, yes, he pays lip-service to supporting it on a Mac. But we all know that it has always lagged behind, discouraging people because WM content on the web might not play.

There is a long-held “EEE” concept about Microsoft and their attitude toward open standards that serve the consumer: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”

That is their very essence. Destroy products that are good for the consumer and leave them only MS products as an alternative. THAT is how they have become so dominant, by browbeating, not with technological service.

He is full of it when he says his tactics “serve consumers.” They do nothing of the sort. Everything he has done has been to FORCE the consumer to adopt his products, whether they were the best or not.

Finally, with wider adoption of Linux and OS/X Mac, and the utter joke that Vista is, more and more people are figuring this out.

I traded emails with him back in 1994 when he still answered his own mail. Thank God the world didn’t buy into his vision!
I wish he would have been tried for crimes against humanity for buying up and destroying all the businesses, burying all the technology that he thought might compete with him.
Maybe now the world will take a second look at what he’s done and move on. Microsoft windows is the bane of the technology era. If we are a world community we should start acting like it, Linux is free and much more stable. Microsoft is a crutch to humanity.

when I was in college there were the guys who went out and did things of value for the university and of course for themselves and friends. then there was that pesky guy who wrote for the paper that did nothing but whinnnn about the guys who did something and how they got everything and how bad everything was. No one ever liked those guys but others who did nothing and whinned. Our “news” organizations have all turned into those guys who comment on everything but do nothing, they add no value to the human species. I can’t tell who is less valuable or bigger liers, politicians or reporters. Anyway, Bill Gates will be remembered for all time, like Edison, Einstein etc… You the reporter are already forgotten.

Please, for God’s sake, will some reporter go out and really write about the one thing that matters in the PC marketspace - the bootloader issue.

Gates, his hairstyle, his stylist, the stupid anti-trust case, DeWitt’s communism, all are trivia compared to the greatest industrial crime of the 20th Century: the black box contracts that MSFT keeps with PC manufacturers to stop them from building and selling multi-boot machines that would allow consumers and office managers to really compare operating systems.

Witnesses in the first anti-trust case knew about it and talked about it. Some even advised Justice the real antitrust case to be made against MSFT was all on the bootloader issue. Boies and Klein knew about it but they had decided they wanted to turn the anti-trust case into a slapping contest between billionaire Gates and billionaire Clark. An easier sell to a court, they might have decided. The guy from BeOS who was hitting the boot loadder wall around the time of the anti-trust trial was articulate but actually more annoying than Clark, hard to believe, I know, but it may have had something to do with it.

Any geek who has spent any time at all in operating systems or on the manufacturing side knows about the bootloader issue knows that it is an enduring crime that really does restrain trade - with every single PC shipped. You can’t get more obvious than that.

Mr DeWitt if you really want to see Gates go completely magilla, turn into the creature from Alien and rip out your kidneys and eat them? Call him up and tell him you are writing a BOOK on the bootloader issue.

At this point in history, you will probably get cooperation from present and past professionals on the PC manufacturing side who have witnessed how caustic the locked bootloader has been to the industry. Today, with the market crying out for different shapes and sizes of PCs with different OSes and capacities, they’re locked into Windows, a really trashy, overburdened and, with their true monopoly position, overpriced operating system.

PC manufacturers - all of whom complain today that all the profit in the PC is realized by MSFT - are just as desperate as consumers to be out from under the horror of Windows.

Do it, Mr. DeWitt. Pick up the phone and really freak out Mr. Gates.

I met him once in the early 80s at a conference about networking. Somehow a number of us who were working on trying to get networking going got together in a hotel and had discussed technical issues of networking.

He was a kid with a company that was make money with MS-DOS, a product most of us techies thought was crap. However, understood DOS was going to be the winner of the OS wars as long as IBM backed it.

I, along with almost everyone else at the conference, was a kid with a software company, some making money some not. Gates did not much of an impression.

For most of us this was our first and last meeting with him. We had expected him to be smart, forward thinking, and a technological wiz. That wasn’t the Bill Gates we saw.

After he left the conference most of us felt his software was a reflection of him; Two years behind the current thinking, any problems we will fix in the next version, and getting something to market was more important than if the product worked, and the IBM deal made him the luckiest man in the world.

Funny, 20some years later I still feel the same way.

I am fascinated by this guy (Gates). Any way to read the whole interview?

Mr. DeWitt: Clearly you have an ax to grind, and have been trying to grind it for the 13 years since this interview. Your personal and journalistic angst is out there in full view… and frankly, I think you should feel a little embarrassed. You are not very adept at trying to chop such a successful and brilliant visionary off at his knees, and kudos to Bill for squishing you like a bug with his concise, honest, non-defensive answers.

I think whatever point you were so desperately striving to make, and have us epiphanize over (that Bill Gates is actually a fraud?) … well, just.. epic fail.

What an embarrassment this vengeful act of “journalism” was, not only to your profession, but to Fortune Magazine as well. You have my immense disrespect.

Bill Gates is brilliant because he did what no one else could do, put his product in front of 90% of the computer users out there. It killed competition and its hold on the operating system and internet browser markets caused those two markets to languish and stop innovating for 10 years, but having that amount of impact takes alot of something.

Little did you realize that you were talking to a small god in 1995?

If Bill Gates, as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, is so “brilliant”, then why was VISTA and its predecessors so flawed and wrought with bugs? After all, who has never lost data or productivity due to a Microsoft buggy system or application? Bill should, however, be credited for capitalizing on people’s penchant to be persuaded by marketing and not technical excellence. He has made a lot of money on your pain and your acquiescence to this mediocrity.

Check out Bill’s philanthropy before Melinda (zero dollars) and after (much more). It is clear Bill borrowed his social conscience from Melinda. Kinda like how Microsoft borrowed its “innovations” from others.

Until you lose over a million bucks of your own money and your company relying on a Microsoft operating system that was fatally flawed with zero support from Microsoft, your opinion is meaningless.

Let’s see… Which of you two would I like to spend an evening with?

It would not be the journalist that has had his 15 minutes of fame badgering someone to get a ‘juicy’ story. What a complete waste of human potential.

In modern terms, the reporter got pwnd in his own interview. You just don’t see that very often as editors usually cut stuff out that makes them look stupid. Kudos for airing your mistakes.

Mr. DeWitt seems proud of himself by revealing how totally inept he is at conducting a real interview. He’s right up there with the worst of the biased sharks who host cable news and talk radio programs. Mr. Gates had more restraint than I would have shown.

No, that is not so. The headline to me, reads: that only on one particular day did Gates not call him a communist!
Smokey

,,it,s a shame that these mega buss people forget that its the USA that got them their money (workers/buyers)and why they see more fit to take those billions of dollars and sink them into the black holes of africia,,( instead of his own country,,like black inner-cities)when he should raise an army and destroy cronnies like zimbawee,,who he has taken from the top 5 of africa and in 30 yrs put it in the bottom 5,,and now we the taxpayers feed them,,while he buys weapons to surpreess his people,,sounds like real stupid buss. to me,,if gates applied that kind of thinking to his americian buss,,he would have failed !!makes no sence to me !!

THIS JOURNALIST IS AN IDIOT. HE’S LUCKY BILL DIDN’T SHOW HIM THE DOOR.

would stop by my office every once and a while

I think that’s

every once in a while

ex ped: Right you are. Fixed. Thanks.

Bill - 1
Philip & Dave - 0

Pretty obvious you were just fishin for juicy stuff, and Bill read you like a Dr. Suess book!

What a great article you have posted about Gates, I like your way of drawing out his testy, ” I am gifted, rich and the boss…dont challenge me..” attitude. This guy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and while he has done well with his company, it shows he still lacks the humility to be called wrong, and to admit making mistakes or transgressions. His idea that he is entitled to take markets and money, run afoul of laws, and to mislead and twist words is evident in this excerpt.

I get tickled when I watch YouTube videos of his interviews where he talks like a teenager about technology, ‘we take all this stuff, and then we connect it to all this stuff, and then we build it so it does this stuff” the guy has practically zero skill at the English language and it hardly becomes a man who runs a billion $ operation, sounding more like a college dropout…oops I’m sorry…he is!!

How a company run by 2 doofuses “Ballmer and Gates” got so far is hard to fathom, other than by using other peoples intellectual property, stealing ideas, and misleading the masses, but this is old hat for snake oil salesman, and dictators of countries who dont have anyone who can stand up to them, or reveal the chinks in their armor.

Now Gates is using his philanthropy to prop up the public image of Microsoft that has been tarnished by their common “modus operandi”: pillage, maim and steal any operation that doesnt have the MS logo on it.

I am sure its hard for them to believe they are at the butt-end of the search market, and that they are being shown up by 2 kids from Google who took a page from their playbook and softened it up, essentially doing an end run around the “we will bundle all our software and give it away for free” that MSFT did to cut off Netscape’s air supply…so now Gates is dying by the sword he lived by….couldnt happen to a more deserving guy or company. The sooner that microsoft is marginalized and minimized, along with gates, ballmer and co. the better off all of us will be.

Heres to hoping he can actually help fund cures for diseases in the world, Lord knows his software has been something of a 2 edged sword foisting improvements in work styles, while simultaneously causing loss of many jobs from companies they crushed unfairly, while also harboring numerous ways to allow the spread of computer virus and other forms of economic detritus from lost time and effort as the world still struggles to cope with the inadequacy of the Windows design.

From where I stand, he wont be missed

Gates was pretty snarky in his response to a typical question about a controversial subject– Microsoft’s alleged use of vaporware (the preannouncement of an nonexistent product). His injection of the comment “This assumes that you like capitalism” is obviously a dig at the reporter and is not lost on the reader. It is easy to see how the reporter remembers the incident as being called a communist by Bill Gates. Common sense tells us a person’s words have denotative as well as connotative meaning. We learn early in life to “read between the lines.” That is what the reporter did.
Alice Licht
Winnetka, IL

This comment is directed at Fortune. You can’t really be thinking that you’ll be taken seriously by critically thinking people if you lead with such sensationistic garbage. Yes it caught my eye and I read it, as did many other readers, but at what cost to you?

Mr. Elmer DeWitt has a chip on his shoulder (eg. This one is for Bill Gates). Not journalism ladies and gentlemen, this is mean spirited editorialism. Maybe he should write historically based fiction, he’d do well and be off the pages of what is supposed be a fact driven magazine.

Congratulations to Bill Gates for talking straight. The only thing the media deplores more than disingenuos corporate doublespeak is a very intelligent individually speaking frankly and directly.

I think it’s amusing that he doesn’t address the substance of the “vaporware” charge. The idea of vaporware is you announce a product which is not actually being planned solely to disrupt your competition. Microsoft appears to have used this strategy many times. Witness the laundry list of features which were announced for Longhorn/Vista, but were never shipped.

Greg Stanley said ‘You should have been honest an said “Later, reading the transcript, I realized Bill Gates did not call me a communist.”’

The article says “in my memory, the chairman of Microsoft called me a communist. Later, reading the transcript, I realized he didn’t really say that”. Could the author have been more clear?

Given that Gates did use some pretty aggressive language (”This assumes that you like capitalism”), it’s not surprising that the writer originally thought that he’d been called a communist, which was (on a careful read) only implied.

I have to say that I’m a little shocked that a major CEO would be so wildly defensive and insulting when asked fairly obvious business questions.

Just curious… why would you take a statement that says “This assumes you like capitalism” to mean he was calling you a communist? I think that says more about you than it does about Gates. Your initial reaction was telling. Shouldn’t an interviewer remain objective and not take what is said as personal?

Get over yourself Phillip. You are a two-bit reporter who Bill happened to talk to. The conversation was always about Microsoft and never about you. Again, the advice is get over yourself. You are not _that_ important.

Actually, as a non-techie, I think Gates’ answers were pretty common sense.
I think you are taking poetic license when you say he called you a communist. However, the old Herst style of reporting news is the most popular today. Hopefully it won;t result in a war like it did before.
Ed

You should have been honest an said “Later, reading the transcript, I realized Bill Gates did not call me a communist.”

ex ped: I would have thought that was clear from the headline.