“Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said current Internet search-engine technology is ‘a joke,’ and promised better features in two to three years. But the head of the software giant, in an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum here late Friday, acknowledged that Microsoft had stumbled in its own search-engine efforts. He said the company had been ‘stupid as hell’ to let Google take the lead in the search market,” Peter Loftus and Taska Manzaroli report for Dow Jones Newswires.
“Separately, Gates said Microsoft was ‘certainly working hard’ to release a new computer operating system, dubbed Longhorn, in 2006. ‘It won’t be a radical shift, but it will be clearly an improvement on Windows,’ the ubiquitous operating system, Gates said,” Loftus and Manzaroli report.
Full article (requires subscription) here.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, Gates doesn’t mention Apple’s Spotlight search technology slated for release “in the first half” of this year. With “Longhorn” long overdue, stripped-down, and now being described by Gates as not “a radical shift, but clearly an improvement on Windows,” Apple is sitting very pretty with their current Mac OS X 10.3.7 “Panther” (heck, they were sitting pretty with Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”) and will soon be in an even better position with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger.” Apple leads, Wintel follows, as usual. Find out more about Apple’s soon-to-be-released Mac OS X “Tiger” here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs: Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ will ship ‘long before Longhorn’ – January 11, 2005
Thurrott: Apple copying Microsoft’s Longhorn search features with Mac OS X ‘Spotlight’ – December 15, 2004
Microsoft’s Longhorn fantasy vs. Apple’s Mac OS X reality – September 14, 2004
Is Microsoft’s stripped-down ‘Longhorn’ worth waiting for? – September 10, 2004
Microsoft to gut ‘Longhorn’ in attempt to ship in 2006; Avalon faces knife – August 27, 2004
Analyst: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘going to have quite a lead on Longhorn’ in search technology – July 02, 2004
PC Magazine: Microsoft ‘Longhorn’ preview shows ‘an Apple look’ – May 06, 2004
at this rate if they back off any more from what longhorn is supposed to be it will be a downgrade from the current windows.
Nothing to see here, Move along.
Magic word ‘police’ Hmmmm!
Any dump Gates works hard at squeezing out would clearly an improvement on Windows.
MDN Magic Word: “behind” – no shit!
longhorn!? yoo hoo, longhorn! where are you? probably hiding in shame from tiger – or even panther. really any OS X version. just another reason to switch i guess. seems like m$ is spending more time in cutting features than in dev.
The revolution is over. Bill knows he lost, though he’ll never admit it publicly. As with most revolutions, the triggering change occurs well before the mass shift which signifies change. But the change is inevitable…
Move along…
Kip is singing to Lafawnduh after they are pronounced husband and wife
Kip: Why do you love me? Why do you need me? Always and forever… We met in a chatroom, now our love can fully bloom… Sure the world wide web is great, but you, you make my salivate… I love technology, but not as much as you, you see… But I STILL love technology… Always and forever. Our love is like a flock of doves, flying up to heaven above… always and forever, always and forever… Why do you need me? Why do you love me? Always and forever…
Longhorn? Cowppatties. Anti-piracy tool. Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Magic word “theres” strikes a blow for poor spellers.
I thought the longhorn was an endangered species. that would explain why its hard to find.
Microsoft can’t get a break, can they? – Not that I really care.
Between their current position in the Digital Music arena and rumors of Apple and the (currently) unrealized potential of the Mac mini, I have to wonder if Billy G is scared.
Longwait….crushed by Tiger.
If the rumors about Apple in Video services is true…
not to mention ‘Apple + Sony’ (who knows)…
We could expect:
Portable Media Centers…killed by iPod AV (Creative declares war yet again)
Media Center PC’s…killed by the one-two Combo of Apple and Sony set-top boxes
As well as VOD (Video-on-Demand) services provided by Apple (a QuickTime Movie Store, if you will).
The golden (more like sh*t-brown) age of Windows is about to hit the fan.
Pun intended.
mooooooooo.
magic word: use
use OSX. use a premium user experience. use your brains. get a mac.
YES! thanks macnut….
I never liked any of the “i” names people had for an apple movie store. QuickTime Movie Store sounds great to me….and it makes sense, Quicktime plays the movies anyways, why add another app? Just put a browser/store in quicktime
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
idiots. Really. It amazes me….no…it really doesn’t….It is kind of depressing when you realize how stupid people really are.
When Longhorn is finally released, the PC world will jump for joy…not realizing that it is just a quick fix…and probably be less secure than NT..if that’s even possible.
Hey magic word losers….why do you continue to do this?
It was funny the first 3000 times.
RJ
Well, we know what isn’t shipping in Longhorn.
No WinFS
The Indigo communications sub-system heavily pruned.
The Avalon graphics sub-system pruned from the original lofty claims.
So, out of [B]FOUR[/B] key areas of “improvement”, the only one that is likely to really make it out of the gate is the so-called “Fundamentals” pillar comprising of really user-focussed stuff like core power management, driver management, application installation/deployment and digital rights management.
Windows XP shipped in 2001, so the net improvement of [B]FIVE[/B] years development effort for what will ultimately be Windows XP 2.00 will be the ability to wake from sleep, the ability to not have your drivers create a BSOD, some new doohickeys to help you click Setup.exe, and some stuff that helps MS out in its relationships with the entertainment industry.
Well, I’m sold…
Magic word is “Alone”. You may use this word in the following sentence: “If you use Windows, you’re never [B]alone[/B] in the pain and suffering that you have to endure every moment of your miserable life.”
I would be shocked if Longhorn comes anywhere near Jaguar… Tiger will easily put it to shame… plus who knows what else Apple has planned in the time between Tiger and the release of Longhorn.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Steve must be loving this.
Jack A
Are you an Aussie bloke?
“I’m really mad, this is outragoues! How could this be going on? The Machintosh taking over. They have iTunes, iMovie HD, Final Cut Pro HD, Shake, Motion, Garageband, iPhoto and what have I created? Winblows!! and everybody is soon going to figure out it was all a scam, How am I’m going to fix this.”
Quoted from Bill Gates CNN.com has the article front page.
I was playing around earlier and dropped a .mov file onto iTunes. It displayed a black box in the album art box but would play the audio from the file. I could convert the audio to AAC also. It’s an interesting way to extract the audio from certain files. I was hoping that since you can watch trailers in iTMS that I might be able to do something similar with local QT files.
Oh well, hopefully soon enough…
Of course “current Internet search-engine technology is a joke”. That is why everyone uses Google.
How about Internet Explorer is a joke? It does not offer half the features of modern browsers like Safari and Firefox.
I hope Google continues to dominate as the search engine of choice on the Internet. Microsoft’s supposed improvement on search engines would most likely be less accesible to everyone who is not using Internet Explorer on Windows.
The thing going for Google, in the masses eyes, is brand recognition. When you want to find something, “Google it”, no one is going to “Search.msn.com it”!!! People associate google with searching and M$ with OS (but even that is going too become more questionable as Apple becomes more synonymous with OS (as in OS X). M$ has been far too complacent in their offerings for the past 4 years. All they’ve seemed to do is repurpose their OS and brand it as a tablet or media version and try to sell it to a different market. And now to announce that the long awaited Longhorn is going too be merely and update to XP? They might as well start rebuilding Virtual PC because that’s going to be the only thing they’ll be able to sell by the end of ’06!!!
IS this a joke?
Microsoft with all it’s billions can’t even create a new OS!
Unbelievable!!!
This is soooo embarrasing for them!!!
All these corporations that use windows must be shiting themselves – the great Redmond can’t deliver a usable product!!!
I think Microsoft are at the end of their monopoly, their time has been and gone – they are too big a corporate monster to do anything new or innovative.
Look at the facts:
– Internet explorer is losing global market share like a boat with holes in it
– Windows has inherant serious security flaws and surfing the net on a windows pc is like playing russian roulette
– M$ haven’t come up with anything new fot 10 years
– Their software products lack any sort of seamless compatibility with the hardware manufacturers that they choose to work with
– The company employs too many high paid ‘executives’ that do not add anything to the company’s bottom line
Weighing all this up, M$ are too big to be effective in the computer industry.
When they have gone, when asked if people remember M$ all they will think is ‘didn’t they write that business software?… What was it called again… oh yes… Office”
And who is the Microsoft software architect that didn’t recognize Internet search as something important, thus letting Google take the lead? And whic architect did not have a good handle on technology such that MS promised “radical changes” in Longhorn when there was no way it could be done?
That architect should be fired. If I was an MS shareholder, I’d say management’s vision is clearly at fault.
>MDN’s misTake: “Of course, Gates doesn’t mention Apple’s Spotlight search technology…”
You’ve got to be an idiot to think the number one software company in the world is going to mention its competitors at every turn.
MDN, c’mon fellas, word your commentary better. At least think about what you say before you publish anything
Not all of us accept all MS-bashing & Apple-praising as gospel-truth. Most Apple users do, but not all. Some of us actually have minds of our own.
Mac & PC Guy
5 Powermac boxes
2 Windows boxes
>MDN’s misTake: “Of course, Gates doesn’t mention Apple’s Spotlight search technology…”
You’ve got to be an idiot to think the number one software company in the world is going to mention its competitors at every turn.
MDN, c’mon fellas, word your commentary better. At least think about what you say before you publish anything
Not all of us accept all MS-bashing & Apple-praising as gospel-truth. Most Apple users do, but not all. Some of us actually have minds of our own.
Mac & PC Guy
5 Powermac boxes
2 Windows boxes