Bill Gates has lost his mind: calls Apple liars, copiers; slams Mac OS X security vs. Windows

17 years ago

On the morning of the launch of the Vista operating system earlier this week, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates talked with Newsweek’s Steven Levy about the new version of Windows.

He also shared his views on the Apple “Get a Mac” television campaign and more.

Steven Levy: You also talk about improved security in Vista.
Bill Gates: Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You’re [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we’ve got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.

Levy: Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
Gates: I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

MacDailyNews Take: We call bullshit on that one: Gates has seen the Apple ads. Every single one and multiple times at that. If not, he’s not doing his job, which seems to be to spread FUD about Apple products, lie to interviewers, and pretend that Microsoft and innovation go hand-in-hand. If you believe Gates, we’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn with your name on it. If Gates had never seen a “Get a Mac” ad, he would not be able to state his next sentence about dullards and klutzes (riiight, someone just told him about the ads, instead of simply showing them to him). Most Windows PC users don’t think of themselves as dullards, but Gates sure does.

Levy: How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Gates: Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

MacDailyNews Take: Gates is in rare form. Lying through his teeth while calling everyone else a liar. This guy’s gonna die in a hotel room in Vegas with 36-inch long fingernails if he keeps up with this level of delusion. Virtually every independent review that compares the two OSes says that Apple’s Mac OS X is clearly superior to Windows Vista. This with Mac OS X Leopard coming out in a few months. No wonder Gates has lost it. Most independent reviews discourage doing an upgrade from XP to Vista; “buy a new machine for Vista” is what they recommend when they’re not saying “switch to a Mac” outright.

Levy: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. 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 dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

MacDailyNews Take: Bill Gates is a liar currently trying to buy his way into heaven with ill-gotten gains. He’s also a vile, weasely dweeb with a massive, yet never-so-richly-deserved, inferiority complex. Steve Jobs has masterfully pushed all of Gates’ buttons and set the stage for interviewers to do the same which has obviously driven the nasty little bastard completely, utterly, and totally out of his mind. Tell us again how you brought Parental Controls to an OS for the first time with Vista, Billy boy. By the way, Bill Atkinson came up with “the file, edit, view, help menu bar” on the Mac. More about the history of where and how the Mac’s user interface originated, from the actual people who did the work, here. Oh, and thanks for the offer, Bill, we would love to be educated by Microsoft’s (former) Windows Chief Jim Allchin:

I’m not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers, both business and home, the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products… I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. – Excerpt from a 2004 email from Jim Allchin to Steve Balmer and Bill Gates

Full interview here.

MacDailyNews Take: The reviews of Windows Vista speak for themselves. “Chrome-plated turd” is not ambiguous. Gates sees the end. His free ride on the back of ignorance is over. Gates sees his legacy, especially in comparison to the one Steve Jobs will leave, and it’s not pretty. Does he really think that he can buy – or lie – his way out of it? Not likely, Karma’s a bitch not easily escaped.

Dude, you got a Dell? What are you, stupid? Only Apple Macs run both Mac OS X and Windows! – April 05, 2006