“I saw what Bill Gates had to say in a recent Newsweek interview about the Mac as compared to Vista,” Scott Granneman reports for SecurityFocus.
Gates in Newsweek: 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.
MacDailyNews Note: Please see related MacDailyNews article: Bill Gates has lost his mind: calls Apple liars, copiers; slams Mac OS X security vs. Windows – February 02, 2007
Granneman reports, “My reaction, like most knowledgeable people who read this, was open-mouthed astonishment. Now, either Bill is heavily drugged and delusional, which I don’t believe, or he’s just completely ignorant, which I also discount, or he knows exactly what he’s saying and has an ulterior motive. That’s my best guess.”
Granneman reports, “Bill Gates knows that he’s at best exaggerating and at worst completely lying through his teeth. So why’s he doing it? Because he also knows that Apple’s new ads are helping Macs to sell like hot cakes, and that security is a big reason why a lot of people are throwing up their hands in disgust at Windows and switching to Apple’s computers. Who reads Newsweek? Not computer pros, but Joe and Jane Computeruser, and Joe and Jane tend to believe what they read in the mainstream media when it comes to computers, especially when that nice, smart philanthropist Bill Gates is the one saying it. He’s Mr. Computer, after all, so he must be right!”
Granneman reports, “A few years ago, Steve Ballmer ranted about open source in the Chicago Sun-Times, bellowing that ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.’ This is obviously horsehockey, and it’s just as obvious that Ballmer knew that it was horsehockey, but he said it anyway knowing that many readers of the Chicago Sun-Times would believe what he said because he is a rich, important businessman. Bill Gates’ claim that ‘security guys break the Mac every single day’ is just as ludicrous, and just as calculated.”
“In both cases, fear is the string these two maestros are plucking. The ignorant will come away from reading the earlier interview believing that Linux is dangerous and will doom their companies, while the later interview may keep a few more people from switching to Mac OS because it’s getting broken into every single day,” Granneman reports. “Apple [also] uses fear to sell computers, but it’s a heck of a lot more accurate in what it both says and implies, while Microsoft’s leaders tend to nakedly push the buttons of fear willy-nilly, facts and reality be damned.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BillH” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Wow: Microsoft’s Windows Vista already hacked – February 09, 2007
Bill Gates unhinged with Apple envy; Microsoft on path to become high profile casualty – February 06, 2007
Bill Gates has lost his mind: calls Apple liars, copiers; slams Mac OS X security vs. Windows – February 02, 2007
They’ll believe it until that shiny new DULL hits the internet and they’re down!
BAM!
Kudos to Billy and Fester – they’re the best!
How the heck did Ballmer get to be CEO anyway?
“How the heck did Ballmer get to be CEO anyway?”
– Because Pugsley was busy selling donuts…
Has anyone, other than Mr. Granneman, taken Gates to task in the “mainstream” media for his outright lies about the Mac?
I’m HAPPY Bill Gates is resorting to lying. The situation was bad back when Bill Gates could simply ignore the Mac. Now he’s feeling the heat of Apple breathing on his neck and has to resort to bald-faced LIES to divert people his way. Seeing Gates resort to this B.S. is simple evidence that Gates is seeing bad times ahead.
It’s a variation on The Three Stages Of Ideas:
1) Dismiss the invention as preposterous
2) Declare that it is no real invention; that it was an obvious development
3) Claim that you thought of the idea first
Steve Jobs needs to ignore Gates. He needs to keep on eye peeled and paying attention to what Microsoft is doing but other than that, he needs to ignore the turd and stay focused on what Apple and Steve do best: make way-cool technology that works well and is appealing. This is something that’s lost on Microsoft.
If Steve sticks to this, Gates will amount to nothing more than a bug-splat on his windshield of life.
akerbs,
He got there based entirely on the Peter principle.
‘You rise to your highest level of incompetency!”
Hate them or not, ethics aside, it is a smart strategy from a business perspective. The majority of people will believe them and they know it. So what if people i the know think they are lying. They are in a minority.
Reporters from common, Joe Citizen mags or newspapers are the ones that will have to get the word out about this crap. I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
Anyone who can lie that big and that easily probally secretly owns hamsters with streched rectums, kept in the basement with a big duct tape supply.
Apple ought to sue the shit out of Gates. This lie is easy to prove.
i guess BG is getting fired again,but in the next weeks ppl here in europe are going to see the REAL POWER of STEVE JOBS.
Is there any truth to the fact that Mac OS X is hacked every day?
Glad I’m not Bill Gates. Why?
Because he’s lying, and he knows it too. Which means he’s rotten inside, and he feels it, it’s a bad smell pervading everything he does.
Microsoft execs know the game’s up, and they’ll be feeling like shit, even with their wealth.
The more Iread about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs the more I realise that they are like chalk and cheese. One has honour one doesn’t. One has values and integrity, the other doesn’t. One will die happy and the other will die trying to rectify many wrongs.
As a story of our time it’s about as good as it gets.
Here’s a very interesting interview with Jobs from 1995 which tells you more… http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html
I am sick of hearing “business is business” as a blanket excuse for the rapid decline in ethics and morality. Lying is lying, just because Gates didn’t stand with his hand on a bible and take an oath doen’t mean he (or anyone) can pick and choose where to throw complete bullshit. It’s dissappointing that the interviewer didn’t have enough technical knowledge to call Mr. Bill to task — probably part of the plan.
My kids are taught not to lie, I was taught by my parents not to lie, and their parents before them (and so on, and son on).
The end does not justify the means, and I guess were starting to see exactly how Microsoft’s bad Karma is starting to catch up with them.
“Good riddance to bad company”, i always say!
C’mon Anaknipedro, get with the program,
Walmart sucks
The Mac doesn’t get hacked.
The tooth fairy is NOT real.
I thought you had to be accountable for what you say to the media. It would be nice to see him caught in his blatant lies, especially if the backlash was more publicized than his original “comments”.
A rat trapped in a corner tends to do anything to try and survive.
@ Buster
Get with the program, no OS is perfectly secure:
http://secunia.com/product/96/?task=advisories
check your tone.
Hope newsweek does a follow up on these lies by interviewing a mac credible source.
akerbs,
Ballmer and Gates were friends at university.
That’s how.
Bill just does what we in our culture do now, lie. Bald faced, flat out, laughable lies, lie to gain advantage, to get ahead.
This happens at all levels of our society, including the top. – – ‘Saddam has tried ot obtain yellow cake uranium ore form Africa’, ‘I did not not have sex with that women’. ‘There are no plans to strike Iran’
Our culture of lies to gain advantage at other’s expense is going to ruin us. A society of sheep gives rise to a government ( & businesses hierarchies ) of wolves. Sheep get sheared, or led to slaughter.
MDN word. lay, as in Ken Lay
Hell, it worked for the last Presidential election, why shouldn’t it work for Microsoft?
The Mac is PROBABLY hacked every day.
It’s the SUCCESSFUL hacks that are important.
To my limited knowledge, the total number of successful hacks is approximately zip.zero
Let him know how pissed you are at the lying SOB.
TechNews@MSNBC.com
The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
It is a brilliant strategy.
The more Iread about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs the more I realise that they are like chalk and cheese. One has honour one doesn’t. One has values and integrity, the other doesn’t.
Bill Gates has done nothing but steal and copy from the very beginning. He created his first programs by going through the wastebaskets at his university and taking code printouts. Microsoft’s very first product was Microsoft BASIC, an implementation of an open language to which they added proprietary extensions so customers who wrote applications in the language couldn’t easily migrate to a competing product.
Microsoft always was and always will be the gutter scum of the corporate world. The inevitable end to their empire is finally drawing close enough to see it on the horizon, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
@anaknipedro
98 vulnerabilities over a 4 year period? If you noticed, the majority are not critical and the few that were important, Apple fixed. Promptly. You had asked if Apple was hacked EVERY DAY. If you do not like my tone which was one of incredulity at your question (I assumed you were a Mac user), then here is a more succinct, hopefully non-offending answer to your original question:
No.
It’s a shame Bill Gates isn’t like Pinocchio; if his nose grew every time he told a lie, he wouldn’t be able to get out of the TV studio after that last round of TV interviews.
Mind you, his wife would probably want him to lie to her more if she were sitting on his face: “Bill, lie to me, lie to me more…. ahhhh, yeh baby!”
(in a ‘When Harry met Sally’ kinda-way…)