“It is almost unthinkable that any one human could pick up where Bill Gates leaves off when he ends his full-time tenure Friday as Microsoft’s leader,” Jessica Mintz reports for The Associated Press.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it is unthinkable. Charlie Peace would have to rise from the dead.
Mintz continues, “But as Gates bones up on epidemiology at his charitable foundation, the software company he built with a mix of visionary manifestos and extreme hands-on management must still wake up Monday to face hard problems even he could not solve.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, like how are they going to “innovate” this time when there’s no longer an unprepared sugared water salesbozo around to sign away Apple’s company jewels?
Mintz continues, “From Microsoft’s start in 1975, Gates has been the company’s genius programmer, its technology guru, its primary decision maker and its ruthless and competitive leader. He would famously disappear into the solitude of a country cabin to digest employee-written papers and ponder the future of the industry, then emerge with manifestos…”
MacDailyNews Take: Like the Unabomber. And, Jessica, those weren’t employee-written papers, they were Mac OS discs.
Mintz continues, “At a May gathering of chief executive officers at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, Gates outlined how he hoped to translate the work once done within the singular confines of his brain into the sort of group projects that could be managed with the company’s own collaboration software.”
MacDailyNews Take: Good God in Heaven.
Mintz continues, “‘We’ve created a thing we called quests, where we divided our types of customers down, and we got the best thinkers on these things, both the very practical people who are with the customers, the engineers who write the code, and the researchers who may be more unbound in terms of their timeframe and imagination, and put them together,’ Gates said.”
MacDailyNews Take: That actually explains a lot. Bloated, spaghetti-coded, focus-less crap covered in rich, creamy bullshit. Microsoft and quality go together like lawnmowers and frogs.
Mintz continues, “Gates did not give any examples of specific quests, though in 2006 and 2007 speeches he referred to the Tablet PC, an innovation he has championed for a decade but which has failed to catch on in the mainstream, as a quest.”
MacDailyNews Take: So, he’s really more like a mixture of Charlie Peace, Ted Kaczynski, and Don Quixote. It’s all finally making sense now.
Mintz continues, “If the quests are as deeply tied to Gates’ own ideas about the future as indicated by the few examples Ballmer mentioned, Microsoft may be in trouble. After all, even with Gates himself at the helm, Microsoft has yet to solve critical competitive headaches. The Internet has changed the means of distributing desktop software applications and even challenged the idea that they’re necessary. Microsoft has scrambled to catch up in music players, and remains an also-ran with its Zune. The most recent Windows Vista operating system landed with a thud. And Microsoft has stumbled badly in Web search and advertising, culminating in Ballmer’s quixotic, $47.5 billion pursuit of Yahoo Inc.”
MacDailyNews Take: Bingo! Well, happy retirement, Bill. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you’re looking for a tribute to Bill Gates, you’re at the wrong site. Luckily for you, there are plenty of mindless twits elsewhere who seem quite happy to gloss things over, rewrite history, and excuse and/or ignore criminal behavior. We only deal in facts here. Trying to buy your way into heaven with ill-gotten gains after plunging the world into a decades-long Dark Ages of Computing does not warrant a tribute.
“….MacDailyNews Take: That actually explains a lot. Bloated, spaghetti-coded, focus-less crap covered in rich, creamy bullshit……..”
oh my !
Geeze, sounds like Gates needs to go to Washington………
I once heard that comment as “Don’t let the screen door hit ya, where the good lord split ya”
Thanx for the overkill in the MDN takes…..as much as we all hate windows, let us remember that Gates did have some positive role in the early years of Apple as a partner. And if weren’t for windows domination in the 90’s, OS X might not have been as great as it is today…..and maybe vista wouldn’t be so disgusting…haha
The only thing these ‘focus’ groups seem to come up with is name changes for long in the tooth, unsuccessful, outmoded and bug ridden software hoping that they can be re=launched on a dull and unsuspecting public who simply won’t notice the sham. Hey after all the whole empire is based on doing that to IBM so what’s changed? Seems quite a lot for that repetitive trick is no longer working like it once did Billy boy. The one trick pony is put out to grass leaving the dung salesman wondering where his next load is coming from.
Sounds like the perfect VP to complete the McCain ticket.
If you can’t take the heat, sissy, then hit up one of these tech blogs where they’re tripping all over themselves to see who can give Gates the best head.
Microsoft sucks, Gates sucks, Ballmer sucks, J. Allard (yeah that’s right I used a period) sucks and I’m grateful to MDN for painting the proper picture.
It sounds like Gate’s DID go to WASHINGTON. Well, WASHINGTON, DC that is. Make comparsion of Gates and the government…………… get the point!
Oh, as a disclaimer: That includes all the numnuts-Democrat, Republican, and other.
Gill Bates also got the cover story on this week’s The Economist.
“Gates has been the company’s genius programmer,”
Bullshit.
I know his PR claims that, but I’ve seen no evidence to support that claim.
-jcr
Thank you Bill Gates for propping up Apple with that $150 Mil investment and making ie for Mac after John Sculley and Gil Amelio did whatever they did to/for Apple.
@ericdano
Geeze, sounds like Gates needs to go to Washington………
Check out “Preston, Gates & Ellis”. Throw in Abramoff too. Lots of Washington scandals there.
@MDN.
Gates would sit in his cabin and try to read Mac OS Discs? That’s creepy and hard on the eyes!
he had his chance to do what he’s been doing all along one more time & he blew it! his parting command should have been to copy apple one last time. i.e. the OS9/ OSX transition!! jettison the legacy code & build a world class state-of-the-art operating system from scratch. by the time ballmer et.al. get it shipped the last extension on XP support & sales should have just been announced…
good luck & good speed on your philanthropic endeavors, bill g.
I guess the site name contributes a bit to the confusion of some readers.
MDN is a news aggregator and the added value (perceived, subjective) is the MDN commentary. You will rarely see a verbatim repring of an entire article there. There will always be a link to the source, though.
My only gripe (and it seems to be common among the regulars here) si that MDN takes, as they are sprinkled throughout the text, aren’t always easily separated from the original text (or quote thereof). A suggestion would be to perhaps colour your quotes in, say, <font color=purple>purple</font>, or <font color=green>green</font>, or something other than black or blue. Not much of an effort to do it, but it would make it easier for us to read.
I guess the old <font> tag isn’t allowed on MDN… At least not in the comments section; but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something out for your own story section.
“From Microsoft’s start in 1975, Gates has been the company’s genius programmer, its technology guru…” etc. etc. Typical hagiography. Seriously, I don’t think Gates as a programmer could hold a candle to, say, Sun’s Bill Joy or Bell Labs Thompson or Ritchie.
UNIX (which underlies OS X) was long ago created and nurtured by Ph. D. computer scientists. DOS and Windows were concocted by a college dropout. Once you understand that, much becomes clear.
For once I agree with MDN’s “takes,” though I would say that Bill Gates is more like Rube Goldberg.
I would like to suggest that you put things like “Mintz continues” (in this article) in blue so that it’s easier to see where you stop and the article starts up again.
Years ago, Bill Gates said he would quit when it wasn’t fun any more. That sounds ominous for Microsoft.
MDN – You cracked me up GOOD on this one!
I’m still laughing!!!
And, just to be clear, you’re right on about Microsoft. Rip-off city!
“Bloated, spaghetti-coded, focus-less crap covered in rich, creamy bullshit.”
Wow, a definition of MDN itself. An adsite, sorry website, with content buried inside a layer of crap covered commentary”.
And what about the actual news? Move along, move along…
Raymond in DC: It’s even worse than that. DOS and Windows were not concocted by a college dropout. Rather, the college drop-out negotiated a contract with IBM, then bought Q-DOS on which he built MS-DOS. WIndows began life as a shell on DOS that was a knock off of the Mac. Bill Gates, and Microsoft, are more about wheeling, dealing, and acquiring than about software development. Quite a lot of their product line came from companies they acquired.
Bill Gates’ quest:
Bell tinkles as door to chemist’s opens.
“Packet o’ Rothman’s, please.”
>Microsoft and quality go together like frogs and lawnmowers.
How about slugs and beer = Dead Bloatware.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
“It is almost unthinkable that any one human…”
But not for a Monkey [boy]…
MS gained the whole world on three things: Windows 95 being good enough for business, the concept of the Office bundle and offering their OS to multiple manufacturers. The rest flowed from these.
MacOS X is definitely good enough, iWork needs work but is 90% there and the third is only a dream…
I’ve had it with this site. I used to love reading it, but over the past couple years, especially, it’s become nothing more than a “Apple fanboy” / “everything else but Apple SUCKS” site, with too buch subjectivity in it’s “news”.
I love Apple products, and have for many years. That said, I recognize the true contributions Mr. Gates has provided over the many many years in his field, plus the work of his Foundation. I think he should be appeciated, even by the fanboys on this site.
Cheers.