Bill Gates is no Steve Jobs
Summary: Bill Gates' gradual departure from Microsoft over the next two years comes at a time when the company is facing its largest challenges. It is way behind Google and other companies in transitioning to the online era, and it faces large problems with staff morale.
Bill Gates' gradual departure from Microsoft over the next two years comes at a time when the company is facing its largest challenges. It is way behind Google and other companies in transitioning to the online era, and it faces large problems with staff morale.
Just a few days ago, Robert Scoble, an important and popular Microsoft evangelist left the company. And it has lost other key people. This makes it doubly hard for it to recruit its next generation of leaders.
Mr Gates' departure might be a way to bow out before the company's problems come home to roost. A company of MSFT's size has plenty of business to carry it through the next few years. And it can remain very profitable if it cuts its losing business groups.
But its long term future is anything but bright, as Mr Gates claimed at the press conference today: "The road ahead for Microsoft is as bright as ever." Microsoft must make some very hard decisions and reinvent itself as a company.
The power of the founder to make such changes within an organization can be very significant. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, returned to the company when it was facing huge challenges and he managed to remake the company he co-founded. Bill Gates could also bring that type of capability to Microsoft during a time of huge challenges.
Clearly, Mr Gates is no Steve Jobs.
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Talkback
bad boy fence sitter
Im a mac guy but kinda think that mac is now following too
much in the hard sell / corporate footsteps of mircrosoft and
kinda forgetting its top end user's
but still happily a mac guy... prob well brain washed...
but dang still the best op system around for day to day hi end
vid/ design work !
good luck to both :)
Thank gawd he isn't Jobs!!!
No sense in being disrespectful to Jobs!
companies. Clearly the guy who wrote the article is smoking
something but I'm not sure what. Bill Gates has nothing left to
prove. Most Macheads show respect for Bill Gates. Just go read
the posts at MacCentral. I'm sure Steve Jobs respects Bill Gates.
Gates will still be involved with Microsoft, but the bottom line is
the richest man in the world doesn't have to work at all, and if
he wants to go into his back yard and grow hybrid roses for the
rest of his life, he can and will. Also, I don't see Microsoft as
being in any trouble. I doubt Microsoft will be able to hold the
90% market share they now hold with Windows and an even
higher market share with Office. Apple's market share is around
5% in the US, maybe higher. It's grown significantly over the last
couple of years while other PC makers have been floundering,
but that's not the point. Microsoft is not struggling and Bill
Gates retires as king of the world. The biggest threat to
Microsoft and Apple for that matter is lawyers and courts. The
patent lawyers and the patent hijackers as well as government
intervention will be the enemies, not Google, etc. If I were in a
high roller poker game in Vegas and Bill Gates walked in the
room with Fort Knox behind him. I would pack up my chips and
leave because he could buy the hand at any time. It's the same if
you happen to be in a business he's interested in. If you think
Mac users don't know how good Gates is at business. Imagine
you're a Mac user. You're running the best operating system on
the planet, bar none. Still I'd say 80% of the computer users
haven't a clue what the differece is betweeen Mac OSX and
Windows. Microsoft kicks ass in marketing. Apple is more
fortunate than most companies in the same business as
Microsoft. Most Microsoft competitors over the years are out of
business now. Steve Jobs above all respects Bill Gates. They
pioneered what today we call the PC business. Anyone who is
totally disrespectful to Bill Gates is a complete moron. For
someone as totally wealthy as Bill Gates, he seems to lead a very
normal life with a normal family, is very focussed and hasn't
gone crazy and lost touch with reality like Michael Jackson or
Howard Hughes.
what most people fail to give credit to
If one looks at Microsoft technologies, MFC, COM, DCOM, MTS, DirectX they'd then realize why Micrsoft wins.
It is the awesome technology from Microsoft that makes Microsoft so successful.
Maybe not
In fact the likes of Sun and Next pretty much based themselves around the idea of ?build it and they will come? ? that by investing in advanced technology they could attract developers to their systems, and thus create applications. And a small number ? those motivated by technology ? did. Next (and by extension OS X) built up a strong niche in academic computing, due to strong support for distributed computing (far simpler than any competing standards at the time like CORBA or DCOM), and by radically simplifying UI development in the early 90s.
Sun made very strong gains in the server market, and Java made a very big impact in those parts of the world where ?write-once, run-anywhere? was actually something people cared about; it still remains the worlds most popular ?serious? programming language. It was a cool enough technology to have a significant influence on C#.
Vista introduces some really cool technological features, but again ideas like a declarative presentation layer are not exactly new - XUL on the Mozilla Gecko engine has been around a few years, and .nib files on NextStep were doing this 10 years ago (although in binary format rather than XML). Most web apps do it. Adobe?s Flex does it for Flash. Which won?t stop WPF being seen as a massive innovation.
Why do I think MS won?? Well, let us not forget that the the most-used programming language in the world is not C# or even C++, but VB. Even Delphi had a good run through the C++ era. That suggests that despite all the push towards good programming practices and OO, there is still far more development done the quick and dirty way, by people who I would wager might not even know their DCOM from their MFC. I don?t think the reason for this is technological, it?s because these are the machines on their desks.
Online trolls still suck
Anyone can blow up a marshmallow with a bazooka, Sparky.
Ax, you're a troll
If you think the world is a better place because one company dominates the computer market-place, you are a fool. An Apple dominated world would be just as bad (as we are seeing in the digital music player market) because as soon as any player achieves dominance (by which I mean over 60% of the market) they make the market dance to their tune.
Sure, iPods and Windows have improved, but they both now hold back real innovation.
Of course, if you want the response you wanted to provoke, without Jobs we'd all still be using MS-DOS. Actually, without Apple there may have been no Microsoft (no Microsoft BASIC, no company for IBM to call) - although it is likely that whoever IBM had picked for their PC would have achieved a similar position.
You are like the fan of an enormously unpopular but succesful sports team. The only thing you can do is brag about their success, because there is no other reason to like them.
That's great. Kick Gates in the stomach on his way out ...
I think its called...
Microsoft has made lots of enemies over the years though its business practices (discussed ad nauseum elsewhere). Bill Gates has been the undisputed head of Microsoft for the past 30 years (Steve Ballmer may have the title of CEO, but he's clearly subordinate to Gates); that means that he bears personal responsibility for what has happened at MS, both bad and good. It therefore follows that it is proper for MS-critics to blame him for the practices to which we object.
MS can use predatory tactics to accomplish their ends, should they think them appropriate, but the price is that they (especially their leaders) have to live with the negative consequences (lawsuits, antipathy and mistrust) that are their inevitible results.
In short, Mr, Gates has made his bed; now let him lie in it.
Please expand.
How many other forums disussing other industries where one company may be a dominate force do you participate in to throw out your opinions.
Is an antitrust case loss proof they committed anything illegal? Hell no. There are thousands of court decisions still heavily debated to this day. Was it to placate both sides, the one being the competition who did Nothing when MS was small and beatable, but now are crying wolf? Many people like to hate winners, esp. when tehy just keep winning. But that's no reason to throw around comments that lack class. Unix/Linux does not exactly have an uncheckered past you know. In fact, if you did deep enough into the Unix past and how it got it's place Dominating the internet, you would see that entirely overshadows anything MS have ever done. AT&T was prosecuted well beyond Microsoft, the inventors of Unix and it's derivative Linux. Does that make them worse than Gates? Answer that one. Does time heal all wounds? Have you ever read about AT&T's domination of every household in America....held literally as prisoners. They couldn't go out and buy an Apple phone line, or whatever. Microsoft is worse than that? I think they are just extremely savvy business people that outsmarted the competition. That is the way in a for-profit economy, if you want to play with teh big boys. Google is not crying about the past, they are just moving on. Maybe you should too.
Against my better judgement...
MS activities, on the other hand, are here and now and the buck stops will Bill Gates. Since I don't have time to rehash all of the discussions on this board of MS business practices over the last 10-20 years, I'll have to let it go at that and we'll argue about it another day.
I've heard every argument.
My thoughts are if you hate the OS, hate the leader, and your heart is full of hate, and many have a small black heart to begin with, why would you waste precious time going to talkbacks on the very person/OS/applications you hate so much? It's obvious, if you read through the hundreds of posts that most of it is these people's lives. They don't seem to have anything else. That is truely sad.
I don't know how we got so lucky but at my medium sized healthcare organization we run around 45 windows 2003 servers and over 300 windows clients. It's been will over 5 years since there has been any hint of any problems. Our security measures are in place and working and server 2003 never goes down. Never. Same with XP. We have a lot of desktops locked down, but a large number are not. No problems with XP. This is an environment in which we could measure productivity gains within a week after migrating from a Unix and Novell infrastructure, which required constant care and feeding, to do administration on Unix required stone age-like tools..it was awful.
Anyway the antitrust case shows MS to be criminals anymore than anyone else in teh business world, including Steve Jobs.
What people don't take about is how MS got in the position it did. Why didn't Unix or Apple or some other OS see what was happening and jump in there while they still had it all over MS? That's the question I'd like answered. Why all the after the fact rubbish. If a vendor sees it more profitable to ship with Windows, is that unethical practice? If all vendors do..is that MS's choice, or the vendors? There's never been coersion or anything close to misprepresentation? I just don't get it. I've owned an Apple and 3 or so windows boxes now. Not once was there ever a feeling I had no choice. The arrogant brainless masses on here that use the term "sheeple" is another pet peeve. How dare they? The "average" citizen of the HERE and NOW is very savvy about their choices and what will best fill their needs.
Sorry to have bothered you.
(If you know about AT&T then you know all about how the Unix/Linux as we know it today, cause the AT&T Unix was horrible!! We ran it!...was created. Tax dollars. Major amounts of tax dollars over many years/decades poured into universities and research facilities. Government created software. I firmly believe that an OS that has been created with taxpayer dollars is more unethical than anything. McNealy walked away from Stanford with SUN in his pocket. Stanford University Network. He would not have had that otherwise. Geez, if it weren't for DARPA and the cold war, there would still be no competition from the Unix side. Even with all that funding, that goes on till this day!....they are still working on getting it to the desktop. And the real sheeple are those that believe this has all happened only since Linux was released, as if it were a new OS and secure by the wisdom of open source. A sort of deception. They don't bother to tell you that YOU funded the linux OS over the past 40 years.
true but..
Comfy bed
Certainly not Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs?? I'm sure there's more companies he can put in the toilet. If their rebadged MP3 player ever gives out, they'll be in real trouble.
He overstayed by 6-7 years
founded DEC in 1957 and was really running it until he ran out
of ideas around 1990. Bill is no Ken Olsen either, even though
he's done a lot of smart things.
Once Msoft was convicted of anti-trust violations - upheld on
appeal - that was the signal that Bill should have heeded. They
need a Lou Gerstner - someone who can think strategically and
isn't a product of Msoft culture - to come in and refocus the
organization.
BTW, Ballmer should leave too. He isn't helping.
Olsen ran out of ideas in 1982
Your missing the point
So it comes down to how much of MS is a real company, and how much is a one man side show. I expect it should prove entertaining for a while
Bill Gates is no Steve Jobs - thats because he's way better
Steve Jobs knows only one thing marketing. Technology wize he knows nothing.
How could one even compare the two. So in a way you are absolutely right.
sorry, couldn't let this pass..
No... didn't think so.