Bill Gates retires from Microsoft
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Well without Bell labs/at&t you would still be on valves
Ok, point made. After reading the wiki page I think Bell Labs can be included.
It still deviates away from my main point though of vision being just as important as technological invention.
Burnsy
Ahahahahaha!
oh yeah without one giant company to unify everything and make standards the small pc market would never really have taken off, you have to sacrifice some immediate invoations for it, but the good ones get pulled in eventually, once they are refined enough to work on more than one specific kind of hardware.
You can't really have both.
You can't really have both.
I remain unconvinced about the common platform argument. If you stifle competition and buy out companies who pose you a threat cause this is gonna happen. In an ideal world your applications would work across multiple platforms, you wouldn't need to target a specific platform. Using open standards and having a transparent nature to your software development process only increases interoperability. I guess we are not gonna agree on this
I do see where your coming from with the ubiquitous platform argument though.
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Sorry for the obvious question, but can you provide some reasoning behind your statement?
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But how does having multiple platforms actually help the industry as a whole other then complicate development? A whole industry doesn't move at the same rate and so adoption of open standards isn't as black and white as people would like to believe.
Surely the closed nature of Apple shows that closed systems are inherently more stable because of the control a vendor has over it?
Burnsy
But you can only get the standards by being big enough for force either software people to use your language etc, or by force hardware manufacturers to make compatible hardware, but again without someone large enough to keep others in check then you'd find a new gfx card coming out that was better but only a few games would work on old ones wouldn't lots of apps wouldn't like it and so on and so on.
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Man of Honour
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Oh and I'm not totally convinced that standards actually are as helpful as people would want. Mainly due to the bureaucratic nature of having to ratify standards that takes years, which is an eternity in the IT industry. Although the alternative isn't particularly attractive either.
Burnsy
Burnsy
Ok take recently, I wanted to write some software for my iphone. Now apple's SDK is totally crippled and it wont let me do what I want to do without much hacking around. Now if the iphone kernel wasn't locked down to hell I might have been actually able to develop my application and thus improve what software is available. Sure I could effect stability of the system, but I would rarther have functionality/more creative software and fix the stability problems in the development process than not be able to do what I want. This is one of the reasons propritary stuff (closed platforms) nark me.
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You've got a good point, but I don't think going totally open source is the answer. Look at the APIs that Microsoft and Google provide. They're well features and well documented. Google Earth is a good example of that, yet they are still propriety. So control over the long term evolution of a platform is not comprimised. I see it as too many cooks ruining the stew as there are so many ideas and not enough control over where the focus should be.
Burnsy
ok i've only just got back in after a big night out and i can still type some how... but from various sources, ok, bill gates from all that he has made he has donated so much to charities and to really good causes but origionally wasnt he working for apple and then the idea of windows (may have been called something else while he was with apple) which im sure he was a main programmer towards, didnt he just take the idea off from what they were working on and just run off with it? like while working for a company if you invent something in the line of work it is legally copyrighted to the company but he managed to get it as his own idea and technically **** apple over for it?
i may be completely wrong about this so im sorry if i am, but that's what ive heard for about 10 or so years now off various people.
still though, he's an amazing guy for all the money he has put back to good causes...
...
on a different not my mate said a funny thing, he's kind of like robin hood, but instead of rob the rich and give to the poor... rob everyone, make loads of money and then charity lots of it
i may be completely wrong about this so im sorry if i am, but that's what ive heard for about 10 or so years now off various people.
still though, he's an amazing guy for all the money he has put back to good causes...
...
on a different not my mate said a funny thing, he's kind of like robin hood, but instead of rob the rich and give to the poor... rob everyone, make loads of money and then charity lots of it
As far as I know both jobs and gates where working on their own things, then jobs nicked GUI/mouse from xrox, then gates made a plan, got a job with apple, then swiped the gui/mouse and released his product before apple
Industrial spy too
Although everything is just slightly different enough to be separate and unsuable.
Take a look at the technology being used in computers like the Amiga as MS was starting to come into dominance via the business world, it already had true multi-tasking and independant processors for graphics, sound etc etc. It also didn't suffer from only having a base 64k of memory with the rest having to paged in and was far in advance of PC technology at the time. While a lot of this stuff is indeed in the modern PC i cannot help but feel that we would have been there that much quicker without the MS domination.
But please remember it's only an opinion, I cannot back it up any further as it didn't happen and anything else is pure speculation. As it stands MS have done a reasonable job of pushing technology forward, however to say they have had the biggest hand in it is a bit off, lets face it it is every software and hardware vendor out there that has been doing it, specifically IBM when it had it's pc copied by so many
MS has just been the crutch they have all been made to lean on, although it can easily be argued that without MS's standardisation of computers that things would have just fallen apart totally.Bill is an amazing business man for sure, it's a testament to him that he can charge so much for an OS and have droves of people defend the cost even with the profits his company posts every year and I'd rather it was him than many others as has already been pointed out due to his superb charitable nature
I'm probably completely and uttery wrong to be honest and it is just an off the wall opinion, it doesn't matter either way as we got what we got, which if I am honest about, I'm not at all disappointed with
With regards to the Amgia (I still have two - A1200 and A2000) it was a good system but not a great system. It was too clunky. It was not user friendly and everytime you played games on it you had to restart the operating system to play the next one. WHDLoad eliminated most of this but it was still not a decent system.
I agree with the majority of the comments. Bill was and is a superb business man I believe we would be ages behind had Windows not been around but that's pure speculation there may have been something else but Windows is the most easy to use O/S there is out there bar none.
Good lucky Bill!
M.
I agree with the majority of the comments. Bill was and is a superb business man I believe we would be ages behind had Windows not been around but that's pure speculation there may have been something else but Windows is the most easy to use O/S there is out there bar none.
Good lucky Bill!
M.
Last time I checked an OEM copy of Vista Home was about £70 give or take. WIndows comes out every 3 - 5 years so not a bad investment. However you fail to mention the Apple 6 month cycle and £100 a pop. I belive Apple has gone from OS9 to OSX 10.4 in 3- 5 years making the Apple software more expensive, which is wrong as it should be cheaper since they don't have to write for much hardware.
Granted Microsoft has done a lot for technology some good some bad, however it is also driving the industry forward. However if it was all open source, I would imagine there would be no incentive to move forward, no incentive for Intel/AMD to push the bounds of physics
But has MS failed with Windows we would have probally ended up with OS/2 Warp and at that time IBM software development was shocking since they will still heavily routed in the mainframe aspect
Kimbie
Sorry I should have been more specific, I meant open standards, as in TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, XML, ODF, Java even. Open source as a development model, yeah it's different and has produced some stuff, it's not revolutionised the world yet though.
MS is well known for taking standards such as these and adding proprietary, closed extensions, breaking compatibility with other implementations. Two simple examples, DCE/DFS and Kerberos in NT, J++. The industry is better off with agreed standards then people compete to produce a better implementation.
On the one hand I applaud MS for getting where they have, despite what some might say it can't have been that easy, but I don't like the tactics they've used and I don't think we or the IT industry are better off for it.
Which just brings us back to my earlier comment
No, it doesn't. The Xp to Vista cycle was an abberation in the MS release schedule.
I excluded apple as I have no knowledge of their release and pricing schedule.
And there was me making outlandish statements...