Source:
InfoWorld
Bill Gates: We were first, we were best, we are more secure
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Microsoft Bill Gates comes out beating his chest in
this at times fascinating Newsweek article. Worth a read by everyone who thought they knew which operating system is more secure, among other things. Here are a few of my favorite excepts:
NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, �Bill, why upgrade to Vista?� what would be your elevator pitch? Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that's got photos. As I went through, they'd think, �Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?�
I guess it's been a long time since Bill Gates has had to do an elevator pitch, because that's a really lame answer to an important question. Everything he mentions involves things that were reasonably easy on Windows XP (and arguably are done
better on the Mac, but that's a separate question). I would have talked through the self-discovery of wireless networks (which is nightmarish on any operating system for the average consumer), and things like that. Based on his response, Vista is not worth buying. If you do buy (and I plan to, btw - there are soccer sites that only work with Windows for some mind-boggling reason), here's what Gates thinks of the upgrade feasibility:
How about the implication that you need surgery [in Apple's commercials] to upgrade? 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.
I'm not sure what planet Gates lives on (he can afford to buy several), but his comment is patently untrue, or at least, shows a very poor memory. Look: I don't think the Windows upgrade process is
as bad as Walt Mossberg thinks, but what you get after upgrading is...
performance poverty unless you have a new machine. Is this Microsoft's fault? Not really.
It's Microsoft's job to make the best software it can, and the world can upgrade (or not) its hardware to keep up. This probably means that a lot of XP users are going to be very unhappy with their Vista upgrade, as Zack
humorously notes (and in this picture taken from his blog). But they'll get over it. When they get another $1000 to buy a new machine. :-)
But it's certainly not true that it's harder to upgrade a Mac - it's mind-numbingly easy. (Upgrade a Linux machine? Not so easy for the average person. But then, the average person generally isn't using Linux, so a comparison to it by Gates is immaterial.)
But perhaps the best comment (which obviously came from a riled Gates) was this one:
In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system. 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?
I wish I knew these "security guys" who find the Mac easy to hack and Windows impenetrable, but I admit I don't know them. And I didn't know that Microsoft had innovated everything which Apple eventually copied.... Perhaps I don't know these things because they're simply not true.
What
is true is that Windows has a 90%+ market share. Why can't Gates be happy with that? I'm sure he is most of the time, but he sure comes across as grouchy about Apple in this interview. I think Apple makes better systems; Microsoft has the market share to allow it believe very differently.
I think that market share is starting to erode. A larger and larger percentage of people I know have Macs now. So maybe it will matter to be "cool." But for now, Gates' "cool" is in the form of tens of billions of dollars in sales. That's pretty cool.
