Gates Defends Microsoft's Tactics nytimes.com
Ok, so Fred Moody wasn't being ironic, just reporting the company line they way he's supposed to. Orwell would be proud. Stalin would be impressed. History being rewritten before our very eyes.
Gates said the personal computer industry "is the model industry in the entire economy," with "fantastic" rates of innovation and openness. "Microsoft's role in creating this has been absolutely fundamental," he said.
Consumers can choose from a wide range of hardware and enjoy rapid improvements along with falling prices, Gates said. Windows has been central to that, he said, by becoming an industry standard that Microsoft has chosen to sell at a low price.
Right, $200 retail, and hasn't fallen since introduction, though the volume has gone up tremendously and hardware has dropped like a rock. Monopoly, nice for the monopolist. Oh, Windows is a good deal at the OEM level, but there's other problems there, ask Compaq. Oh, never mind, they love Microsoft, now, at least in public.
"In terms of Internet technology, everyone should be rooting us on in terms of getting those into our product," Gates said. "There's nothing more open than the Internet. There's nothing that's going to foster business efficiency and competition like the Internet."
Right, until Bill establishes that all important "technical lock". It's a necessity, you know. Oh, it's all going to be "open", in the Microspeak sense at least. Interoperable too, in the same sense.
Gates said Microsoft's decision to incorporate browser technology to Windows predates the founding of its chief Internet rival, Netscape Communications, and is simply part of "the march of progress," like adding speech recognition or linguistics capabilities to the operating system.
Like I said, Fred was just reporting the company line, like he's supposed to. That New Yorker piece, where Nathan talked about everything but the internet- another Nixon era dirty trick, I guess. MSN was meant to go through 4 makeovers before converging on the internet. That Spyglass deal, where Bill bought the Mosaic code for some nominal royalty on Windows 3.1 IE- wasn't important at all, Bill had stuff cooking in some secret skunk works. The Active Desktop was already being developed in 1993. And never mind, it'll all be obsolete when the ritualisticly promised speech recognition and natural language processing comes through in NT 8.0 or something. Nader better just go wash his mouth out with soap.
Bill's quite the businessman, no doubt about that. Stock keeps going up, and that's all that counts. That, and the integrity and uniformity of the Windows Experience.
Cheers, Dan. |
