To: Pamela Murray who wrote (517 ) 11/1/2001 12:30:53 PM From: Pamela Murray Respond to of 1644 Bill Gates is a Boob Quotes are popping up of Gates talking about the "digital hub" theory. He stole the idea during a keynote in the beginning of the year, following Jobs' description of the future of the PC and is being quoted about it again now in an article in PC World. When the description of XP was hitting the media, I made a grave error. I thought Microsoft going out on their own accord with their own ideas was dangerous to their success, since most of their acceptability has come from ripping off Apple. They have dropped the NBCi rip off with Smart Tags and the failed Sun idea of their .NET strategy was branching out to other companies failures, and they put in their own OS as some kind of innovation. Aside from the new looming "big brother-feeling" pieces of XP, they are still following suit, ripping off Apple. Windows Movie Maker, My Pictures, and the updated Windows Media Player to shadow iTunes capabilities are a few of the recent rip-offs. The Movie Maker doesn't need much comment to understand where they got the idea, nor does My Pictures, or even Microsoft's own on-line offerings comparing to iTools. The new version of Windows Media player comes after rumors of Microsoft tampering with how MP3 players will function with XP, trying to force users to use their media player. Microsoft has vigorously gone after this market, even threatening Apple to halt their distribution of QuickTime to Windows users or face the possibility of having MS Office axed for the Mac. Their OS business model is clear. Keep throwing things out there on top of mirroring Apple and their success will keep on coming. macinstein.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------