JaguarWong said:
I know geek guideline #3 states clearly that popular=bad but is there more to it than that?
Did a miss story somewhere in which he was caught with in flagrante delicto with a boy scout, a badger and a jar of lemon curd?
hmmmm not sure if i got that much time to write out the diatribe or not
well in the beginning there was this group known as the homebrew computer club, the list of members is some of the most brilliant computer ppl in this day and age, they recieved a letter from a young mr Gates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists he said what they were doing was wrong. they were helping one another and generally helping the hacking community by sharing stuff
along comes an os called cpm, mr Gates saw this and decided to "embrace and extend" it and stole someone else's version of cpm and called dos, thus ms-dos was born. well then mr Gates, along with the 2 Steves (Woz and Jobs) and a few others went to visit XEROX PARC, they saw this nice "window" type system. well the 2 Steves used this in their nice little computer system, giving birth to the mac, and mr Gates decided to try his hand at this and made an even worse version, windows was born
in the early 90s mr Gates figured that everyone should pay him a levy on their computer equipment cause it might possibly run m$ software, thus was born the microsoft tax, which you can't get back even if you don't run m$ software. now at this time he was teamed up with a small company called International Business Machines, big blue for short, and they were making a great os called os2. well once the m$ tax hit computer companies decided to not sell os2 preinstalled cause they were giving money to m$ anyways.
then windows 95 and windows nt came along and sadly os2 died off. the internet became popular, it had been around for almost 30 years at this point, and the web was born. there was this great browser called netscape and it was good, well mr Gates saw this and decided to make his own, thus was internet explorer born. it was a separate download tho and netscape was doing really well. so mr Gates decided to for internet explorer on users, he made it so it was bundled with windows, since most ppl were not very computer savvy, they didn't know about netscape thinking the internet was "the little blue e", thus the antitrust trial got into full swing
all this time mr Gates and friends were spouting lies about how great and secure their os was and how bad their competitors were. they would out right steal technology from competitors and change it BUT make it less functional, more of a memory hog and have security that resembled a sieve. they continue to this day to bully people to do their bidding, look at the recently ooxml standards bid, also look at their battle with linux and all that fun stuff, look at the xbox360 and even the oringal xbox
i could seriously go on about how bad they are as a company and even him as a person, great he donates to charity and all but doesn't excuse his business practices.
