Just came back from a conference with guest speaker Bill Gates. Gates touched a number of subjects and we quickly report and comment on them below.The conference took place at the beautiful ex-SGI Computer History Museum building (last year’s story on CHM, make sure you visit the museum if you are living in the area or you are passing by).
Bill Gates started by talking about speech recognition and how this is the next big evolution in the input systems. He also talked about malware and that even himself has to run Ad-aware in order to keep spyware away from him home computers. In fact, he believes that malware is even worse than viruses, because they transmit through downloadable applications that have them embedded in them on purpose. He expects that Microsoft will include anti-malware/spyware software soon on Windows.
Gates believes that connectivity is a very good thing and while this creates new dangers, everyone needs to get extra education on the subject on how to secure or behave on such interconnected environment. He believes that the real WiFi generation is just starting now.
Answering the question about hackers crack DRM and other secure technologies, Gates said that it’s always possible to crack anything. However, it is better to have such technologies around and hope for the best, rather than not publishing online music or movies just out of fear that someone will crack their security. In the first case you have some piracy and some sales, on the second case you only end up with piracy.
On ITManagerJournal’s question about how Microsoft is going to compete with the 50% Linux sales on new servers, Gates replied that “my numbers are different, depending where you are getting them”. He also said that MS has seen many other competitors, including IBM & OS/2, Borland, Apple etc and have survived them all, and he doesn’t see something different with this competitor. He did say though that “fast forward 10 years, the two leading OS technologies will be Linux and Windows” hinting that most others (Sun, Mac?) will be eclipsed from the main business scene.
Gates also mentioned that Linux is taking over Unix, not Windows. The problem with Unix is that the OS companies involved (SGI, Sun, IBM, HP, SCO) never managed to get together and adhere to common standards and direction, he said. When a Unix brand would get a bit better than the other on a particular thing, the others would “conspire” behind its back to bring it down. It’s this fragmentation and lack of business relationships that has destroyed Unix to the rival Linux (our editorial).
As to how Microsoft is going to beat Linux according to Gates, it seems to be via its software’s value, rather than the price. Bill Gates is trying to create software that needs little maintainance and little support. By doing so, he hopes to cut down the number of IT administrators needed on companies (a good admin costs overall up to $200,000 per year for a given company here in the Bay Area, for example). On the other hand, Linux rivals (e.g. Red Hat) are making money primarily by support calls and require capable administrators. Gates hopes to elliminate this need.
Regarding the point that Linux is catching up in market share with Windows on small/poor countries, Gates said that countries are evolving quickly. He said that a few years ago Hong Kong, China or Taiwan were not big Windows buyers, but now, as their economy & business sectors evolve, they are catching up with Windows orders made in the US. He expects more small countries to be able to evolve in that way, and he also said that Microsoft will be adjusting prices for these countries so that the Windows prices there will make more sense and be more affordable.
As for consumers, in these same countries Windows piracy is high. In other words, Windows is free for some of these people. And so is Linux. Having two products that are essentially “free” in one way or another, it all comes down again to the actual value of the software.
Special thanks to Jean-Baptiste Queru for the picture.
These are just hopes and dreams of MS. They are trying to Just brush it off like it is no big deal when in fact it will eventually catch up to them.
I find it funny Bill Gates thinks that in 10 years it’ll just be Windows and Linux. Nevermind the fact that Apple survived around the late 90’s, but now that they have good CPU’s and hardware, Mac OS X is really great, plus the iPod I fail to see where the heck along the line Bill Gates thinks Apple will just disappear.
Personally my hope is that over time Mac OS X and Linux will take over good amounts of marketshare.
Maybe if Gates used Firefox instead of IE he would get less malware. Speech recognition has been around for a while and the science behind it has become so standardized it shows up in Universities all the time (markof graphs I believe?). For drms and hackers I would say forcing a new DRM down everybodies throwt when the last one got hacked is a futile effort. If a algorhythm has a defined methode to unlock it via some legal set of steps garuantied some one will be able to simulate these steps and crack the vault. Well M$ maybe have survived Apple and the likes but this is the first time they will be competing with something free. Linux and Open source isn’t a company or a product its now an principal and movement.
>Speech recognition has been around for a while
He knows all that. He mentioned the software available in unis since then 60s! But his hope is to make it _really_ usable, because today it’s just not a practical form of input method. It still misbehaves, no matter what speech software you use.
Ha ha! Old Bill’s looking the worst for the wear these days. He’s not really all that bad a guy; just a smart & intelligent business man. Never was much of a programmer/hacker either. Paul Allen was the hacker brains in those days. But in the 30+ years I’ve traversed the tech landscape and have seen the many sides of Bill, one thing never changes.
He still refuses to comb his hair.
Daemons @ the Jersey Shore
Bill Gates is trying to create software that needs little maintainance and little support. [SNIP] On the other hand, Linux rivals (e.g. Red Hat) are making money primarily by support calls and require capable administrators. Gates hopes to elliminate this need.
So after having dumbed down the users they’re going after the admins, brilliant. Ok, maybe I’m being a bit too harsh, what he’s trying to say is no doubt that they’ll try making their products as stable as possible (good) but I have a creeping suspicion that not quite meeting that goal they’ll go for the next best thing: making their products as easy to use as possible (bad).
Now I don’t have anything against easy to use products, but we’re talking about admins here, not users, and the average quality of one is low enough these days. Admins don’t need to have it ‘easy’, they need to have it ‘stable’ and ‘streamlined’, if companies aren’t ready to shell out for a decent admin they have to be ready to run into a few problems down the road.
Fast, cheap, good: Choose Two. I think this applies to the whole admin ecosystem as well.
>Never was much of a programmer/hacker either
He argued the opposite and he seems to be a good Chief Software Architect.
Actually Gates was a good hacker on the Altair when he was doing BASIC down in New Mexico. The book Programmers at Work has some of his assembly code in it and he was known to use some clever tricks to save a byte here and there and to get good execution speed on that very limiting machine. He also had his hands in the compiler code well into the early 80s.
But whatever it takes to make yourself feel better.
This interview was conducted with you (Eugenia)?
It was not an interview. It was a public Q&A with many different people asking questions and Gates answering.
I was not fortunate to have my question answered because we ran out of time.
Admins don’t need to have it ‘easy’, they need to have it ‘stable’ and ‘streamlined’
There’s no rule that they can’t have all 3. I guess Perl and Bash make things too easy for admins. They should have to write all their tools in assembly.
>>I find it funny Bill Gates thinks that in 10 years it’ll just be Windows and Linux.
“He did say though that “fast forward 10 years, the two leading OS technologies will be Linux and Windows” hinting that most others (Sun, Mac?) will be eclipsed from the main business scene.”
Even now Apple is pretty insignificant. No doubt, Apple has fantastic products but proably will never be able to compete with the commodity market.
Heck look right now, Apple’s marketshare has been dropping for years because they can’t keep up with the X86 market’s growth. Its going to get worse for Apple since now, new markets are emerging (China, India, etc) that will inevitably go with X86, hence degrading Apple’s marketshare even further/faster and might make it hard for third party companies to justify supporting Apple.
I am just a bit confused in the categorization/classification. What would you say BSD falls under, Linux or Unix? There’s a good chunk of BSD running the net. Heck, even hotmail run BSD (or at least, used to…) He mentions Unix as if referring only to big HP, Sun, etc.., what about the free ones? Guess he means those fall under Linux.
Can we all just shut our mouths and wait 10 years and see who comes out ahead? All of this MS bashing (and very rare *nix bashing) means nothing because its all speculation.
BSD is a Unix, 100%.
Gates was speaking about the heavy commercial Unix though, not the likes of FreeBSD etc.
macs have been on a steady and substantial decline since the early 90s
unix servers have been on a steady decline as well…sped up fairly radically since the release of windows 2000 and as linux gains in power.
overall unix machine numbers may be up because of the 3 million mac desktops/portables that ship each year, but unix is dying in its bread and butter: servers and high performance computing/mainframes.
the trend is well established, why is it hard to carry it out 10 years to unix and mac as bit players to the 9th degree when both are already on that doorstep….8th degree already?
expensive and proprietary hardware and software solutions when sold together are finished.
the world speaks ever louder every day: we want commodity hardware and we want cheap or free software. linux and ms provide both on the software front and with commodity hardware that is likewise inexpensive, we are free to use the software of our choice on it.
I think some Microsofties would do anything to shut up Gates by now. 🙂
I don’t think this news item is word for word what Bill Gates said.
So when it is written that it will be mainly Linux and MS. It does not mean Apple or Sun or the BSD’s will disappear. It just mean MS and Linux will be the dominant OS.
Remember don’t make something out of nothing, this news item is not a transcript (word for word).
>>expensive and proprietary hardware and software solutions when sold together are finished.
To be fair, the G5 compares very well to high-end AMD/Intel products in terms of price/performance.
Its Apple’s low-end products(imac, emac, etc) that really get spanked when you compare them to their PC counterparts!
“To be fair, the G5 compares very well to high-end AMD/Intel products in terms of price/performance.
Its Apple’s low-end products(imac, emac, etc) that really get spanked when you compare them to their PC counterparts! ”
i agree with you strongly about the low end options spankdamonkey.
apple does however have some interesting workstations and servers but i would disagree with you for several reasons:
workstations:
no scsi option
no 3d workstation cards available
plain sata 150 7200 rpm drives…no 10k option
limited drive expandability
no redundant power supplies
dual cpu models only
no single cpu choices in a tower format
no quad cpu…
servers:
1u only
no scsi
no 10k rpm sata drives
no towers, no 2u, no 4u, etc
no 4 way, 8 way, 16 way cpu options
no redundant power supplies
pro model portables:
older g4 technology and all of its attendant problems…slow bus etc.
and as a power user or enterprise i would have to be alarmed by the serious problems that have paqued the g5 since its release. heat issues that require 9 fans and liquid cooling, delay after delay, not hitting target ghz by a wide margin, cpu shortages so severe that apple ran out of imacs….
all very alarming stuff for someone considering high end models.
I agree with Bills statements that he made. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are pretty good products so if Microsoft can build on that they may have a shot at staying in the game.
On workstations…
It really depends on the demographic your targetting. Really besides education, Apple seems to be have a very large proportion of Mulimedia users (graphic artists mostly). They’re computer savvy enough to know that there are options (Apple) available but assume that more money means a better computer.
Also proably the biggest criticism yet admiration towards Apple has been they offer very little choice.
Little choice is bad, but having a solution that works very well is good.
On servers…
No apologies for Apple on this one. Apple just isn’t doing enough to promote/develop their Xserve/MacOSX server solutions.
>>heat issues that require 9 fans and liquid cooling
Nah thats been commented on before, the G5 dosen’t need to dissipate that much heat. The fans are there to reduce noise pollution.
But the G4 powerbooks, OUCH! You can burn a hole in your crotch, it gets so HOT!!!
But the G4 powerbooks, OUCH! You can burn a hole in your crotch, it gets so HOT!!!
That’s what everyone says, but it isn’t true of my 12″. Yeah, it gets warm, but not hot, and not warmer than a lot of PC laptops.
This is coming from a friend who has a 15″ 1.25 GHZ PB. My IBM thinkpad OTOH is unbelievable cold. I mean, leave it on for days at a time and you can’t feel anything!
“and as a power user or enterprise i would have to be alarmed by the serious problems that have paqued the g5 since its release. heat issues that require 9 fans and liquid cooling, delay after delay, not hitting target ghz by a wide margin, cpu shortages so severe that apple ran out of imacs….
all very alarming stuff for someone considering high end models.”
When grasping at straws, grab straws… not air! The g5 , as was already stated, was going after quiet… and cool. They seperated it all into more efficient zones, very clever. And very quiet. I’d be willing to wager that it would outlast 2 x86 type machines. Remember your Dad saying that “you get what you pay for” ? Take a good long look at a g5, it just oozes quality. It’s big, beautiful, and functional, everything that 90% of biege boxes are not. And I have both, and run or have run all the os’s that where mentioned in the article. I have to say the mac is very good, and osx exceptional. Windows is good , but it is was it is, x86 ( ie cheap!!!!) . Linux is sweet, because it is free, as in freedom . I like them all. And as God as my witness, I hate to say what I must. Bill’s right , M$ and linux will be out front 10 years from now. But Bill is not going to be nearly as rich, or in possesion of nearly as much market share. This much he knows to be true, or he wouldn’t waste his breath on the matter. I love mac, but it will never be # one, and I’m glad for that (virus? what virus? hehehe!)
This is kind of the most interesting time in computing circle’s, with Linux on the rise, and Microsoft seeing the truck coming and unable to dodge it. And that’s just because of it’s sheer size and complexity. To compete against Linux
must be frustrating for Bill, because it changes so fast. How do you take a shot at something that refuse’s to hold still? You don’t.
We had monkeys programming Altairs & PDP/7s at UCB. He was OK but not great; that suitable enough amicability?
“640k ought to be enough for anybody”
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0439/040929_cover.php
“According to the DragonFlyBSD guys, the linux kernel has fundamental design flaws with regard to the multi-core chip future, so who knows if Linux will even be premiere technology in 10 years.”
And in the early 90s Linus said Linux will probably never support anything more than x86 and AT harddisks. And now, 10 years later…
According to the DragonFlyBSD guys, the linux kernel has fundamental design flaws with regard to the multi-core chip future, so who knows if Linux will even be premiere technology in 10 years.
If in 10 years it turns out that DragonflyBSD has the only reasonable MP architecture then Linux will just copy it. Problem solved.
Geez, am I the only one who’s got fed up with Gates trying to be some kind of digital messiah over the years ?
“Bill Gates is trying to create software that needs little maintainance and little support.”
All I can say to this comes from Depeche Mode (probably inappropriate, but it was the first to pop in, sorry:) and sounds like: “There’s no time for hesitating, pain is ready, pain is waiting, primed to do it’s educating… Dream on”
Nothing more to say here, I moved along
unfortunatly that’s not true. not everyone wants commodity crap. i for one, rather like the higher quality apple hardware and software and i’m willing to pay as much as i have to to get it. you might be surprised to find there are millions like me.
you also might find many are fed up with viruses and spyware. a lot of people are fed up with the difficulty in running a linux box. i know i fit in all those categories, and some people may just fit in one or the other.
basically what i’m trying to say is, enough with the “one OS to rule them all” mentality. there’s more than enough room in this market for 2 or even 3 OSes. linux for servers. mac for productivity. palm for mobility. windows for solitare.
Microsoft however is sure competing with GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux will always be around in some form or another because it’s supported by a community of programmers who just love to code and create new tech.
Tha fact that Gates dismisses so easily Apple is surely a sign how much worried he is about that company.
“Answering the question about hackers crack DRM and other secure technologies, Gates said that it’s always possible to crack anything. However, it is better to have such technologies around and hope for the best, rather than not publishing online music or movies just out of fear that someone will crack their security. In the first case you have some piracy and some sales, on the second case you only end up with piracy.”
wasn’t it microsoft that told us that drm was _not_ one of the main goals of tcpa/palladium/whatever-it’s-called-now (not that someone believed that for a second)?!
now bill gates is openly trying to get the message across towards the entertainment industry (use drm, and pls ours)!
besides, i’m very curious if his argumenta are true…
i might be wrong here, but afaik there are some commercial and legal sites for music around that let you decide the format and bitrate of the content you pay for, and that all without any drm.
in result, they’re very popular because people feel not forced and locked-in. also, drm likely results into compatibility-issues which can be harmfull and dangerous for the industry (pot. lawsuits, look what happened to copyprotected cds).
so my guess is the music industry would do best if they would offer all their content free of any drm and for a fair price, at least as long as using p2p is still legal!
“He expects more small countries to be able to evolve in that way, and he also said that Microsoft will be adjusting prices for these countries so that the Windows prices there will make more sense and be more affordable.”
but that windows is a heavily scaled-down version. linux is for free and (soon) fully featured! even if this offer includes the normal windows too, once you’ve switched completely, you’re locked-in!
“As for consumers, in these same countries Windows piracy is high. In other words, Windows is free for some of these people. And so is Linux. Having two products that are essentially “free” in one way or another, it all comes down again to the actual value of the software.”
yeah, and thanks to drm/tcpa, at one point, it’s payday coming to a country near you!
if countries are smart, they won’t take the sweet poison pill called windows or at least will pursue a 2folded strategy. it will help saving cost, help developing the local industry, is legal and won’t make you dependant on an (american) monopolist.
taken from openoffice.org:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1373
Quoting His Billness Bill Gates: However, it is better to have such technologies around and hope for the best, rather than not publishing online music or movies just out of fear that someone will crack their security. In the first case you have some piracy and some sales, on the second case you only end up with piracy.
Replace “online music or movies” with “program source code“, and you have the reason why MS Windows can’t compete against Linux. It’s the same reason why IBM won – much against corporate expectations – the PC standards “war”.
He looks tired. Bill Gates should get more sleep.
There’s a marketing “law” that says, eventually a market will be a race between two [dominant] players. The others will be driven out or become so small that they do not matter. This happens for example with cola drink (Coke and Pepsi), and also with a bunch of other markets (can’t think of other examples right now, because I don’t live in the US).
However, the computer industry is comprised of _many_ markets (and market segments) plus it’s always and still changing, so I also still cannot see this kind of thing happening anytime soon.
That’s true – here in Russia we can buy pirated Windows (any version) cheaper than set of Linux distro CD’s, and most people use Windows definately.
“However, it is better to have such technologies around and hope for the best, rather than not publishing online music or movies just out of fear that someone will crack their security. In the first case you have some piracy and some sales, on the second case you only end up with piracy.”
If nobody is publishing, how can you have piracy?
This is the flaw in all the “piracy” crap. “Piracy” (more precisely, unauthorized distribution) is not even possible without the production of original product. Therefore it is impossible for piracy to ever drag down any product completely. Unauthorized distribution can force reduction in profit to some degree (mostly to those customers who are marginal at best anyway because they value products solely on price) but the majority of purchasers of any product will buy from the source as long as the price is reasonable and the intangibles of buying from the source are there.
The solution, to this and all issues of note, is to produce humans with some concept of economics – instead of just ignorant, exploited “consumers”. As long as the corporate world regards people as sheep to be fleeced, the “consumers” will regard corporations as con men to be robbed – justifiably so.
As long as the corporate world regards people as sheep to be fleeced, the “consumers” will regard corporations as con men to be robbed – justifiably so.
And if your hard work was stolen from you, how’d you feel?
And the market share can change in a couple of years if that happens.
Quote:
“Desktoplinux is a pile of of software held together by digital ducktape, and no matter how good those pieces of software are individually, that doesn’t mean they work well when put on a cd together. A little analogy: get the world’s best novell-authors, put them in seperate rooms without them being able to communicate with eachother. Then, ask one of them to write part one, one of them to write part 2 etc. of a series, with only telling them it must be about WO II. How well will those four books integrate with eachother? ”
Hmmmm, I don’t really think that’s a good analogy you make there.
Take for example a look at http://www.freedesktop.org.
There are a lot of mailing lists where people of different projects join and discuss what they are working on and how to proceed.
Example: DBus
It’s not that these people don’t talk to eachother at all.
Even on Windows, can you say that each and every program is 100% integrated with any other program?
That’s simply not possible.
Artificial Intelligence, Speech-recognition, Automated translation: the reason why Über-geeks and other “severe bèta’s” think they will all work one day, is because these folks don’t understand the human being well enough. It’s escapism into technology.
I wouldn’t mind Microsoft steering into a dead alley, though…
You’re exactly right and something the fanboys are incapable of either admitting or are too indoctrinated to understand.
The best thing to happen would be for Novell to officially adopt Gnome as its platform (which it will most likely eventually do), therefore marginalizing KDE, as RedHat and Sun have already committed to Gnome.
KDE might be some good tech, but the current QT license will always hinder its dominance.
microsoft should build a plant on another planet, as far away as possible from the real living world
comparing linux with cancer, that just goes too far
Quote:” but the current QT license will always hinder its dominance”
It’s gpl.
> It’s gpl.
Well… Not in all cases.
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licensing.html
what have MS done in the last ten years?????
Untill MS are FORCED to release their monopoly on OEMs and the consumer gets a choice in pre-built machines nothing will change…
I am surprised more Motherboard, Hard drive and Graphics Card Manufatures are not giving Linux away free. For the cost of a DVD they get a full OS
“Digital Ducktape”
and how useful is Duck Tape….
I bet MS would Love to put more Duck Tape on their product.
“Bill Gates started by talking about speech recognition and how this is the next big evolution in the input systems. He also talked about malware and that even himself has to run Ad-aware in order to keep spyware away from him home computers. In fact, he believes that malware is even worse than viruses, because they transmit through downloadable applications that have them embedded in them on purpose. He expects that Microsoft will include anti-malware/spyware software soon on Windows.”
It would be a good start to make MSN messenger 6.2 > adware
free ,to give an example.I’m tired of proxying messenger via
http(80) with privoxy to get rid of the constant nagging adware banner.Why can’t messenger run per default on tcp 80? Now one has to enable proxy support and leave the proxy address blank in order to use port 80.They should have a good look at amsn.
I’ve just been informed that that is what is used in Peking for Peking Duck!
Speaking more facetiously, might I add to my previous comments the observation that Microsoft not only has to face on one hand the “threat” posed by illicit copying of their software, great distribution channel, no immediate financial returns; but on the other hand, the threat that they are losing developer mindshare, and the major contributors to Microsoft mindshare are likely to be the F/LOSS community in the form of PNET and MONO – and that’ll be guaranteed interoperable.
So either way, Microsoft is NOT going back to a guaranteed monopoly position, and they’ll survive with lesser margins that will be guaranteed by their current worst enemies, who don’t form a fixed point of vulnerability such as a company, which Microsoft is a past master at defeating.
Microsoft will have to do some belt-tightening, and changing of attitudes … poor sods!
MS should give XP free to the windows volunteers as Redhat did
with Fedora.Man that would speed up their (patch) release cycle,and would extremely innovate the product.The kernel
could still be MS controlled, as the linux kernel still
is by Linus Torvalds and his 52 Lieutenants.
This way they could set their time more on further developing
and innovating the server versions.I think within 10-15 years
MS will be a desktop OS only selling firm.
The GPL of Qt is of course the normal GPL, so no restriction.
Trolltech understands the term “commercial” like normal people do, they don’t consider “commercial” GPL software.
Windows will have lost some major ground in the corporate env. to Linux.
Linux will have a huge chunk of the server market with a decent desktop coming along.
Sun will still be shooting itself in the foot.
Apple will still be making neat stuff that everybody wants.
And cheap bastards will still want them to port OS X to x86.
What people are forgetting is the original reason for why Linux took off in the first place.
Linux took off in the first place because it was a low cost UNIX clone, it enabled companies to move their small servers which once used expensive UNIX’s, to run Linux on x86 machines without the hassles of hardware and licensing issues.
Flash forward to today, HP-UX is dying a slow death along with other *NIXs HP owns, IBM look as though they will push their AIX to the ultra high end, maybe we’ll eventually see AIX replace their mainframe operating system in the near future, IRIX is dead along with its architecture; sure, you’ll still see MIPS being used in routers, switches, game consoles, but don’t expect it to re-emerge as the CPU for super computing, workstations and rendering machines.
We’re now left with Solaris, now sure, on the x86 version 7 was laughable, version 8 was pathetic, version 9 was ok, I do express the ok as in “it could be worse”, however, version 10 is their last ditch effort. If they don’t get their x86 (Opteron) and Solaris 10 act right, they might as well close their doors.
As for the future, we’ll still see Microsoft reach for the stars, only to be told that they should stick to planet earth, Linux will gain more ground on the desktop as freedesktop software becomes mature and fixes the sort comings in Linux, as for the workstation market, again, depending on how SUN market their machinees, it can go either way. If they get ISVs on board by paying for the porting of SPARC and Windows applications to Solaris/JDS, you will see a move towards Opteron/Solaris 10, however, if they do what they’re doing now, namely sitting on their ass doing sweet-bugger-all, they may as well kiss the workstation market off to Linux and god forbid, Windows.
There’s no reason to attack synergy.
And I don’t see why he should be East German.
I wouldn’t call Mr Chavez call a communist, and I can understand when Venezuela doesn’t want to become a second Argentina.
Of course, his course has to be watched, but at the moment you haven’t to be afraid of him.
He was confirmed in internationally observed elections.
Mac OS X being a 64 Bit advanced OS front runner, should be ported to be used in any hardware platform including AMD Opteron & Athlon 64 Bits and Intel’s Nocona 64 Bits like what Sun’s Solaris did for Servers and Mac OS for PCs at a cost of a fraction of Windows because in this case it will not be further decimated, because Windows do not yet have a viable 64 Bits OS and Linux 64 Bits OS is still not very user friendly on a 64 Bits desktop PC. That is why for Mac OS to survive and still be available and alive in ten years it must be ported to work on any hardware platform.
There should then be 4 OSes that survive until 2014 and growing stronger than ever.
Mac OS X being a 64 Bit advanced OS front runner, should be ported to be used in any hardware platform including AMD Opteron & Athlon 64 Bits and Intel’s Nocona 64 Bits like what Sun’s Solaris did for Servers and Mac OS for PCs at a cost of a fraction of Windows because in this case it will not be further decimated, because Windows do not yet have a viable 64 Bits OS and Linux 64 Bits OS is still not very user friendly on a 64 Bits desktop PC. That is why for Mac OS to survive and still be available and alive in ten years it must be ported to work on any hardware platform.
There should then be 4 OSes that survive until 2014 and growing stronger than ever.
When looking at the picture of Gates it seems to me that he regrets the way he went.
That he did not made Window$ like the nix world would do it, secure.
Or maybe he is thinking why did’nt I made something like Linux?
Sorry bud, but I know replacing all the admins in the world is your dream, but it just ain’t happening. You can’t just click “make me secure” and solve all your security problems without then breaking half your applications.
I wish Business leaders were more honest. “Yea, we aren’t sure what we’re gonna do here, but we’ll figure something out” instead of “yes, we will fix everything that’s broken and make your computer world perfect, if you want you will even be able to marry your computer, our lawyers are working with he president right now to consider computer marriage ok.”
If in 10 years it turns out that DragonflyBSD has the only reasonable MP architecture then Linux will just copy it. Problem solved.
uh… indeed in that scenario the problem will be solved for all the users, since every OS will then be able to copy the DragonFlyBSD architecture & implementation (thanks to the academic and apolitical spirit of the BSD license).
On the other hand, the problem won’t be solved for Linux, which will find itself on par with competitors on that topic, thus slowing the “mission” of having all the OS world under the GPL. But after all, who cares?… 🙂
Oh… yeah: GNU zealots.
Well… who else? 😀
In Spain you’ve got a good admin for much less … too much less: €30.000.
People keep saying “What about Apple?” .. well, what about them? It doesn’t matter how good Apple’s products are. They have their collective noses buried in the dirt as far as how to successfully permiate the computing market.
GNU/Linux will always be around in some form or another because it’s supported by a community of programmers who just love to code and create new tech.
Well… that’s true, even if in the GNU/Linux community there’s quite a lot of hatred towards proprietary software. So, saying that Linux is not competing with MS is not really correct, IMHO.
I’m sure that many Linux programmers are animated by commitment to innovation and technical excellence, but I see this spirit and mentality much more frequently in the smaller (in quantity, not in quality) community of BSD developers.
By Lumbergh: …. Linux on the desktop isn’t in competition with Microsoft now and will still be a small player in 10 years.
Your religious faith is inspiring.
Gates predictions are way off.
In 3 years it will be Linux and Windows
!n 5 years it will be mostly Linux with a declining Windows
In 10 years it will be Linux, Windows will be history, but there will be a newcomer to dethrone Linux somewhere in that time frame.
Now what was that about memory Bill?
People keep saying “What about Apple?” .. well, what about them? It doesn’t matter how good Apple’s products are. They have their collective noses buried in the dirt as far as how to successfully permiate the computing market.
It could be that consumers have their collective noses buried in the dirt as far as how to successfully open their minds.
Even if Apple executives dream of having a Microsoft-type dominance of the world, Apple users do not. As long as the company remains profitable and continues to create great products, I’ll remain satisfied.
If in 10 years it turns out that DragonflyBSD has the only reasonable MP architecture then Linux will just copy it. Problem solved.
You mean stea^H^H^H^Hborrow, DBSD’s MP architecture. Not an entirely new concept either, alot of stuff has gone BSD->GPL. Unfortunately it doesn’t work vice versa.
Still it doesn’t matter if MS is still around 10 years from now, or if GNU/Linux gains 90 percent market share. Alot of the alternative lifestyle folks will still me fiddling with asm code, trying out *gasp* new Operating Systems, building new Operating Systems, and just plain exploring old/new technology. Alot of this stuff is just speculation, come ten years we may not even interface with computers the same we do now. Operating Systems may become something we look back on and think “You know that Microsoft’s OS wasn’t so bad.”, or “Damn I should have explored outside of my Microsoft world I sure missed out on alot.”
Microsoft will be adjusting prices for these countries so that the Windows prices there will make more sense and be more affordable.
Why should I get WinXP Home for $100 when I can get SuSE Home for like $50?
I use Linux on my desktop. I used to use Windows on my desktop. In what way is that not competition?
forget the fanboys. the fanboys are irrelevant. the fanboys don’t program the system. if they did, you’d have a point. as someone before you pointed out, the people who actually program the system *do* work hard on unification and interoperation.
they do something fairly similar. Windows betas get distributed through various programs including MSDN and probably reach a lot more people than any Linux test release.
linux has little to do with GNU zealotry. Linus is pragmatic; he releases the Linux kernel under the GPL because it’s a good fit, he’s not a Stallman or anything. Neither are most Linux users.
Does redmond make me money? Minimal as a support tech repairing its failures and faults.
Does GNU/Linux make me money … you betcha?
Break the cycle of redmond dependence, go Linux.
Untill MS are FORCED to release their monopoly on OEMs and the consumer gets a choice in pre-built machines nothing will change…
That already happened. OEMs can ship other operating systems and a few of them have done just that, including Linux as an offering (dell was at it for awhile).
[quote]I am surprised more Motherboard, Hard drive and Graphics Card Manufatures are not giving Linux away free. For the cost of a DVD they get a full OS [/quote]
Thats just it, the cost of a DVD. Its a cost and when you ship thousands or millions of units its a big cost.
Its not worth it for a lot of manufacturers.
In canada you have better admins for a quarter that amount
Oh man, it’s eliminate, not elliminate.
Microsoft are worried that the market is going to change.
If there is a shift by users from mainly x86 based desktop PCs to a mix of consoles, PDAs, thin clients, Web terminals, Power5 based servers, cellphones etc then they have a big problem.
They cannot afford to support and licence Windows on so many platforms, nor can the closed source software companies (those who support Windows only at the moment) keep up to date on such a wide mix of architectures.
Linux however, is written to be cross platform, and OSS apps are generally as OS and platform agnostic as possible. I can already run many of the same apps on a Zarus or PPC as I can on an x86 desktop.
In ten years, the computing landscape will by very different today. Microsoft assume they will still be around because the good quality of their software and the inertia of their customer base will keep them competitive, and give them time to change with the market. Linux will make gains because it can adapt to survive, and provides low cost high quality software.
It’s going to be an interesting next decade.
If smart networking people were rare, Linux would never have happened in the first place. Apparently, the *nix skills base over the last 20 years has progressed to the point that now there are enough capable people which has the effect of pushing the admin requirements technologically downstream, although still far from mainstream. There are lots of internet commerce adopters that want high reliability and low risk, and as long as open source and especially open standards exist for web development, the idea of “easy to setup” or admin as a cost reducing stategy or selling point may already be passe.
The MS motto: On every TV stand and in every home. MS is all about the consumer space and interactive entertainment, especially the emerging global sports betting market now looking for new national or global secure integration solutions. MS and IBM are almost certain to lock-up these opportunities, and the money to be made implementing this infrastructure is huge.
http://www.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=24337
I also seriously doubt that Brother Bill doesn’t have a proxy server sitting between his home machines and the outside world, don’t all rich tech-types have this stuff?
As far as BASIC goes, well, you have to remember that in the 1970’s, nobody had a computer at home and getting time on the machine at work meant job scheduling for your “card deck”. If the only thing you’ve got is a pocket calculator and a slide rule, BASIC and a word processor in the home starts to look like a dream come true.
Expect Linux to do well in the large business enterprise space and of course, high security areas like the military, county jails and prisons, a potentially huge opportunity for firms like Novell.
unfortunatly that’s not true. not everyone wants commodity crap. i for one, rather like the higher quality apple hardware and software and i’m willing to pay as much as i have to to get it. you might be surprised to find there are millions like me.
No offense to Apple but we’re referring to market share here. It doesn’t matter how good Apple’s quality is. The fact of the matter is that Apple’s market share is slipping constantly in the face of the x86 commodity onslaught. Does that mean Apple won’t exist? No. It will still have a place as a boutique computer maker. But it will not have any appreciable influence on the overall market.
You know Eugenia, Gates also was at Berkeley earlier that day(at 9). He pretty much gave the same talk, however in that one he said that “GPL cannot make money”. http://news.com.com/Gates+stumps+in+Silicon+Valley/2100-1012_3-5392… Here is the story.
Sorry to nitpick, but it is duct tape, not duck, although their is a Duck brand duct tape.
“unfortunatly that’s not true. not everyone wants commodity crap. i for one, rather like the higher quality apple hardware and software and i’m willing to pay as much as i have to to get it. you might be surprised to find there are millions like me.”
yes. about 3.2 million per yr want macs omnivector (the last two years sales figures).
about 180 million this yr want pcs
not all pcs are made from the cheapest components
one can buy a boutique pc with the finest case in every shape and size and color imaginable, top end powersupply, super high end ram, 10k sata hard drives, the best that ati and nvidia have to offer, top flight plextor optical drives etc etc etc.
fact is the majority of components in macs are commodity parts: apple uses standard brand ram, they use old technology ati and nvidia video card parts (can anyone say 18 month old fx5200 in new imacs?), they use run of the mill to high end optical drives but never the top end cutting edge models, they were still using 5400rpm ata 100 hard drives when most similarly priced pcs had moved to 7200rpm ata 100/133 and 7200rpm sata hard drives.
apple has well made and distinct cases but if that is important to a pc buyer they certainly have that option available via dozens of makers as well.
so no, not everyone wants a budget commodity pc. but the best selling computers in the USA, one of the wealthiest nations, are sub $600 models. academic institutions have even fallen in love with these models as well. one of apple last strongholds is quickly choosing the commodity pc market as a replacement.
“i for one, rather like the higher quality apple hardware and software and i’m willing to pay as much as i have to to get it.”
and there are plenty that follow that credo on the pc side as well and buy boutique pcs from people like alienware and falcon northwest. but interestingly, when you look at macs, you still get commodity parts in almost all areas short of the case and lcd.
finally as for higher quality, most of us with long term experience around tech will admit that apple for the longest time had real a advantage in quality:
they made their own machines and used high end components. today however, they use the same contract manufacturers that make sonys, dells, gateways, ibms, toshibas, acers, averatecs, etc and they seem to be having a high incidence of recall programs over the last few years since they started doing it.
“Gates also mentioned that Linux is taking over Unix, not Windows. The problem with Unix is that the OS companies involved (SGI, Sun, IBM, HP, SCO) never managed to get together and adhere to common standards and direction, he said. When a Unix brand would get a bit better than the other on a particular thing, the others would “conspire” behind its back to bring it down. It’s this fragmentation and lack of business relationships that has destroyed Unix to the rival Linux.”
Linux has the same problem; there are hundreds of distributions. Few of them are compatible with each other.
Pretty bad typo before.
Sorry to nitpick, but it is duct tape, not duck, although there is a Duck brand duct tape.
I agree with Billy G, Apple won’t even be significant in 10 years. I doubt they’ll even exist. If they do exist, they’d be a consumer electronics company, selling ipods and mp3’s.
You people that thank Windows will be in the dust ten years from now you forget one thing: games. Games will keep Microsoft afloat for a long time.
I remember one day in – it must have been around – 1987.
A friend and I sat down before my Commodore 64 and loaded some software. We trained the software by speaking into a microphone, and then the machine actually understood what we said. Wow, what a miracle!
Now, almost 20 years later, Microsoft thinks this will be the next big input modality. Congratulations! Well done! What foresight!
I think Microsoft make great products. But sometimes it surprises me how long it takes for them to catch on. The above is one example. Another is refactoring in Visual Studio. Eclipse, IntelliJ and others have had it long before MS. I kind of expected such a big and wealthy company to be *ahead* of the rest, instead of behind.
yes, they are. The source code to any modern Linux app will compile on any modern Linux distribution. That’s compatible.
uh-huh. You think it’ll take Linux ten years to develop a decent set of tools for building games? Ooops, no, it appears it already has a platform perfectly capable of running games as sophisticated as can be developed (cf. Doom 3, Linux port out soon). As soon as there’s a big enough Linux market share, games will be developed for it. Game developers go wherever the market is, they have no platform loyalty.
Remember video game consoles? And, unfortunately Microsoft does not, yet, have a Monopoly on the video game market.
Still I don’t foresee them going broke anytime soon, and the whole speech recognition does seem kinda neat, until someone looks at you funny for talking to yourself.
I don’t think Game devs like windows at all, as a platform it’s not friendly to intense applications like games, and it likes to do things like never let go of key bindings, which is very annoying that bumping the windows key drops you out of your game, which stops some games.
I think this is partially why Mac has seen good attention lately, it’s a lot of work to port a game to Mac to get that extra 1% of gamers (of gamers, not users).
Personally I’d like to see more work into competing with directX instead of copying it (WineX), I understand why so much work is going into copying it but directX really seems to be a lot of Microsofts stranglehold on the gamers market.
Of course, if gamers move to Linux, companies like Asus will have to revise their anti-OSS attitude and stop intentionally breaking their compatibility with open drivers.
Oh well, for now I am just happy that nvidia does such a wonderful job of keeping their hardware mostly working on my linux system, and they support amd64 as well *cough* ATI doesn’t *cough*.
…and I think Gates knows that.
Beyond the basics, nobody knows for a fact what will happen in 5 years let alone 10. The only scary thing is that people take this prediction seriously.
Ever heard of OpenGL, SDL, Allegro, ClanLib, etc, etc? Remember that WineX discourages companies away from alternative Multimedia API’s, and into wine which does not benefit very many people, other than WineX ofcourse.There are alot of API’s that more or less,usually less, offer the same things as DirectX. Trick is to get Developers to migrate away from propietary API’s and into Open API’s, that would be one hell of a trick though.
I agree with Mr. Gates with all the stuff he said except for the thing about Apple not being a major player in 10 years time. I honestly don’t see where he pulled this off from unless he knows something more then all of us.
I also agree with his statements on Unix/Linux but I would also like to add the same for Linux. What he said for Unix about companies trying to destroy each other and the lack of standards, I would also add this for Linux. Lack of standards could destroy Linux or just slow it down from progressing well. If I was a Unix vendor, I’d take his comments seriosly as he is a proven sucessful businessman which I have great respect for him. Also, it is good that he tries to make Windows as easy to use and maintain as possible. The fact that he says most Linux vendors get their profit from tech support, perhaps this is one of the reasons why they say Windows costs less to run/maintain then Linux. Ok I am not trying to create a flame over here, it’s only my opinion.
dpi, your language and low-level manners once again shows your inability to counter my arguments. Kind of sad you live in my country.
And by the way, my name is Thom, not Tom.
It may or many not compile. Lib hell still exists. But will it run on any Linux system once compiled?
>It may or many not compile. Lib hell still exists. But will it run on any Linux system once compiled?
I wish.
It probably won’t run on the next minor version of the distro. Let alone the previous minor version. Been there, 100s of times.
The guy is just saying the things I’d expect him to say.
1. He tries to connect with people raising common problems that he shares with the world (adware) and say that it’s something he will try to fix. “Hey I’m just like you guys, except that I have the IT-world in my hands, I’ll take care of all your problems.
2. He tries to predict the future. I mean, seriously, the subject speech recognition has been on UI-peoples lips for ages, and yet we have seen no purpose for it in regular environments. It’s not going to be the next big input method, it will be an additional input method used in certain environment or by disabled people.
He’s just trying to say that “We are your future”. And yet he doesn’t have a clue.
If it was such an important thing, it would have been much more developed allready.
3. He shares his wisdom from the IT-industry with us, giving us his insight on the unix era. Oh mighty leader, guide us out of the pains of administration and support with your wisdom.
He’s just acting like a puppet once again. Any one of us could have been there in his place and given better answers.
I long for the day when he retires, and balmer is taken away by men in white suites.
It probably won’t run on the next minor version of the distro. Let alone the previous minor version. Been there, 100s of times.
If the application is compiled statically it will work just fine for *years* to come, well barring the introduction of a new kernel ABI or something.
If the application is compiled dynamically you’re kind of at the mercy of distro vendors, although the situation isn’t really as bleak as you make it sound.
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Also for all of you people who are still inside the Steve Jobs reality distortion field…it won’t take 10 years for Apple to no longer be relevent…it’s not really relevent now in the grand scheme of things, nor has it been for quite some time now.
Bill Gates’ prediction really isn’t that risky or earth shattering, with the exception that the technology field can change a lot in 10 years time and someone that’s not even on the map today could disrupt either Linux or Windows. However, thanks to the power of inertia and the fear of change among mainstream computer users, it is highly unlikely that Windows will see a serious threat other than Linux within the next 10 years.
It’s interesting how different you can write about things. Review the heise online article and you know what I mean – the OSNews article was neutral, heise online had loads of linux trolling in it …