Sunday, July 06, 2008

Good Riddance Bill Gates...





























I forgot to give my farewell thoughts after Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft. If I wanted to give this a serious tone, I'd perhaps write something along the lines of what Richard Stallman has said to the BBC.

But those who know me know that I'm not very serious or "politically correct". So here's my farewell message to "Bill #2" ... the only moment where I smiled after seeing Gates on TV!:



The pie-in-the-face. An hillarious and well-deserved moment.

The young people nowadays whom watch the clip on YouTube seem confused... and don't understand "why" someoone would even think about throwing a pie to the face of this "hero" of theirs, responsible for their "stable, lovely" Windows OS. This is the generation which has grown on Windows XP and think Windows has been stable all the time and they can't conceive or imagine that the company did something abusive and broke the law in the process to obtain its dominant marketplace position. They should know the truth about BillG's firm and its recurring abusive, restrictive behaviour.

I said Gates was "Bill#2". This isn't my own invention... I took it from a very funny book at the time of the Microsoft-DOJ trial aptly titled "The Secret Diary of Bill Gates". On it, the Bill Gates character calls Bill Clinton "Bill #2" -in his view he was always Bill the Numero Uno. [Well, I think the spots were reversed. I always thought of Clinton as "Bill #1" and Gates as "Bill #2" ;-)].

Let's just remember him with one of his internal e-mails that surfaced to the public as a result of the DOJ-Microsoft trial: "what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there [sic] feature they have that might get in our way?" -Bill Gates, to a number of his employees.

And the memorable response from one of his product managers: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS" -Brad Silverberg



Good riddance, Bill Gates!






FC
PS: For those interested in the facts with regards to the pie-in-the-face greeting to BillG, you should read this very interesting cached interview with Noel Godin, the man behind it, and whom calls himself the leader of "Patissiers sans frontiers" -Pie Bakers Without Borders-

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