Last week's Newsweek included a pretty good interview with Bill Gates - that is, if you like puffball questions and don't get irritated at the interviewer's complete lack of interest in following up on obvious gaffes. Now, me, I'm not so good at this whole obeisience to money thing, so as a public service, and in keeping with this week's intelligence theme, I thought I'd present some excerpts, with "interpretive extensions."
[NW] Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?[BG] I've never seen it. I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.
[NW] How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
[BG] Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
[NW] Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC?
[BG]That's for my customers to decide.
[PM] If you haven't seen any of the ads, how do you know what NW means by Hodgman needing surgery to get Vista?
[BG] I don't even get that.
[PM] I've got a five year old Mac, that runs the latest MacOS X just fine. Can you do that with Vista on a five year old PC?
[BG] I don't even get that.
[NW] In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.[BG] You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let's be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?
[PM] Did you just say: "we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done"? if so, so were you lying when you promised Longhorn for 2003? 2004? 2005? or the current NT release for early 2006? mid 2006, late 2006?
[BG] I don't even get that.
[PM] aah, ok, but it's a matter of public record that virtually everything in each new Microsoft OS generation has "re-invented" interface technologies Apple already had - can you really claim that Apple followed your lead when Vista looks like MacOS X 10 - a product that's been out for years?
[BG] Yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let's be realistic, 25 years ago Apple re-invented some ideas from Xerox and to me that justifies us re-inventing the whole thing from them every five to eight years.
[PM] You say "security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." Can you tell us about the latest zero day exploits on Office? SQL-Server? Windows/XP? Vista?
[BG] You're [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we've got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it's totally according to plan,
[NW] So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like?[BG] Well, it will be more user-centric.
[NW] What does that mean?
[BG] That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services [a way to connect to Microsoft via the Internet] to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable.
[PM] So your next generation will copy Sun's network computing paradigm instead of Apple's interface?
[BG] I don't even get that.
[PM] Well, doesn't Sun already let Sun Ray users just carry a plastic card around that triggers their environment on any Sun Ray, anywhere, when they plug it in?
[BG] I don't even get that.
[PM] Me neither, Bill, me neither