Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 2 February 2007, 4:15 PM
Bill Gates on Apple security and other things
William H Gates III has been talking to Steven Levy about Vista, the Apple Switcher adverts, and more. It's well worth reading the whole thing - though hold onto your jaw. At the bottom of page 2, we get this delicious morsel:
In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
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?
There's more.
A word of advice: if you're ever in a pub quiz team and you're expecting questions on the history of personal computing, Bill may not be the ace in the hole you were expecting.
PreviousComments on this post
'Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is.' Jim Allchin? The guy who just left Microsoft? The guy who wrote the 'I'd buy a Mac' email? I guess this is a case of - 'If you can't rewrite Wikipedia, rewrite history'. With bold-faced spinning skills like this, no wonder pundits predict a political career for Gates.
I do think that the top level of Microsoft have reached that point where if you lie to yourself too many times you begin to believe it. Bill has had a very bad week - his thunder has been stolen by a lot of press asking - effectively - why MS are copying Apple.
Two things from the article though Rupert that are kind of interesting.
The first is Microsoft believe that stealing ideas from Apple is fair game as Apple stole the ideas from Xerox. (This is their VIEW - not reality - in reality Apple gave Xerox a boat load of shares and induced some of the Xerox team to come and work for Apple - also Xerox's machines at the time didn't do a lot of the things that Apple thought they did and so Apple did quite a lot of work to make it work as it should)
The second - which was touched on in another ZDNET article I passed a comment on - is that Microsoft are absolutely convinced that Apple relies on security by obscurity. I don't think they have really grasped that the Mac is inherently more secure. As in I don't think Microsoft "get" it.
Bill had a bad week - it was supposed to be his time in the spotlight and he got a much harder time than he thought he would. unfortunately the majority of the people who see this - and I am talking the non-technical public - will believe the lies that he was spouting.
As Ballmer said last year - "Some people will say some of the features are kissing cousins to features they've seen elsewhere, and that is true. I'm not apologetic about the fact that we should, in a way that doesn't offend anyone else's intellectual property, study and learn and benefit from the work others have done."
And there's this great story from Andy Herzfeld's Mac history site, Folklore.org. The scene is - after working closely with Apple, Microsoft went off and announced Windows. Jobs has just found out...
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
