neurological dryer lint

screw 2008, bill gates needs to leave the industry now.

microsoft's PR people should be at red alert while bill is out screwing up their vista launch. this was really the company's last stand in regards to being the dominant force in the PC software business, and they seem to have botched it rather completely.

instance #1 - watch as bill looks like a dolt on the daily show. he's not funny, awkwardly injects plugs the entire time he's talking with jon stewart, and ends up walking off the show and getting mocked later. his head's not in the game. he's not a marketer. he's a programmer who has been thrust into the spotlight over twenty years of his company's guerilla success, and now people expect him to be a spokesman. microsoft need a reggie fils-aime, essentially.

instance #2 - the newsweek interview where bill gets uptight about the mac/pc ads, calls apple "liars" and then lies in the same paragraph about stolen features from OSX.

this is in my blood now from yesterday's four-hour launch event for vista/office07/exchange07 that b and i attended. the presenter stood onstage and clamored about new features like a "users" directory and a one-button-show-all-open-windows thingy (heard of Expose?) in Vista. it was absolutely laughable.

the question, and bill's answer from the interview was

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.

far be it from me to be an Apple apologist... i'm feeling more anti-Microsoft than pro-Apple about this... but yes, let's look at the biggest new features in Vista and where they might have come from. These are straight from the 100 reasons to upgrade to Vista site:

- Instant Search: indexing search tools have been around for a while. integrated into a GUI OS, i believe spotlight was first.
- Interface changes: Aero, their transparency interface that gives the frosted glass look, has been around for decades. i first used it in WindowMaker on Linux in 1998. Flip3D was first demoed by Sun in their project lookingglass. thumbnailed images on the taskbar is new as far as I can tell. the Sidebar is konfabulator (or dashboard).
- Movies/TV/Music/Photos: Media Center + remote - Apple did it with Frontrow. live video playing in a task-switcher - that's also been in OSX a while. Windows DVD Maker - Apple did it with iDVD. Windows Photo Gallery - Apple did it with iPhoto.
- Utilities: Easy Transfer, to copy profiles between systems, lived in XP as Files & Settings Transfer Wizard, as well as in OS X as Setup Assistant. Scheduled backup - hey, you have cron, congrats. ReadyBoost with USB thumbdrives is new, AFAIK. So is SideShow.
- Security: The UAC feature is nothing more than sudo. Windows Defender - antivirus/antispyware suites have been around since the mid 90's. i sold some of them at CompUSA. Bitlocker is a built-in Safeboot.
- Internet Use: Meeting Spaces is simply a Webex ripoff. Tabbed browsing - yeah, that's new.

point illustrated? more annoying, though, was this quote from bill:

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.

bill is likely referring to the recent month of apple bugs, where a researcher listed new bugs in software that affects the OS X platform every day for all of January. keep in mind, not all of these vulnerabilties were in Apple software (and some of them also affected Windows), and not all were code-execution vulnerabilities.

interestingly enough, there were more code-execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft's January security bulletin than in the MOAB list. i wonder if bill ever looks at a list like eEye's zero-days that are currently live. all eight currently unpatched holes belong to Microsoft.

another interesting tidbit: check out secunia's stats on bugs in Windows versus bugs in OSX. there are pretty graphs. someone should show them to the chairman.

did he dare us to find a code execution with elevated privileges exploit once a month on a Microsoft product? go read their January bulletin. there are eight.

he needs to shut up and retire and keep raising money for things. he makes his company look foolish, and himself, childish, with his defensive whining.