I am looking forward to this

[coffeeprogrammer]

I am not sure how other people feel about MS, but there is some part of Bill Gates that I like ok. I guess in my mind he is ok because sometimes I think, I were him, would I have done anything differently? It is concealable to me that I would not have. I think if you are really going to dislike someone, it should be for something other than they have way more money than I could ever dream of. I guess besides that, while I don’t think he is the like one of the “smartest” people in the world, other than what his resources allow him to be, he is much smarter than most people and I my guess is smarter than most people that approach his wealth.

YouTube showed me this ad, and I thought some twit/sn listeners might want to watch this. I will likely watch it and some of the questions about wealth inequality I think it will be interesting to hear his response given some of his past comments about respecting necessary to pay people doing important work or work with which one finds important and not expecting everything to be free.

 

[AARC]

Gates and MS are predatory marketers of inferior software. Go back and compare their offerings to the alternatives and
it's clear what they are. Anyone who has used all iterations of Windows (I have) and a good deal of Linux cannot possibly
have any respect for MS. Even in the DOS days MS was outclassed. Wealth and "income inequality" have absolutely nothing
to do with any of it. One would think that instead of gouging the users and then becoming a "philanthropist" it might have looked
better if Gates had gotten rich by offering cutting edge products.

 

[PHolder]

Gates got rich the old fashioned way... by being an opportunist.

 

[AARC]

An opportunist takes advantage of easy gain. Gates and MS are predatory. That means using chicanery
and dishonesty for gain. The quality, or lack thereof, of much of MS products aside, there was and is
lots of sleight-of-hand, etc., i.e. the scam where computer manufacturers had to pay tribute to MS or
face being starved out. When you bought a box it came with an MS OS - no exceptions. So
you, the user, had to pay the tribute even if you weren't going to be using the MS OS.

 

[coffeeprogrammer]

Well, I figured I would get involved and see what other people think; I know that for many years I got a lot done on Microsoft products. I was thinking about it, and I have keep Windows running and available to myself since I was maybe 14. I only started figuring out operating system internals around 2015 and I still don’t know the best to use my skills to make the most money, I am currently unemployed, but I do have a progressive attitude towards wanting a better quality of life and being able to understand and if end control the world around us.

Other platforms, such as Apple products, I simply don’t find that appealing and until the last few years, open source operating systems simply don’t seem that useful for anything that I do.

As far as Microsoft today, the only thing I really care about is Windows and I like the old versions. I need to access the internet at direct times, so I do use Windows 10 and 11, but my since is that I don’t really have to use Microsoft if not wanted. I have been a C# developer in the past and I had tried to communicate that I don’t think of C# in any special way, the company picked the title; those were just the jobs I happen to apply for and get hired. I would turn down any offers for something like that moving forward.

 

[AARC]

Sorry about the unemployment. Best of luck with the job searches.

I didn't just wake up one day and despise MS. It evolved over 30 years of frustration with MS' entire operation. And it's
not just their "retail" garbage. I still have an article that was published in the 90's that pitted MS Server against IBM's OS/2 Server. MS claimed
their server was 32-bit (cutting edge then), but investigation showed that many of their libraries were actually still 16 bit. They used a "thunk" layer to
translate, with the expected slowness and freaquent crashes. This was for important business use.

Now there is the fact that Win 11 is blatently sucking customers' data. The recently revealed issue of surrepetitious screen shot captures should show what
MS is capable of.

 

[Kyra@TWiT]

I'll have more to say once I watch the videos, not all of it flattering.

But Gates hasn't been actively involved in running Microsoft for several years. So while critisism applies for how he started and ran the company (and made his Billions), the Windows OSes got more privacy invasive amongst other things well after he was gone.