Maybe I am Missing Something
So I was thinking back of one of the better movies I have seen in the last 10 year: Pirates of Silicon Valley. It is based on the novel "fire in the valley" and in essence chronicles the early days of the personal computer from the advent of the GUI(Graphic User Interphase which enabled the mouse) to the beginings of the microsoft conglomorate.
So the question I have is why is Mircosoft hated so much? Is it becuase they in many ways emerged victorious and there is a certain amount of jealousy? If you look at the last breakdown I saw, 97% of personal computers run some form of Windows, whereas 3% run some form of Apple's software. Is the hatred there because Microsoft essentially stole much of the early Windows OS from Apple? But then again, didn't Apple steal the GUI technology from Xerox in the first place?
Perhaps people do not like Bill Gates personally? But according to the movie(please correct me if I am wrong) Steve Jobs was not exactly a nice guy. He considered himself a pirate, had pirate flags all over his office, and expected employees to work long hard hours. In fact he came across as an asshole in the movie.
So why is it that people hate Bill Gates and Microsoft? I was wondering this question this morning, as I checked my email on my Firefox browser. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
1 Comments:
It's been a while since I saw "Pirates", but I've read a lot about those companies. I think there are a wide variety of reasons why lots of people hate Bill Gates.
For one thing, every huge, powerful company has its detractors who think it's too huge and powerful. Add to that the fact that Microsoft's programs are notoriously buggy, ugly, and hard to use, and you get a lot of people who feel that Microsoft is using the strength it gained from one pivotal product to force mediocre-to-bad products on the rest of the world. Granted, no one's legally bound to buy Microsoft stuff, but even now, it's kind of hard not to.
Truth be told, Microsoft didn't actually "steal" anything from Apple - they just took advantage of Apple in a crummy way. Right after the Mac came out, Apple president John Sculley was worried that no one would want to write software for it, since the Mac was a new machine and Apple didn't have the corporate respectability it does now (1980s Apple was still regarded as something of a hippie collective. Serious businesspeople bought IBM).
I don't have the exact details of the arrangement, but Bill Gates apparently worked out a deal with Sculley where Apple signed over the rights to its UI in exchange for a promise from Bill that Microsoft would write software for the Mac. This, to me, is a little like exchanging one's car for a gallon of gas, since the deal apparently gave Microsoft the right to make Windows as Mac-ish as it wanted. Worse, that deal cost Apple its early 90s lawsuit against Microsoft and HP, when it went after them for Windows 3.0. So it could be said that if Microsoft stole Apple's crown jewels, it was only after Apple gave them the key to the safe.
As for Apple and Xerox, Xerox wasn't doing anything with the UI - they didn't see how it was useful, and were shutting the project down. We might still be typing stuff like "C:/> RUN MSWORD.EXE" if Apple hadn't taken the basic idea of a graphical user interface and run with it. It's also worth noting that Microsoft took a lot more from Apple than Apple took from Xerox - Xerox's UI was pretty clunky compared to the Mac.
I don't dislike Bill Gates as a person. I just don't have a lot of respect for his company, because it seems to me that Microsoft hasn't come up with an original concept in its existence (remember that it got the original concepts behind DOS, Windows, and IE from other places).
Some food for thought, though: one could argue that Microsoft actually made the world easier for computer users because it mimicked Apple's UI so accurately. Because of that, people aren't required to learn an entirely new user interface for every computer. I can get around Windows fairly easily, since it works so much like a Mac. If Microsoft had gone off and created something that looked and felt entirely different, I don't know how many people would be switching from PCs to Macs, because the learning process would be harder.
Steve Jobs was definitely an asshole. He was largely an effective one, however - he had charisma and was good at motivating the Mac people. One example of this was the pirate business. Those flags came from a quote of Jobs's that "it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy", meaning that it was better to be working on a revolutionary project than a regular boring one. Jobs kept telling the Mac team how revolutionary their project was, and it was thanks to him that they believed so fervently in it that they didn't mind the long hours. They were actually the ones who made that pirate flag in the first place.
Glad to hear you've switched to Firefox. A few of IE's inane glitches delayed the launch of one of my sites this morning. I would be so happy to see that plague of a browser go the way of phonographs, Edsels, and DOS.
- Chris
Post a Comment
<< Home