|
< BACK TO Fresh Intelligence Bill Gates Should Let 'PC' Hodgman Do the Talking![]() NERD ALERT Gates, Hodgman In his appearance on The Daily Show Monday, Gates's forced chuckles at host Jon Stewart's one-liners were the least of his worries (see video, here). Rather than steer conversation towards the product at hand, Gates waxed at length about a TV/computing future that sounds suspiciously like, uh, TiVo. (Sayeth Gates: "Say you're watching the news—you can spend more time on the topics you're interested in and little or no time on the things you don't care about."). Worse yet was his awkward exeunt from the guest's chair. He stood up as Stewart was shaking his hand and, as the camera panned out, proceeded to walk off the set. As a confused Stewart intoned, "He's leaving! He can't just leave!" Gates kept walking. He didn't fare better on CNN's American Morning yesterday. When, after toggling through a few Vista features, host Miles O'Brian said the new interface looked pretty much like Mac's dated OSX platform (diss!), a visibly uncomfortable Gates responded: "No, no, no. Actually, uh, the, we're ahead [slight pause] on a lot, uh, there's whole areas where we've innovated like Media Center and tablet, uh, that, uh, no one else is doing and the parental control, that's the first time that's been done." The coup de grâce, however, came on NPR's "Day to Day" (listen here), when host Alex Chadwick noted, "There is some sense that Mac is cool and Windows is not." After playing one of the ubiquitous "I'm a Mac" spots on the air, Chadwick asked Gates if he thought it was "a little bit mean." "Certainly not to me," Gates shot back while nervously laughing. At least he didn't bring up the "parental controls." PREVIOUSLY The sense that Mac products and open source alternatives are "cool" when compared to Microsoft's illustrates the kind of poor core logic in the argument itself. Both communities have been able to create a sort of in-crowd that throws stones at Microsoft for the same reason grammar school kids belittle the class nerd. Every corporation in the world barrows some of it's ideas from competitors. Look at cars, they're not that dramatically different from one another. Most of today's innovations can be traced back to some earlier technology; but I didn't hear anyone speak up about the iPhone's new velocity scrolling being awfully like the InterLisp GUI, or NextStep's network integration being like that of the Xerox Alto. Don't go with the crowd, decide for yourself what technology you prefer. -Charles Toepfer Posted by: ioillusion on January 31, 2007 4:23 PM He has a refreshing naturalness about him that comes accross well. Posted by: security on February 6, 2007 1:40 AM Advertisement |
|
|||