Yesterday, Bill Gates delivered the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show - the annual gathering of electronic gadget manufacturers. Gates has been flogging Microsoft’s vision for the future at CES for a couple of decades now; but this year will be his last. In the middle of the year, Gates will cease devoting his life to increasing his net wealth; he will, instead, work full-time on distributing it to the world’s poor through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So it’s perhaps worth looking back over the career of the most financially successful businessman of the modern era.
Of Gates’ financial success there can be no doubt. Starting from scratch in 1975, Microsoft rose to become one of the world’s most profitable companies. Its profit margins continue to boggle the mind. Even last year, its net profits were 14 billion dollars, on revenues of roughly 50 billion. BHP Billiton’s profit margins are even greater at the moment, but at the very top of a commodities cycle. Gates’s company has produced similar margins pretty much every year for the past decade, but with continued revenue and profit growth well ahead of general economic growth. Personally, the resulting dividends and share price growth have made Gates, for much of the past decade, the world’s richest man. While his net worth is a far smaller fraction of the American economy than the Rockefellers held at their peak, it remains a colossal sum.
But besides enriching himself, what else is Bill Gates’ legacy to the world? How would the world, particularly the computing world, be different if Gates had never existed? In my view, not a lot. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that if a gentleman named Gary Kildall had decided to take a business meeting rather than go fly his private plane, Bill Gates and Microsoft would have been very minor footnotes in computing history.
Bill Gates got his start in the computing industry in the mid 1970s, when he and Paul Allen developed a programming tool for the very first microcomputer, the Altair 8800, something known as a BASIC interpreter. This wasn’t particularly new; versions of this tool were available as early as 1963 on larger computers. Throughout the early history of the personal computer, Microsoft was a reasonably successful small business selling BASIC interpreters for each new machine that came along. By the early 1980s, many of those early micros were distributed with an “operating system” - sort of a master program that simplified certain tasks like writing to the floppy disk (hard disks were virtually unknown on PC’s at that stage) and putting stuff on screen, also supplied by a third-party business. The operating system’s name was CP/M; it was supplied by a company called Digital Research, run by Kildall.
In 1980, when IBM was developing its Personal Computer, it sought to license an existing operating system for the device, first beginning with Kildall’s company. However, when the negotiations took place, Kildall was busy flying his private plane to drop off a new version of his software to the manufacturing center, back in the days before ubiquitous telecommunications networks, leaving the IBM negotiations with his wife Dorothy as was the usual practice. However, Dorothy wouldn’t sign IBM’s standard non-disclosure agreement, and thus the negotiations were delayed. Accounts differ on exactly what happened next, but the net result was that IBM ended up doing a deal with Gates’ Microsoft to supply an operating system for the PC. However, Microsoft didn’t actually have an operating system. Gates purchased the rights to “86-DOS”, very similar to CP/M, from a company called Seattle Computer Products. 86-DOS was uncannily like CP/M; it’s been claimed that the programmer, Tim Paterson, directly referred to parts of CP/M when writing 86-DOS. But, anyway, Microsoft ended up selling the rights to use what became PC-DOS to IBM for a one-time fee, as IBM demanded. But IBM didn’t get exclusive rights to PC-DOS, nor to the Intel processor in the PC. Soon enough, therefore, imitators like Compaq started churning out PC ‘clones’. And, to be compatible with IBM’s original, they needed Microsoft’s operating system. And, thus, Microsoft’s first fortune was made. But would it have made any great difference to the world if Kildall, rather than Gates, had signed a deal with IBM? Hardly. The two operating systems were so similar that Digital Research eventually turned CP/M into “DR-DOS”, which was fully compatible with MS-DOS. Having used it, it’s my strong opinion that it was a better MS-DOS than MS-DOS ever was…
Then, there’s Microsoft Windows. At the time it started becoming popular in the early 1990s, it was abundantly clear that there was a general desire from users for more friendly user interfaces for IBM clones - something more akin to what the Apple Macintosh had been offering for years, but without the massive cost penalty that Apple’s custom hardware demanded. Indeed, Digital Research had a product called GEM. IBM and Microsoft collaborated on an entirely new PC operating system, OS/2, which had its own GUI system, Presentation Manager. However, due to various key limitations of OS/2 at the time Windows 3.0 was released - notably, through IBM’s insistence that OS/2 needed to support old hardware - application developers started writing applications for Windows was rather than OS/2. Here, arguably, Gates did the world a favour. IBM would probably have tried to leverage its control of OS/2 into greater control over the hardware market. But, otherwise, things wouldn’t have been terribly different.
Finally, we have Microsoft’s other great cash cow, Office. Microsoft weren’t the only ones selling bundles of the most common application software. During the 1990s, Lotus had one called SmartSuite, Corel had Corel Office. So why did Microsoft’s become dominant? If you believe Judge Jackson during the Microsoft antitrust case, in large part because Microsoft used its desktop monopoly to squeeze out the competitors for Microsoft Office, by encouraging hardware vendors to bundle both with computers. The Internet, furthermore, increased the network effect favouring everyone having the same office software, because collaborating on documents across organizations became commonplace whereas back in the 1990s it was a rarity. But Office did little, at the time, that its competitors didn’t do equally well. But because everybody needs to send Word and Excel files to each other, they are all but entrenched.
Furthermore, it is notable that Microsoft’s attempts to extend its dominance beyond the desktop PC and the associated local network haven’t been spectacularly successful. Its web server products have done OK, but various proprietary tools, as well as the free combination of Linux, Apache, and various other tools, have a huge chunk of the market. The XBox has been moderately successful. The Zune media player has been a dud. Their operating system for mobile devices has been largely squeezed out. Virtually all of them have imitated other competitors’ products; without the leg-up of Microsoft’s desktop dominance, most have failed. While Microsoft, in the manner of Bell Labs and Xerox before them, have used their monopoly profits to fund enormous amounts of cutting-edge research, they have turned virtually none of it into new, innovative products.
So, in the end, the world would look pretty much the same without Microsoft, except that we might have had more competition in the office suite and operating system markets without the leverage one company contained by controlling both. The resulting reduction in monopoly profits would have meant that more money would have stayed in the pockets of consumers and businesses around the world, and less of it in the hands of one or two technology companies. That’s it. Sooner or later, Microsoft’s monopoly will become less pivotal than it is today. Eventually, the free offerings from the open source world will evolve to the point where they become good enough for what just about anybody wants to do. Or Google’s online office apps will suffice for most. Whatever. Microsoft will become just another company, and future generations of technologists will wonder why the crusty old guys grit their teeth and mumble “evil empire” whenever Microsoft is mentioned.
But what’s most interesting about Gates ill-gotten gains is where they came from, and where they will end up going. Most of the customers Gates has overcharged over the past decade or so are businesses, particularly large businesses, and to a lesser extent middle-class and wealthier individuals. And, it seems, Bill’s charitable foundation will ensure that a large fraction of it ends up assisting the third world. Does it justify the manner in which he gained his profits? Probably not. But while I certainly don’t think you can credit Gates with deliberately planning this - by all accounts, he came to philanthropy relatively late in the piece, at least partly through the encouragement of his wife and Warren Buffet - he might just turn out to be the greatest Robin Hood of all time. And that, rather than the products he supplied, is his real legacy.
Note: The Wikipedia articles on Gates and Kildall provided large parts of the background for this article.
The gift of standardisation is often overlooked. Communication standards (e.g. lingua franca, morse code, TCP/IP) are some of the great enablers of globalisation.
One of the many points in computing history that could have changed things phenomenally would have been an adoption of a standard document file type for each of the major Office document types. It would’ve been a hard thing to see coming and without the internet to facilitate discussion between developers it would have been incredibly hard to document. Still, an open document standard would have ensured that competition within the office (MS Office, Corel Office, Lotus, etc.) software market was based on what the software could do rather than ensuring compatibility with the rest of the world.
Proprietary formats stifle innovation, splinter the market and force needless competition on the market. Just imagine if electronics companies manufactured their own batteries for their own devices and there was no standard sizing.
It is the proprietary formats like .doc and .xls (and the bundling of software) which have allowed Microsoft to build their empire. If everyone needs to run Microsoft Office to ensure that others can read their files, then everyone needs Microsoft Windows (let’s not kids ourselves, Office X (for Mac) is terrible). The bundling of Windows and Office effectively squeeze other operating systems and office suites out of the market.
Whether Gates’ charity work is enough to overcome the damage to the world that Microsoft has wrought through its aggressive marketing of (arguably) inferior products (such as Windows NT) remains to be seen. I appreciate that Gates does charity work and hope that it continues, but I don’t know if it’s enough to convince me that he and his company are necessary evils.
Gates could commence his task of distributing his wealth by paying me for my time he wasted when his crap products froze while I was trying to use them.
Tony D: in my view, any “standardisation” Microsoft is responsible for would have happened anyway, probably in a less brain-dead fashion.
Robert, Microsoft have consistently avoided any standardisation. TCP/IP predates Microsoft’s ascendancy by a good while, and actually evolved in UNIX environments, I think. Microsoft acquired its original TCP/IP stack by “lifting” the BSD unix code.
Or, more to the point, when standards have come along, have added their own proprietary extensions to try to lock people in to Microsoft products. The tactic has a name - “embrace and extend”.
Mind you, it’s hardly unique to Microsoft, it’s just that they’re in a uniquely powereful position to do so.
I just wonder how much better life would have been if IBM had known something about operating systems and had gone and asked Microware to put OS/9 on the PC instead of the second-hand, warmed over, CPM knock-off that Gates offered up.
As to why MS has been so phenomenally successful, well, in H.L. Mencken’s words “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”. That and the fact that most people don’t actually want choice when it comes to computers. They just want to know what “the” tool is to do their job, and they don’t want to learn that job all over again. Those that want choice have to go out of their road to get it.
Windows NT wasn’t their worst product by far. In fact it was one of their best (which is damning with faint praise I know), and showed them taking their OS business seriously for the first time.
That he’s giving money to charity now is great, and something to be applauded. I just hope he invests it in charity with better vision and judgment than he used when creating software.
RM you haven’t mentioned several other episodes : that whole MCSE certification ripoff ,the theft of the Xerox Parc interface ( both Apple and Microsoft) , the disabling of DR/DOS and the take over of any company that came any where near the operating system.
To think that industry is full of nice people who wouldn’t have done what Microsoft did is a form of idealism. Governments ensure anti trust processes.Standardization is a complex process and to think that a standard can be established prior to some extremely competitive process is also optimistic.
OpenOffice does a better job of reading Office formats than Office itself does.
To say that very little of Microsoft’s research ended up in Microsoft’s products may be true but misses the point of good research.
In summary this scenario ( IT - Microsoft) is too complex to be a useful counter factual.
Very true Robert, as David’s assertion supports. Standardisation has occurred in spite of Microsoft’s best efforts. However, never underestimate the “Can’t Be Stuffed” factor that underlies a lot of the His Holiness(R) The Invisible Hand’s(R)(tm) attitudes to software markets.
Another interesting perspective on the development of the GUI is the Xerox PA Labs Incident - where both Apple and Microsoft pinched the same idea at the same time but the company who was first to market tried to sue the slower. Those crazy kids eh!
Minor point of order: it wasn’t PC-DOS that started the IBM PC clone revolution, it was a clean-room BIOS (Wikipedia has a good article on it). The operating system wasn’t all that relevent in the early days as most of the programming for PC’s was done at a pretty low level, making direct BIOS calls. Gates got lucky and then got very smart by licensing MS-DOS to the burgeoning clone market, then making a software industry around writing MS-DOS programs rather than PC-BIOS programs. Initially, this looked like a huge failure (there were MS-DOS compatible machines that weren’t BIOS compatible, like the Sanyo MBC-550 for example). A lot of people bought those DOS compatible boxes, only to find they couldn’t run 90% of the software for proper IBM-PC clones.
As Robert says above, it’s standardisation that created the whole industry. Before that, every different architecture had various “silos” of expertise surrounding it (i.e. Wang and word processing). IBM really should have seen it coming - the first proto-market in 3rd party software surrounded IBM 360 mainframe clones. After the IBM-PC, it’s hardware expansion slots and BIOS became an industry standard and an entire industry flourished. Did Microsoft extract a rent for that? Sure. Did it really hurt consumers? In the age of the $200USD PC, it’s hard to say that for sure. Right up until 1990, it wasn’t a dead cert that Microsoft would be the industry leader in anything (novell had networking, WordPerfect had word processing, Lotus had spreadsheets). In fact, when Sun workstations started to leave university campuses and LAN Manager failed to make a dent in Netware and Windows 2.0 was DOA, it looked like they would be an also-ran. DR-DOS and OS/2 were real contenders back then.
My memory suggests that the turning point was the original Excel for Windows. it was so much better than Lotus 1-2-3 (and cheaper as I recall it) that buying the whole bundle including Word for Windows and Windows 3.0 quickly became a financial no-brainer. That they later leveraged and abused that success kind of obscures just how much struggling in the application market Microsoft did during the 1980s.
On Bill; ever since he installed the Buffet Upgrade package I’ve been wanting him to sponsor technology competitions on the scale of the X-Prize.
Bill: WRT Microsoft’s research, you’re quite right. But Microsoft Research seems to be largely running as a benevolent fund, like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center before it, rather than a source of new, commercializable products.
I’m grateful that they’re doing the research, but in a strict commercial sense I’m not sure how much benefit they’re getting out of it.
That said, I am aware of some of the testing research they do; it has contributed to make their products more reliable and secure than they would otherwise have been.
While the Gates’ philanthropic activities of late are commendable, I can’t shake the feeling that they, or Bill, specifically, maintains his seemingly intrinsic anti-competitive nature in doing so.
As a part of this $20 billion odd he’s giving away, about $1 million, I believe, is going towards the Northern Territory State Library (the government department, not a single library), to establish and/or support small community-based libraries in remote communities. Great, wonderful. However, most of that money is going towards fitting out these libraries with Microsoft-built computers complete with Vista, Office, etc., and I believe there are some terms and conditions, such as the individual libraries not being able to run any of Microsoft’s competitors’ software.
The there’s the bright green laptops being built for impoverished children; they were going to install Ubuntu on every one, since it’s, you know, free and open source and all that, but Microsoft intervened and secured a contract to supply them all with a radically scaled-back version of XP, for $40 a pop.
I fully welcome charitable donations from the world’s richest man of course, but I wouldn’t simply assume it’s entirely altruistic.
Jangari: fair point; however, most of the Gates’ Foundation money is going into things that have nothing to do with computers, notably vaccine development and distribution.
It works like this:
Steve Jobs does the thinking and invention; Bill makes it cheaper and more attractive to accountants.
Teamwork.
Gates is the Henry Ford of the digital age, Jobs is Louis Chevorlet.
One of the ideas no-one seems to have ‘permanently borrowed’ when Steve Jobs & co visited those PARC labs way back when – was seemingly the replacement for the qwerty keyboard.
I read a book years ago –re: the Apple story, and this device was mentioned along with, all the other now ubiquitous innovations that whatever his name (?) developed (gui, mouses, wysiwyg, blah etc) – all I can remember is that it was a one-handed device that replaced the qwerty keyboard using a few buttons or somethum?…..
Considering the brilliance of the minds, who developed personal computing as we know it – it’s hard to think that this device would have been complete rubbish.
But so far, no movement on replacing the qwerty keyboard, even with the development of mobile digital technologies.
In respect of Gates & Buffett – like Rockefeller, Ford, Packard before them – establishing huge philanthropic foundations, that with many others, fund a significant proportion of the global NGO sector, is one of the ultimate ironies and saving graces of capitalism.
Many NGO’s and community groups, including those in the global south, rely on direct funding from the capital or more so, the dividends from investments in current enterprises, from outrageous fortunes wrought a generation or two prior. And as Foundations age, and the original trustees are replaced, most foundations become increasingly liberal in their grant making.
So much so, that the neo-cons at the AEI, spent considerable time discussing this issue, and their stated aim was to replace Foundation trustees with fellow neo-con travellers. (They started of course with the Govt USAid office.)
Of course, they still don’t get why directly funding grass-roots civil society in developing countries around health, environment, education, governance etc. is actually beneficial in developing successful democracies, rather than viewing short-term hits on affected TNC’s bottom lines, via increased local expectations in relation to proper landholder entitlements, environmental & labor etc. standards being supposedly unsustainable.
Like Katz, looking back at all the hours wasted on crap Microsoft products is a bit sad, but I am happy to forgive Gates in light of his direct funding of large scale immunisation programs in Africa and malaria research etc. – incredibly worthy recipients.
First, a joke.
“How many Microsoft Product Managers does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“None. They define the absence of light as an industry standard and market it as ‘Active Darkness’.”
Ok, maybe it isn’t a joke. It’s still funny.
Now, to business. Apple did not steal any ideas or technology from PARC. Apple hired a couple of academics in the late 70s who had been affiliated with PARC (eg Jef Raskin, Larry Tesler) and they got Apple interested in the Human Factors problems with PCs and started the Macintosh project in 1979. GUI’s weren’t a ‘new’ idea in CS by any stretch of the imagination and most of the core features were standard - Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer (WIMP).
Steve Jobs and his entourage went on the now famous tour of PARC in December 1979, where they were given a technology demo of their Smalltalk development environment with a GUI. The critical point that people miss is that this demo was part of an investment transaction between Apple and Xerox, where Xerox bought 100000 Apple shares for $1M and Apple got the tour and came away inspired by the fact that somone had built a working system based on the same ideas they were working on. There’s no theft or swiping of ideas here at all.
d
I like to think that the ‘Internetworking’ industry to be the ultimate form of successful standardisation. Even with giants like Cisco and Nortel anyone can participate competitively and freely - proven by niche startups like Extreme Networks and Foundry. When a new tech arrives they all appear to come together and nut out a standard and then abide by it (with a little squabbling) thus adoption of new technology is rapid by comparison to other industries.
From this I believe Microsoft are finding it difficult to participate in the modern interconnected world. They bring the habits of a monolithic behemoth used to exerting its monopoly upon the uninformed. Apart from a massive cultural revolution they will always be the migrant who won’t accept the surroundings. They will give way to the native Open Source movement just like IBM gave way to the Open Hardware movement.
Bill Gates has so much money the only thing he can do is give it away. He’s shopping at the good legacy store with a wad of cash.
Jobs hasn’t invented much either.
What he has managed to do is to file off the rough edges of earlier versions of technology, wrap it up in beautiful product design that makes Apple products a pleasure to use rather than a chore, and market the bejesus out if it.
As for QWERTY keyboard replacements, they’ve all been duds so far.
Have you seen the RRP of Windows & Office lately? No wonder people pirate them.
Have you seen the RRP of Windows & Office lately?
>
Nah. I’m Mac boy these days. Having a PC in the cultural industries is a little like turning up to your Hell’s Angels’ chapter get-together on a Honda.
>
No no no.
There is now an existing ISO published office document standard called ODF, which many office like programs (except for microsoft office) support. These days you can pretty much use OpenOffice which is free instead of going out to buy Microsoft Office. Open Office will convert existing Microsoft Office documents.
Microsoft are currently trying to get OOXML adopted as an ISO standard which is basically just the microsoft file format. But its pretty controversial as many people believe its too complex, buggy and just not implementable by anyone else but Microsoft.
Openoffice frustrates me a little bit. My personal bugbear is that it doesn’t do error bars on charts properly, which makes it virtually useless for scientific charting.
That’s bad enough. What makes it worse is that the maintainers of the graph component of OpenOffice have been told for six years that this is a showstopper limitation for scientific use - and thus wider deployment in universities - and they still haven’t fixed it, or even acknowledged what a serious problem it is.
The code base is also pretty intimidating, so it’s not something you can just dive into and fix.
Robert, thanks for reminding me of the “good old days”.
My first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer that came with a Microsoft BASIC “ROM PAC”. This pre-dated the IBM PC, DOS and Bill Gates the gazillionaire. Later we bought an S-100 expansion box and floppy drives and ran CP/M on it.
I’ve only owned machines with Microsoft operating systems since. I’m looking for a new computer ATM and promised myself I’d buy a Mac this time, but they’re still just too expensive.
Might be a case where it’d be worthwhile for some people to fund someone to fix this problem. If its the only thing holding back an organisation from converting to open office, the savings in licence costs would pretty quickly pay for a few hours of consulting.
Hey, just get a lecturer to set it as a project for some poor third year to fix as part of their degree
OpenOffice annoys me a little too, sometimes, but surprisingly, only on linux, it seems fine on Windows. I find that on linux, it formats pages slightly larger than MS Office would, resulting in more pages per document, and ruining any carefully spaced paragraphing.
Doesn’t matter, I run a dual-boot now, so I can do everything on linux for free, then switch over to XP when I need to use OpenOffice. Since it’s free I’m willing to accept any annoying idiosyncracies.
Chris (the other one);
OpenOffice has its own component model / middleware which is heinously complex. It has a custom build system. Consequently the project as a whole is tied in knots politically between the high cost of forking and the constant tension between Sun and everyone else.
The neat thing though is that since the ISO endorsed ODF, other opensource programs have started to support it.I believe KOffice is using or is going to use ODF formats as its native format; on the GNOME side a lot of apps can read and write ODF files.
Even OS X Leopard has inbuilt support for ODF.
It’s fun, if futile, doing counterfactuals, but if Kildall’s wife had agreed to sign the IBM contract, there could have been a very different turn of events. The IBM PC was, like the IBM AS/400, developed by a bunch of mavericks far from WHQ of the Evil Empire in New York, under Don Estridge at Boca Raton in Florida.
If IBM had gained exclusive rights to an operating system, WHQ might well have closed off Estridge’s open architecture initiative. IBM could have achieved the same dominance in the personal computer market as it had in the 1980s in mainframes - instead of now being out of it altogether.
Result: today personal computers might be a tenth as functional and five times the price. Instead, Sun Microsystems’ internet appliance initiative could have become the major vehicle for delivering internet access and Scott McNealy might have become as wealthy as Bill Gates actually did.
http://www.canadiandemocraticmovement.ca/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=52&theme=Printer
Greg Palast:
MikeM: Interesting theory, but that’s not the way I read it.
It doesn’t appear that IBM ever sought exclusive rights to the operating system for the PC.
The further question is whether the PC would have died in the marketplace if if had had remained a closed architecture. If you wanted a closed, overpriced architecture, the Mac was a much, much nicer one…
“My personal bugbear is that it doesn’t do error bars on charts properly, which makes it virtually useless for scientific charting.”
Robert M, if you want to do any serious data analysis or presentation, I’d strongly recommend that you bite the learning-curve bullet and try R
Yes, and proprietary office applications (other than Microsoft Office) are also starting to support it. Hopefully it will become the office file format and as more organisations adopt it as the standard interchange format.
I would guess that may be due to slightly different fonts being installed on your linux install than the standard windows one. Many distros allow you to install the microsoft set of standard fonts and it may fix the pagination issues you are seeing.
Ah Carbonsink. You’ve got me all nostalgic for the Sorcerer. My first computer, sigh.
The QWERTY is a case in point. Once you get critical mass of humanity using something, it is very hard to change the orthodoxy because it’s worth putting up with crap programs just for the universality and ubiquity. Nothing shits me more than trying to read documents or work on documents that the computer I am using has trouble opening. This I guess is Gates’s genius and contribution, no finesse just sledgehammer bluster and phalanx of lawyers. Hard to make MS blink first. This brings results and sends more elegant programs to the wall, or to the margins.
Take Word. It’s basically bullshit. Word Perfect kills Word in every way. But it is not in the race. Open Office and the Gnu Abi and Bean (for OSX) are good bits of software and free but so what. Most Words come with the computers you buy anyway so the “free” is moot.
Bean for the Mac is a brilliant little program by the way. I love it but end up using Word anyway. I’m not that obsessed about Gates as All That is Evil to suffer any inconvenience as a result.
Even better is Lyx. This is an open source Unix based program. It is just brilliant in every way and is a proper typsetting tool with which you can write and professionally typeset your own book, chapters, sections and so on, which are dynamic as you write.
I do not think it will run on Microsoft Windows though and thus I am rooted. I couldn’t be bothered running a bloody Unix platform. PCs are a disposable razor nowadays.
There have been numerous products/systems/inventions that should have won the day. They didn’t: their mundane, clomping pedestrian competitors won the day… Where are:
Erco Coupe 415 light aircraft, the vanadium redox battery, the Betamax, the Dvorak layout keyboard, Bertin’s aerotrain system of mass rapid transit, the Splayd fork, dirigible airship, caseless rifle, biodiesel from algae, safety razor, diesel aero engines, Patak’s ginger pickle, Heroin as painkiller, borax as household cleaner, bicycle hub gears, drive-in movie theatres, sleepette train carriages on the Gold Coast Motorail (the two). I could go on.
I don’t know where exactly to dive into this discussion other then I think Robert and others are seriously underestimating the impact of Microsoft in the computing world. Yes, Microsoft has been involved in some shonky deals, but everyone in the computer industry is guilty of this.
Microsoft spend a fortune on R&D all over the CS and Physics sector in the US and around the world - much more than any of their software competitors. I’m not sure if the money they spend is proportionally more than the old pillars of the hardware community, IBM and Bell Labs, spent in their heyday but it is a huge amount nonetheless. Very little of the money MS spends is meant to fuel the MS machine, most of it is a gift to the community to support scientific development.
Without Microsoft their would be a lot less money going into foundational research into Computer Science without which the stellar rates of progress that we’ve seen the last 20 years may never have happened.
“Even better is Lyx… a proper typesetting tool with which you can write and professionally typeset your own book, chapters, sections and so on, which are dynamic as you write.”
Not to mention the open source Bibtex bibliographic package that is bundled with most LaTeX distributions.
Ultimately, Sir Henry, Lyx is a front end for LaTeX, Donald Knuth & Lesley Lamport’s impeccable collection of software packages. Lyx/LaTeX can also be used to make high-quality presentation graphics in pdf format that are easily the equal of anything you can do in Powerpoint.
And the files used to generate Lyx/LaTeX output are plain text format. What could be more transportable or more compact?
I agree that Word is basically bullshit, and it shits me to tears that so many scientific journals insist that manuscripts be submitted in Word format.
Lets face it: Word is not a scientific instrument. It was always targeted at a corporate sector seeking to minimize training costs.
TFA - Pretty much all physics, CS, or math journals use LaTeX.
LyX is crappy, it’s full of bugs and has a clunky GUI. I reckon’ LaTeX with WinEdt on PC or TeXShop on Mac kills LyX for ease of use.
TFA, I have used R. Great if you’re doing really chunky data analysis work, overkill if you just want a quick chart. There are other alternatives, of course.
“I like to think that the ‘Internetworking’ industry to be the ultimate form of successful standardisation”
Yeah the Open System Integration model has wonderful utility.
How does it go again? A.P.S.T.N.D.P = All People Seem To Need Data Processing… sorry, geek joke. You’re lucky it wasn’t written in L337.
But seriously, OSI can probably be credited with the creation of the internetworking and system integration industries. The ability for a Russian hardware vendor to sell a product that fits into a particular layer of the OSI to a South African telco, without either of them ever speaking a human tongue is incredibly powerful.
Re QWERTY: Dvorak re-arranged keys in attempt to distribute the work evenly between fingers whereas the original typewriter arrangement was an attempt to keep keys clashing in the gate as typing rate became fast. Human Factor research in the 80s using a variety of layouts (including alphabetized) showed that QWERTY won out every time. While there was a vogue for Dvorak where one installed a conversion program and popped off all the keys and re-arranged, the buggerance is that if you go to use another computer, say at a work site, you stuff-up. Re CPM, does anyone remember ZCPM (Think it as developed by Rodney Zacs who legend has it, was also approached by IBM reps but was fishing at the time) Also, I have an old Scientific American somewhere that names Kay as the man who developed the GUI for Xerox/Apple which included a small device he called a ‘mouse.’
“Pretty much all physics, CS, or math journals use LaTeX.”
True, Mick, but not the case in the biological sciences. In my field, the majority of journals will not accept anything other than a Word .doc
Blackwell journals have become particularly inflexible in this regard - I offered one journal plain text, rtf, postscript, pdf and html, but they refused to accept any of these.
This is an area where Bill Gates’ products have done a great disservice. The pervasive dumbing down effect of MS Office across many specialist areas has led to the output from a superior technical instrument (LaTeX) no longer being acceptable to technical & scientific publishers.
Robert M - have you tried John Fox’s RCmdr tcl gui for R? It’s handy for those sorts of routine tasks.
Robert did mention that in passing:
And much like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, Microsoft have struggled to even notice the awesome work done by their research arm.
I am not sure if it was Gates or Buffett, but I read one of them intends to leave their kids only $10 million!
It was Gates.
That said, in the real world $10 million is rather a lot of money
Robert
I also suspect by the time they actually “inherit” Ma and PA would have bought them some fine Chrissy presents!
abbr title=”Rex N”
“An interesting thread over at Larvatus Prodeo on Bill Gates’s legacy reminded me of a short story I wrote a few years ago on vaguely relevant themes, with a nod to an earlier Roald Dahl one. I was apparently in a shitty mood with Microsoft as well as the world; was a mite harsh on Gates at least, I s’pose…seemed like a suitably sly moment to slip a bit of blog-whoring in. If you got here via LeProd, which you pretty well must have, welcome. Breathe a sigh of relief, yonder moderators all: no more lengthy shanghai’ing from me over your way. Until I collapse in a disillusioned, sucked-dry cyber-heap, that is. Again.
Thanks very much for your tolerance over the years, Mark & Co, and this (one and only) uninvited ad.”
“I have an old Scientific American somewhere that names Kay as the man who developed the GUI for Xerox/Apple which included a small device he called a ‘mouse.’”
Alan Kay is a huge figure in CS, and was a key player in the development of PARC’s SmallTalk environment which was what Steve Jobs et al were shown back in 1979. The Mouse, however, predates Kay and PARC by over a decade. It was invented by Douglas Englebart at the Augmentation Research Centre in the mid-sixties and features prominently in his famous demo which can be viewed at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html (there’s a google video copy as well, but you can’t read the on-screen text)
If you have any interest at all in the the history of computing, or you believe that the last 20 years have seen great leaps forward in computer science and its applications, you really must see this. He makes lists, copies and pastes text, draws graphics, makes hypertext links between parts of the graphics and parts of the lists, videoconferences with a colleague 30 miles away and collaborately edits documents and… oh, just go watch it. Did I mention this was in 1968?
d