[clug-talk] M$ revenue falls, open source "blamed"

[John Jardine]

On Sat, 2009-08-08 at 09:17 -0600, Robert Lewko wrote:
> Yeah, OK a talented programmer.  Yeah he was working on Basic.
> Whoopee!!!
I'm no fanboi but you do need to factor in a couple of things...
- He did scratch write a Basic interpreter.  Before you blow that off as
no big deal, try it.  Now try it again in 4K.  I've done parallel work -
that's difficult now, it was *hard* then.
- I don't know many CEOs that do a whole lot of coding - their
responsibilities have changed.

I couldn't find an employee head-count for 1975 - when BG & Paul Allen
released basic.  In 1976 MS had 6 employees.  I did find that by 1993 -
first release of NT - MS had over 14,000 employees - by this time Bills
coding days were long behind him.


> 
> Then how is it that when this "talented programmer" gets into the
> position of chief architect that he hires David cutler, who was fired
> from DEC for incompetence, to architect NT?  Then because the
> performance of NT 3.51 sucked so bad he hires people to cut the normal
> protections of a Multiprocessing OS out to create NT 4.00.  He was
> having such a hard time with the debugging he gets Nathan Myrvold
> involved who promises to help get it degugged, which he does.
> 
> My point is that through this episode, he sneers at the almost 30
> years of computing wisdom and in the process creates a piece of
> technological drek, which we are stuck with today as the majority OS
> on the planet.  And you want me to acknowledge that man for being a
> wizard and a visionary?!  Sorry No!!!
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Gustin Johnson <gustin at echostar.ca>
> wrote:
>         Robert Lewko wrote:
>         > Thank you for that acknowledgement.
>         >
>         > I would like to add that what also added to M$'s success
>          was the
>         > incredibly inept marketing of others and the stupid UNIX
>         wars of the mid
>         > 80's and early 90's.  If Apple, Xerox and IBM had not been
>         so steeped in
>         > the paradigm of the era (mainframes) and could have seen the
>         > consequences of hardware becoming cheaper by the day almost
>         (commonly
>         > known as Moore's Law) then they may have been able to make
>         something
>         > come of the technologies that they had in the 1980 period.
>         
>         Say what you will about MS, they are one of the few big tech
>         companies
>         to have not made a fatal mistake.  At least not yet.  Anyone
>         remember
>         the Wordstar wars?  You know two competing products from the
>         same
>         company that even had similar names.
>         
>         Anyone remember Borlund?
>         
>         <snip>
>         
>         > All the stuff about BG being some technological whiz and a
>         visionary is
>         > bullshit!!!
>         
>         Actually BG was a talented programmer back in the day.  He may
>         not be an
>         industry prophet, and he may not play by the rules, but at
>         least get the
>         history straight.
>         
>         
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