Bill Gates’ MSNBC/Newsweek Interview and the Introduction of the Bill Gates BS-O-Meter (this thing goes to 11^11!)

Whoo hoo… well it’s been a fun week to be a Mac user, eh?

Via Newsweek (aka MSNBC… and you do realize who put the MS in MSNBC right?) comes the story of “Bill Gates on Vista and Apple’s ‘Lying’ Ads: Bill Gates explains why you should buy his new operating system, what he’s doing next and why John Hodgeman bugs him.”

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch?

Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes

Decoded Answer: I don’t have an elevator pitch, but if I could show it to you I’d be able to:

show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

I don’t know what the “Sidebar” is, but

• Searching through lots of things
• Managing photos
• Edit high definition movies
• Making DVDs which have pictures

Are all, every last one of them, features which have been available in Tiger since April 2005.

[Newsweek:] Vista has been a very long time in coming, and parts of it were jettisoned along the way. Do you feel satisfied at the outcome now that it’s finally shipped?

[Gates:] Well, we released Windows XP about five years ago. During that time, we’ve had, I think, three releases of Media Center, four releases of [Windows Media], Tablet releases, Windows XP SP2, which was really a very major release. So in no sense has Windows been standing still.

Media center and Tablet sales have been completely abysmal. How about releases that people actually used? SP1 and SP2 were bug fix releases. No question they were important, but they brought almost nothing new to the table. Are we counting bug fix releases now, because if so, Apple’s Mac OS X has had about, what, 30 releases in 5 years?

[Gates:] Actually, if you look at Windows strength versus Linux, or versus anything, it’s done very well, because we have this big ecosystem.

Would you clarify on what this Windows “strength” is? Because the question was “It took a long time to get Vista out the door, without a lot of the big features you were talking about 5 years ago.”

[Gates:] Next time around we’re going to have a lot more agility. A lot of what we put into this version was layering work that will let us take the upper parts of the system, like the browser, and let us do more regular releases. So there [will be further releases] at least every couple of years, and in some parts maybe even yearly. And we learned a lot during the Vista [process]. People can see how we’ve mixed together our Office talent and Windows talent to get the best of both worlds, and how we’re going to do things going forward.

So your answer is “Nothing was wrong with the way things were, but we certainly aren’t doing to do that again.” Gotcha.

[Newsweek:] You also talk about improved security in Vista.

[Gates:] Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You’re [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we’ve got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.

First: what is up with all the [ brackets ] in the quote above? Was Gates really that inarticulate when talking about Vista that they had to redact him for clarity?

Second: Bill Gates has seen Apple’s code base? Really? Really?

Third: This reminds me of an old Dilbert strip where the programmers started to get paid per bug fixed. Guess what happened? Yeah, they wrote more bugs. Gates is saying “Wow, you won’t believe how much more secure it is than the pile of crap we’ve been shipping for the last decade! Apple hasn’t made nearly that much improvement.” Let’s say that they got an “A” for security in Vista (which is clearly yet to be proven, given that the main security feature is so annoying that nearly everyone will turn it off, not to mention the fact that you can use voice recognition to delete files in Vista). But, for the sake of discussion, let’s say that they do really, really, really well. A huge improvement over what they’ve done before. Is he really saying that Apple is worse because they’ve been a steady A-/B+ student whereas Microsoft spent the last 5 years to pull their grades up?

[Newsweek:] Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

[Gates:] I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

Translation: “I’m so hopelessly out of touch that I haven’t bothered to — or won’t admit to — checked out my competitors huge marketing campaign.”

He hasn’t seen the ads? Come on. That’s like Steve Jobs saying that he didn’t know Microsoft made a brown Zune.

Bill’s BS-O-Meter: 1

The best part though? On the MSNBC site where the original article is hosted, right at the top of the article (even higher than the ad for Microsoft), is a link to the video.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?

Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

How about the fact that each version of OS X has run faster on older equipment?

The Apple ad clearly says that to take advantage of all the features, you’ll probably need a video card upgrade. Is that a lie?

512 MB has been widely accepted as the “sweet spot” for RAM with Windows XP (OS X, it should be noted, needs at least that much, and 1GB is highly recommended). I was looking at Dell laptops the other day for a friend (as I said, I’m not a Mac zealot, I recommend what I think will work best for folks), and noticed that all of their laptops seemed to have at least 1GB of RAM, and there was a disclaimer about the ability to run the Aero effects.

Don’t take my word on it, checkout How Much Memory Does Vista Need? from MSDN.com where he says:

In my experience, XP ran very well with 512 MB and only slightly better with 1 GB (unless you were putting it through a very serious work load). To get this kind of performance out of Vista, you really want 1.5 GB. 1 GB will work but it will be sluggish at times. Anything less than 1 GB will feel very slow.

Is upgrading a video card and adding more ram “Major Surgery”? Not for me, and maybe not for you, but for the vast majority of Windows users, I’d say the answer is yes. I suspect most of them will not go for Vista until they get a new PC which will be much faster (spec wise) but not really run any faster. (The first thing I do when I sit down at someone’s XP installation is turn off all the eye candy. Make it look like Windows 2000 and you will notice a significant speed increase.)

That’s not lying, Bill, that’s telling the truth.

Bill’s BS-O-Meter: 2

[Newsweek:] Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—

[Gates:] That’s for my customers to decide.

Bill has lost the ability to form opinions on his own? He was asked for his opinion and said “Let my customer decide”? Wuh-huh?

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

1) Would that be the same Jim Allchin who trashed Windows-Media players not long after iTunes came out? The same Allchin who wrote that if he wasn’t working for Microsoft he would have bought a Mac? The same Allchin who decided to step down once the bloody thing finally shipped?

2) You may have showed these features, as in “talked about them” but Apple actually shipped them. Almost 2 years ago.

3) Please show me where security guys are breaking the Mac every single day. Jeebus Crispy, if it’s not Artie MacStrawman saying that Macs are completely invulnerable, it’s Gates saying that they are having daily exploits. Who is lying now?

4) The doesn’t so much matter to me who invented the File/Edit/View/Help menu bar (which Microsoft is now removing in Office 2007). What matters to me is that in OS X I can go to any app and find my way around the menu bar. In many Windows apps, they have hidden those items so you have to know where to click to get menus.

Bill’s BS-O-Meter: 4 (3 plus a penalty of 1 for making such outrageously false claims after saying that Apple was lying).

[Newsweek:] Is this Vista launch the last hurrah of the big operating system?

[Gates:] Well, people have said that at every major Windows release. Java was going to eliminate Windows programming, or thin clients were going to eliminate people buying PCs. Operating systems keep getting better and richer, and they allow developers then to take advantage of that. We’re doing more innovation now at the operating system level than we’ve ever done. As we sit down and think, what are the things we’re going to do in the next release, there’s no shortage of radical things that will be happening in the operating system.

The only thing that has been forecast more is Apple’s death.

Oh Bill, a followup question: Please name 10 radical things in the operating system in XP and 10 in Vista. I mean, if there’s no shortage of them, surely some radical things have already been put into XP and Vista. Right? And new bundled software doesn’t count. I want operating system radicality.

[Newsweek:] So you feel in 2010-2011 Microsoft will be back with the next big one?

[Gates:] Absolutely. We’ll tell you how Vista just wasn’t good enough, and we’ll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don’t know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

Ok, first predication of next Microsoft OS: 2010-2011.

(I’m tempted to up the BS-O-Meter again, but heck that’s 3-4 years, they sure as heck ought to be able to hit that target. Right?)

[Newsweek:] So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like? [Gates:] Well, it will be more user-centric. [Newsweek:] What does that mean? [Gates:] That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services [a way to connect to Microsoft via the Internet] to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that’s kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable.

Wow, sorta like a thin client.

[Gates:] [Also,] in Vista things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won’t need textbooks, they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We’ll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we’ve got a pretty good outline.

OK, so with the next version of Windows, students will no longer need textbooks.

Sorry, but I’m upping the BS meter to 5 on that one.

[Newsweek:] With Xbox and Zune, Microsoft has adopted an end-to-end approach, where you write the software, design the hardware and run the services—

Like Apple has been doing for years. And people keep telling them to get out of the hardware side of things. Except that Microsoft has just gotten back into the hardware side of things. Huh.

[Newsweek:] Will Microsoft now change its mobile-phone strategy and adopt an end-to-end approach, the way Apple has with the iPhone?

[Gates:] No, I don’t think so. People like different styling, media storage, capability [in phones]. The benefit we get from having lots of great hardware partners is pretty phenomenal. And our software can run on any one of those things.

Where by “benefit” I mean “money” and by “run” I mean “crawl.”