[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!! (Andrew Halliwell)

[John Winters]

> I'm sorry and I'll probably have millions of people shooting at me for
> this
> comment BUT - If it wasn't for Bill Gates PC's would not be as they are
> today, he is responsible for bringing computers to the masses.

Hardly.  Firstly, they are not Bill Gates's PCs.  The PC as we know it was
brought to us by IBM and Bill Gates initially just hung onto IBM's coat
tails amassing a lot of money.  Since then he's carried on with much the
same strategy.  He's pinched ideas right left and centre and used them to
make lots and lots of money.

Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company - the software is more
or less incidental.  They put a lot of marketing money into projecting the
image of innovation, but they've produced practically nothing innovative. 
The PC revolution would undoubtedly have happened even if Bill Gates had
never been born.  Without such an insatiable parasite hooked onto it it
might also have been quite a lot better.

> And
> without
> cheap and readily available Intel x86 computers where would Linux be
> today?

Bill Gates is responsible for neither Intel processors, nor commodity PCs.

John

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