[I, user.]

Bill Gates gets schooled in Chess, beaten by 23 year old grandmaster In 71 seconds.

Excellent point:

It is critical that HotHardware place Bill Gates "brilliance" in it's correct perspective, that of exceptional business acumen in corralling the major PC hardware manufacturers in late 1990s into contracts that proved draconian in not allowing any other operating systems (OS) pre or post install on every computer manufactured other than Microsoft Windows.

This one particular maneuver, and not any technological aspects of Windows or any software out of Microsoft was the genius of Bill Gates, which helped propel the company and himself to great wealth and total dominance and control of the computer PC marketplace.

Therefore it should not come as a surprise that Mr. Gates legal "brilliance" is not transferable to either Chess or technological innovation.

BIll_Gates_Chess.jpg (57.97 KiB) Viewed 3432 times

[TmEE]

I would get hammered just as quick lol. I barely know chess lol.

[Steven W]

I've been mulling this over and if you read some of my post, you'll know that I certainly hate what Microsoft has become. Gates does deserve some kudos for intelligence. Don't forget he is more or less on the sidelines at MS today. Let's also not forget his past accomplishments. He wrote the basic interpreter for the Altair. He licensed basic to all sorts of folks back in the day. I remember my TRS-80 Color Computer used Basic licensed from MS. I'd say the smartest move he ever made was his licensing arrangement for DOS on the IBM PC. Yes, I know that Mr. Paterson is mostly responsible for DOS. Be that as it may, Gates maintaining rights to sell DOS to competitors was brilliant. I think younger folks tend to forget that IBM was huge in those days (early '80s). In those days serious businesses demanded IBM PCs. When other companies started making PCs, they needed to be IBM compatible. That's what customers demanded. They wanted the software they already had to run on new machines. So if you think about it, the "clones" essentially needed to be MS-DOS compatible. By the late '80s/early '90s IBM began realizing that they had erred in not only licensing the OS to Microsoft, but also allowing MS to license to others. IBM's attempted remedy was to be OS/2. IBM was getting help with OS/2 from MS, while MS was also working on Windows. I never did quite follow the logic there. Anyway, Gates also deserves credit for essentially knowing when give up with IBM, although that may not have entirely been his choice. MS was still the relatively small, agile company made up of computer nerds/hackers then too. To give you some idea of what IBM was then -- I remember seeing an interview with Steve Ballmer where he spoke of IBM only being concerned with KLOCS (maybe K-LOCS), or thousands of lines of code. I think this is what they were wanting to base Microsoft's pay on.

Perhaps that's MS's problem now; they've gotten too big. Too much like what Steve Ballmer was mocking in that interview.

[!]

Indeed, they are exactly like International Business Machines Corporation now and that's correct, I.B.M. payed per 1000 lines of code. The more lines you wrote, the more you got paid. LOL! Idiots.

Now, years later, businesses require I.B.M. Microsoft compatibility because their old software must keep running on newers machines. Even though Microsoft did try to keep backward compatibility, they forgot about the Internet and that many applications are now "Web-based". By alienating their developers more and more with lock downs similar to Apple and crazy shit like killing Silverlight and XNA, the developers are moving to Android and/or platform independent technology.

Which in probably will mean that Microsoft will be as relevant as I.B.M. is today in maybe 10 years from now. They will still exist but mostly on the business side. Ironically, they are killing off a lot of developer jobs with their other products. For example Microsoft Dynamics AX has killed my job. They are upgrading to it and once it is in place, I will no longer be employed because there wouldn't be a need for an in-house developer anymore.

On the user side ("consumer side", I hate that word), there is SteamOS so many games will be made by things like Unity3D which makes your game run on iOS, OSX, Android, Windows, SteamOS and even inside a browser.

Basically, by introducing Windows 8.x, they started the job of killing themselves much earlier by waking up even the most "hardcore 'MS fanboy' developers" which were on their camp for a looong time. People like me who never even dreamed of touching Linux are now jumping ship by the thousand.

If I make a game, it will be with stuff like Unity3D and if I use their .NET technology on server-side, I will make sure that what I build will be in a way to enable me to leave that platform within 30-60 days.

They (Microsoft and any big corporation) can all fuck off.

hammer-and-nail_web.jpg (38.27 KiB) Viewed 3420 times

Ps. The picture isn't a blur bastard. It visualizes the speed of the falling hammer so in this case, blur is OK. Hehe