Please

Please

The Customer's Always Right... Right?

4 February 2007
Filed under Mac, Technology, Text

In yesterday’s Fireball, John Gruber looked at an interview Steven Levy did with Bill Gates for Newsweek, in which Gates makes some pretty surprising statements about the Mac, among them this extraordinary nugget:

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.

As the young people these days would say: “OMGWTF??!?!??” Or, in my own words, “ah… yeah.”

Quite aside from the Mac stuff, though, the thing that I was shocked by was Gates’s desperately defensive tone, which is in marked contrast to the hubris of his Apple counterpart. I was struck in particular by his response to Levy’s question about the next big Windows release:

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.

I don’t mean to attribute too much meaning to something said off the cuff, and nor do I wish to discount entirely the wisdom of consumers, but seriously…

Homer's Dream car

Views from the Floor

Chai says:

I wonder why the interviewer doesnt pick him up on such statements.

Neil D'Souza says:

It think it's a marketing game at best. It always has been with Apple and Microsoft. Apple has stepped up their game really well over the years.

As a multi-OS user myself, I'd give due to Apple for taking MS head on despite the fact that 90% users are windows. It's a story of David and Goliath.

Not tried the Vista yet, but security aside (time will tell) the whole OS is just a Hyundai under the hood.

I wonder where the Penguins are this time of the year?

Speak, friend, and enter


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