Microsoft’s Bill Gates Hoof in Mouth disease

Bart Leetch

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Microsoft’s Bill Gates Hoof in Mouth disease

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates
reportedly compared the computer industry with the
auto industry and stated "if GM had kept up with the
technology like the computer industry has, we would
all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the
gallon."


In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued
a press release stating: If GM had developed
technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving
cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash
twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road,
you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for
no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of
the road, close all of the car windows, shut it off,
restart it, and re-open the windows before you could
continue. For some reason you would simply accept
this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left
turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to
restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the
engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless
you bought "CarNT" but then you would have to buy more
seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the
sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as
easy to drive- but would only run on five percent of
the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning
lights would all be replaced by a single "General
Protection Fault" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same
sized butt.

9. The airbag system would ask "are you SURE?" before
deploying.

10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car
would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you
simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key
and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a
deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM
subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want
them. Attempting to delete this option would
immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by
50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for
investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers
would have to learn to drive all over again because
none of the controls would operate in the same manner
as the old car.

13. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the
engine off.
 
Just want to point out that this is not current. That statement from Bill Gates goes quite a ways back - in fact, the COMDEX trade show which used to bring 250,000 people to Las Vegas doesn't exist anymore - the last one was in 2003. I don't remember when Bill Gates made that presentation but it was quite a bit before 2003. The riposte was created shortly after he made the presentation.

I attended COMDEX every year for many, many years. In the beginning the hotel rooms were cheap but the hotel people quickly caught on that people who can do mathematics don't gamble - towards the end we were paying over $300/night. But in reality, we didn't have time to gamble. The show opened at maybe 9am for the exhibitors and closed at maybe 5 or 6pm. Then, we'd have private parties for buyers in a suite at a hotel. And anyone who thinks those parties were fun needs to experience one some time - they were quite serious business "parties". By the time those were over, all you had time to do was fall into bed and start over the next day.

I saw Las Vegas go from a relatively elegant town to a Disneyland-like environment where you wait in line for EVERYTHING, including going to the bathroom. Miserable town - I just refuse to go there now.

How far the PC business has fallen!!

Mike
 
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I recently hard a story about hoof and mouth disease in Britain on the radio, but, driving at the time, initially heard "Britain's latest outbreak of foot in mouth disease" and was waiting to hear something about how one of Britain's gov't said something completely stupid.
 
The reference to NT would, I think, date this to sometime around the spring of '96... ;)

Boy, we're all getting on in years, aren't we... ;)

Remember the days when Macs actually existed? Now Apple just slaps its label on a wintel chip, and runs linux on it. Pretty soon, we'll be looking at solaris people the way others look at people who use planes and handsaws in their shops! ;)

Thaks,

Bill
(who still remembers how to go to SU, and can even remember how to do some things in vi ;)
 
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As I am forced to still support an ancient home-brew app that uses VI as a text entering mechanism, I would have to object to any statement that implies it is a text editor or even resembles one :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
 
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