Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads

fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that '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.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."

Exploits on Vista?

[soapbox]

I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.'

Yeah, there's one this month [eweek.com].

also here. [indiatimes.com]

Gruber

[Anonymous Coward]

Great write up at Daring Fireball already: http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/lies_damned_lies _and_bill_gates [daringfireball.net]

Re:Well, of course he's saying that.

[GogglesPisano]

I assume he's referring to the Month of Apple Bugs [info-pull.com]

Re:upgrading

[ender-iii]

Have you ever seen a how a Mac desktop case opens? How all the cables are out of the way for easy upgrading? Seriously... what are you talking about?

Re:upgrading

[fohat]

Actually, you can upgrade most if not all the non integrated componants in the new intel Macs. Even the CPU on the new Minis can be upgraded, whereas before it was soldered iirc.

Re:Well, of course he's saying that.

[rudegeek]

He needs to keep the boxes moving out the door. It's all promo anyway.

Well, MS will "sell" Vista thanks to Dell, HP and other OEMs.

I haven't heard about all those Mac exploits he's referring to, have you?

OSX ships with a dozen of thord part apps like PHP, Apache and Ruby (IIRC, my experience with OSX is very limited) and I've seen some security alerts regarding all of them since last release of OSX. I bet you could find some local exploits in them. Anyway, MS talking about exploits is a "pot calling kettle black". But no, I haven't hear about some nasty, transforming-to-botnets viruses for OSX.

Re:upgrading

[Anonymous Coward]

odd then how my wife's 8-year-old iBook runs the latest version of OS X.

Sidebar is 13 years old

[kindbud]

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, show them the Sidebar...

Sidebar, new Windows interface from Quarterdeck [findarticles.com]
Newsbytes News Network, April 6, 1994

Sidebar is delivered on a single floppy disk, takes up less than 1 megabyte (MB) of hard disk storage space, and less than 300 kilobytes (K) of random access memory (RAM). It also fits on the right edge of the computer's display to take up as little screen space as possible.

Quarterdeck has exclusive license of Sidebar from Paper Software of Woodstock, New York. Paper Software originally distributed the product on a try-before-you-buy basis as shareware, then Quarterdeck licensed it, made significant changes, and is now shipping the product. The suggested list price is $59.95.

Yeah, cool new idea there, Bill.

Re:upgrading

[kebes]

I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.

(I'm not saying I particularly approve of the Apple ads, but I don't think your comments about having to throw out apple hardware are particularly fair.)

Re:upgrading

[Anonymous Coward]

I use OS X (10.3.9) on a 5 year old clamshell. And it runs pretty well.

If I had _the next revision_ that has firewire, I could use Tiger (or I could hack it).

Now, I know that OS X (10.1) is as old as XP, but OS X Panther can be compared with ease to Vista.

Re:Dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

At that point, I wondered how long it'd be before someone did it (NEVER challenge an attacker). I think it was just a few months before it happened.

Oh yeah, good point. Wait a minute... What happened? There's a Mac OS X virus now?

Oh right, there isn't.

Re:ring ring

[ReverendLoki]

Sorry bud, GP got it right. MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America [wikipedia.org], while RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America [wikipedia.org].

I'd say he's running scared.....

[8127972]

.... Given his reaction when questioned about the look of Vista by Miles O'Brien of CNN:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/bill-gates/does-bill-ga tes-always-say-no-no-no-when-he-hears-os-x-232750. php [gizmodo.com]

and his "performance" on The Daily Show:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/the-daily-show/bill-gat es-tells-jon-stewart-why-he-should-buy-vista-yes-i t-was-as-boring-as-this-headline-232403.php [gizmodo.com]

I'd say that Bill is a bit scared that Vista will flop, or worse, people will just buy a Mac.

Re:Well, of course he's saying that.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bill. I thought you were an uber-hacker."

Ha, after watching these DOJ testimony tapes of Bill Gates [iowaconsumercase.org], you could conclude he doesn't know a thing about what his company was doing, what e-mail was sent to him or what the definition of an operating system is to name a few. Watch Bill dance around even the most simplest questions trying to spin his company in a favorable light.

Four Apple bugs in a month, when looking!!

[SuperKendall]

The MOAB actually only came up with three or four Apple bugs, the rest were in third party software that also applied under Linux and Windows!

The most serious exploit (Quicktime) could only be replicated by one in sixty people, and that was when RUNNING A CUSTOM EXECUTABLE LOCALLY, generating the attack file from the binaries on your computer - again, which only worked for one in sixty people.

Ridiculous. Now we know exactly what projects like MOAB lead to, idiocy at the highest levels of the executive quarter.

Re:upgrading, Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's not the argument.

The argument is that to run Vista properly, you need to upgrade your computer, whereas with a Mac you don't need to upgrade at all.

The latest version of Mac OS X will run just fine on a five year old Mac. In fact, it will run vastly better than the version of OS X that came with it. Sure you may be envious of your friends with their quad-core machines, but in terms of what you can do with the hardware you bought, you can keep upgrading the software and get improved performance out of it.

I'm sure you can run Vista on a PC from 2002, but will it be usable? Will it be faster than the OS that it shipped with? How many of those expensive new features you're paying for will actually work?

Upgrading a PC is definitely harder than not upgrading a Mac. I know, I've done both.

Re:upgrading

[qwertphobia]

Yep... mine was used as a server when it was purchased. It's still aa server, but just for a test environment.

You may have found different information, but the first search I came across listed the PowerEdge 2400 at a price of $8,994 in June of 2001. This G4 was $3199 in July of 2000 from what I could find.

Your comparison is not quite equivalent, but I wasn't comparing price in my comments, just timeframes of technology.

Re:upgrading

[be-fan]

When OS X 10.3 (Panther) discontinued support for the Beige G3s, the line was six years old and had been discontinued for four. It makes sense that Apple chose to abandon support for a line of machines that wouldn't have run the new OS acceptably anyway.

Linux can get away with supporting ancient hardware because, well, because they don't actually have to support it. Nobody calls up the GNOME foundation complaining that 2.16 crawls on their PIII-450 with 256MB of RAM. In comparison, Apple actually has to live up to the specifications they outline on the box.

Re:Mac Exploits?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I also believe that *most* of the MoAB exploits that have been reported are not because of holes in 3rd party software, not the OS itself. Someone correct me if I'm wrong (I dare you!).

25-30% of the bugs reported by MoAB were in third party applications. A goodly number of them were local overflows or DoS on some service, which by themselves would result in little or no risk. At least one of them seemed to be the same issue (.dmg validation) stretched out for several days. A handful of them have real potential for widespread exploitation via a worm, virus, or Web site.

Re:upgrading, Huh?

[be-fan]

I don't think the argument is that PC hardware upgrades are easier than hardware upgrades on the Mac, but rather that Vista requires very substantial hardware upgrades while Leopard won't. Each release of OS X tends to be faster than the previous one, on the same hardware (though they usually use more memory). Tiger runs perfectly fine on a circa-2001 PowerMac G4 (composited windows and all), and so will Leopard. Meanwhile, Vista is going to crawl on a circa-2001 Athlon XP with a Geforce 2, and won't do Aero Glass on that machine at all.

To put a sharper point on it, Apple's upgrade cycle is very gradual, and very incremental. They release a new major version every year or two. Each new version obsoletes a couple of the oldest supported models, and breaks a minor number of applications. An upgrade is generally not very traumatic. Meanwhile, Vista is being released half a decade after its predecessor. It's instantly obsoleting a huge amount of hardware, and breaking a lot of applications in the process.

Re:Truth or Dare?

[pestilence669]

When I used to be employed to write adware, we did this at least once a day. I shit you not.

You just can't hide running processes as well as you can on Windows. No other operating system offers so many diverse methods to run executable code as a privileged user. Believe me when I say: Exploiting Windows is like stealing candy from a baby.

Re:The ad I'd like to see . . .

[Ford Prefect]

Apple is ragging on PC - the usual story - and in the middle, up walks a red demon and a penguin who PC introduces as his "brothers".

Aww, bless. It's almost as if you don't realise that Mac OS X's Darwin is derived from FreeBSD [wikipedia.org].

I'd show you the output from uname -a and a listing of the files in /etc, but my MacBook Pro is currently running Windows XP. For PC games stuff, no less. It's quite a speedy Half-Life 2 machine!

Re:Well, of course he's saying that.

[Kadin2048]

It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default, and most users will never change that. I don't even think that OS X ships with sshd running by default. It's a very minimalist configuration, in terms of enabled services.

It's not a totally fair comparison; saying that some of the installed software on Mac OS X has vulnerabilities, is like saying, if you turn off Windows' firewall, and run these services, you can get rooted. Well, duh, in both cases. What's really important is the default configuration, (or the 'minimal configuration necessary to get real work done') because that's what 90% of users will ever have running.

Re:Not a fan of the ads

[tfreport]

Exactly right. My parents are not the most savvy tech people - they call at least once a month to me at work with computer questions. The ads appeal to them, my dad has even started asking whether he should get a Mac. Why? Because he has the experience of the computer not "talking" with the new camera that he purchased or wanting to do a simple slide show of his recent trip to Hawaii. Those are things he knows others do on their computer and he cannot understand why he is not able to. It is to him that the Mac ads are so simple and so appealing.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates

[LKM]

Gates' claims are so absurd, they're not really worth refuting. So instead I'll go to bed and let Gruber do the job. [daringfireball.net]

Good night.

Re:Well, of course he's saying that.

[47Ronin]

It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default

Actually, NONE of it is turned on by default.

Re:Is Gates wrong, or lying?

[ak3ldama]

I don't care to refute everything you say, but my older computer could run vista. It's a 1.6Ghz (AMD 1900+ XP) with 1Gb of ram and 2x40GB hard drives which clearly fits the bill. (The video card is also DX9 capable with 128MB ram, but that was a previously upgraded component.) It is about 5 years old. According to the all knowing and never wrong wikipedia the cpu was released [wikipedia.org] on November 5, 2001. I don't remember but it might be the Thoroughbred core, in which case my point is completely incorrect. Not that I care, Vista isn't coming close to my computers. For my uses Linux is just fine, and in the future I'll only consider OS X and Linux. Non-the-less there are definitely 3 and 5 year old computers that are capable of running Vista; whether they should is a different answer.

As for your other points you're definitely correct. Billy G was talking out of his lower orifice, although to the uneducated he may have sounded reputable.

PC: Why must you say these hurtful things, Mac?

[jdbartlett]

I'm certain he was referring to MoAB. My OS X setup is unaffected by the majority of MoAB "bugs"; as you said, many rely on third party apps (and therefore aren't really "Apple" bugs at all). That's not the only reason Mr. Gates can rightly be accused of a lie: "every day"? As in "every single day" since a particular date? MoAB had a hard time stretching a full month out of the few security flaws they were able to find in Apple's software, but a full year? And given the restriction of operating system (Tiger) bugs ONLY?

I was opposed to the MoAB project because I thought it irresponsible. I would say the same of YoAB (Year of...) but my hat would come off to anyone who could accomplish

Gates lied about several other things in this interview, even contradicting himself: he claims he hasn't seen the Get A Mac campaign ads (which are broadcast during some of America's most popular prime time television shows) but knows full well what sort of creature Apple paints Microsoft Windows to be.

Apple has done more than they could hope for with their Get A Mac campaign: they've really really pushed Bill's new Aero-skinned captionless Start button.

Re:4 TEH WIN!

[Jherek Carnelian]

And before the "Apple stole from Xerox" comments start, they actually hired a bunch of the Xerox folks who then went to work on the Mac.

So you are saying that Apple stole the people with the ideas instead of just the ideas?

According to the infallible wikipedia [wikipedia.org] Xerox actually sued Apple over the UI design. The case was thrown out due to the statute of limitations having expired, so legally we will never know.

Re:4 TEH WIN!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA you quoted:

"In retrospect, this turned out to be a good idea, for around 1974, PARC was able to raid the nearby Augmentation Research Center (founded by Douglas Engelbart) for some of its most talented personnel. It also helped that Engelbart's funding from DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force was drying up around the same time."

So I wouldn't exactly give Xerox the moral/suing high ground here.

Re:ring ring

[Emperor Cezar]

NSFW

Re:Is Gates wrong, or lying?

[MacDaffy]

Apple might not have had DLL hell, but they had an extension hell with pre-OS X that, according to Mac people that used it that long ago, was a pain. This was fixed with OS X.

This isn't accurate. I can think of VERY few extension conflicts in Apple extensions. There was an extensive integration and compatibility group to make sure of it. There could be plenty of problems with the mix of Apple and third-party extensions, but resolving them wasn't "hell"...usually.

A user could boot with the shift key held down, turning off all extensions. Then, a search of the preferences folder by date modified would often turn up the offending extension or control panel. You could boot into the Extensions Manager by holding down the SPACE bar. Then, you could either choose a basic Mac OS extension-control panel set or a full Apple-only set. If your machine crashed after booting from that, you could eliminate extensions until the problem was isolated. There was also an application called Conflict Catcher that also helped with the situation.

The best way to solve extension hell? If you just installed something and your machine starts crashing, uninstall it. Inconvenient, but hardly "hell." And it was WAAAAY easier than resolving DLL problems.

Re:Speaking of misleading...

[bryan1945]

"Apple for using DRM on iTunes because they are assuming you are going to be a criminal and file share your downloads."

This would be mostly because the RIAA companies required it. As for independent artists, I don't know (I don't use iTunes), but if they are also DRM'd then I agree that's wrong (unless the artist asks for the DRM).

Just sayin' because a lot of people here seem to think Apple hoisted DRM on iTunes just for the fun of it.

Re:Has the media has woken up?

[mgiuca]

Well.....I think that Newsweek is really mainstream....

Yeah, I guess so. I was commenting on the mainstream media I've seen in Australia (in print newspapers and TV), as opposed to what I read online.

But also this interview, even if it is printed, is really not asking the tough questions - Gates is left essentially in the clear after making potentially quite libelous statements.

Re:4 TEH WIN!

[gig]

It was weird he went all Xerox PARC when the question with Vista is the skin. The Windows logo has been ensconced in glassy bubble that is such a Mac OS X wannabe that it's a self-parody ... the very Windows logo has been made to look Mac-like. The swoopy desktop pictures are too much just by themselves, although I heard them defend that by saying that they got all the desktop pictures from third-parties ... so it is not actually Microsoft that did the off ripping. And the "parental controls" feature he keeps saying is a first is in Tiger, released in 2005. It is really weird to hear him say they are first with these things when they are clearly not.

Apple not only hired people from PARC and gave them a chance to make real products out of their ideas, Apple also paid Xerox with pre-IPO Apple stock. When Apple went public, Xerox made millions and millions and that was what Xerox wanted. The very reason they had the CEO of Apple and his computer design team touring around the Palo Alto Research Center was because they didn't know how to make any money from the stuff they had there. They were like a motorcycle company who came up with a cool concept car and didn't know what to do so they called the local car company CEO to come down and see if they couldn't get him to take the car project forward. He said, yeah, I like this, I'll hire the team and compensate you with stock and everybody was happy.

When you read the list of GUI features that were developed AFTER that, solely by Apple, at Apple, and for Apple products, it is embarrassing to think about anyone trying to take Apple down a notch with the Xerox PARC story. Just in the 1980's Apple invented and shipped drag and drop, the clipboard cut/copy/paste, the double-click, the pull-down menu, overlapping windows, marquee selections (marching ants), the little box of painting tools like you see in Photoshop, files-and-folders, proportional fonts, WYSIWYG, the Trash, keyboard shortcuts for menus, File-Edit-View, a system menu full of shortcuts (Apple menu/Start menu), little hardware controls in the corner of the screen. The other day I saw a screenshot of System 6 and I was stunned at how much like Mac OS X it looked.

The only stuff I know that Microsoft has contributed to GUI science is the little curly arrow they put on shortcuts, which is a classic innovation in that you see that on every system now ... the soft links or aliases or shortcuts have the little curly arrow. Also, using a modifier key plus Tab to cycle through running applications started on Windows and is everywhere else now. That's not much for 20 years of MS Windows.

Re:Those Ads ARE Misleading

[porcupine8]

I have a Fuji Finepix 2600. I've never had an issue hooking it up to a Mac - it just appears as an external drive on the desktop. Or, if I want, iPhoto opens up and takes care of it for me (but I don't like iPhoto much).

This Christmas, I tried to hook it up to either my mom's Dell laptop or my brother's HP desktop. Neither one had drivers for it, neither one could find any drivers for it when I let it do whatever wizard-thing it tried to do. I finally had to find them online myself, download them, run the program to install them *twice*, and then it would finally recognize my camera.

The odd thing is, I think I've hooked my camera up to my mom's laptop before with no problems. But since then it's had a couple viruses and a couple reformats, so I guess whatever drivers it had got lost along the way. That's also not an issue on my Mac.

Re:File, edit, view, help?

[agathezol]

I'm seeing File/Edit/View in the very first version of Mac OS.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/3.html [kernelthread.com]