Мнение heritage american о Гейтсе и ИТ

Не помню где, недавно приходилось дискутировать на тему пользы Билла Гейтса для Америки и народа её населяющего.

Трудно посчитать все за и против, заслуги Билла Гейца известны, благодаря его продуктам страна смогла автоматизировать многие вещи и повысить производительность труда. Здесь есть проблема, про которую любит говорить Пракапович, производительность труда в эпоху Майкрософта росла, а вот доходы среднего класса -- нет. Все эти какбэ исчезнувшие профиты разделили между собой элиты западной цивилизации и страны третьего мира, такие как Китай и Индия.



Т.е., если верить этому графику, заслуги для простого американца нулевые. Разумеется, одно это можно рассматривать как предательство элитами их народов. Но увы, такие времена.

Но псто про другое, если "заслуги" Билла Гейца известны и видны в новостях, то труды в ущерб Америке известны мало, об этом немного разве что (в плане образования) пишет Стив Сайлер в своём бложеке.

Есть мнение, что Гейц деньги, отнятые у простого американца относительно честным способом, направил на нужды всего того, что принято в среде альт-райт называть "глобохомо". Емболденинг дисфункциональных миноритиз как в самих США (преимущественно через гранты на образование), так и в Африке, через борьбу за снижение детской смертности, гигиена там, прививки, учить их срать культурненько, чтобы говно потом в воду и пищу не попадало, вот это вот всё.

Привожу цитату целиком из обсуждения убитого продукта ISA/TMG на текнете:

> Hey Ballmer, can I run the show for a couple years? I've no education and no experience. I couldn't possibly make things worse :)

Priceless, and too true. Microsoft has made so many bad moves over the last 5 years it's just incredible. Very much a case of 'the emperor has no clothes'. But, they are also so large that they really can screw the pooch (and the customer) for a very long time before it ever really affects them.

I've often said, if Bill Gates really wants to be a humanitarian his first endeavor should be a return to Microsoft...his customers are really hurting and it's a clear case of needing humanitarian intervention.

But, and let's be clear, Microsoft has never operated from a sincere desire to serve their customers. Instead, they've always operated from a desire to obtain their customer's money.

This is why you get arbitrary decisions such as killing off TMG. They don't even think about (or care about) their installed client base or how this will effect them. Loyalty never factors into the equation. Their decision making process is strictly governed by what's best for them - that's it. It's a wholly selfish pursuit.

So if they 'see' another way forward that still enables them to get that loot (or more of it) they'll just arbitrarily change direction - without a thought to their customers.

In a real business customer satisfaction is key. As a result of that philosophy people are inspired to buy the company's products and tend to trust the company because they see that philosophy in action. This is not Microsoft and almost never has been. Make no mistake, it's gotten worse over the years since Gates left. When Gates was there you could always motivate him by ridiculing him in the press. So if/when Microsoft screwed up, the press would write up an article about it and Gates would immediately address the issue lest he look like an idiot. So, at least there were some checks and balances there.

I mean, to give you an example of just how screwed up Microsoft is, they can't even release a proper Service Pack for TMG 2010 that incorporates all their hotfixes and rollups. Why? They just don't care. They've also made it very hard to find any documentation on the proper install order etc. Why? They just don't care. They never updated the documentation for it, instead they routinely direct people to the ISA 2004 docs for TMG 2010. Why? They just don't care.

What you, as a paying customer, thinks or desires is never a part of their decision making process. It does not factor in at all.

It doesn't matter that you paid a gazillion dollars for TMG or that you implemented a major (and complex) large scale roll-out. Microsoft just woke up one morning and did what they always do, pulled the plug on it with no though to their clients whatsoever.

When NT Server 4 came out Microsoft wrote many articles mentioning how much better it was at Symmetric Multi-Processing then NT 3.51 was. I mean, entire 100 page white papers were written about it. People took them to task about it and the understanding was that it really wasn't much better. Still, Microsoft kept churning out white papers about how much better it was then 3.51. Why? To sell as many NT Server 4.0 licenses and upgrades as possible.

Just to be clear, Microsoft did everything possible to promote the 'far superior' SMP functionality in NT Server 4.0 even though the entire world knew it was BS.

What happened when Windows 2000 Advanced Server came out? Microsoft leaked a document showing how poorly NT Server 4.0's SMP functionality was. Why? To get people to buy/upgrade to Windows 2000 Advanced Server. They shot their own product down and took a public stance in the exact opposite direction of what they publicly maintained all along. No shame whatsoever.

It goes on and on. I still recall the whole mess of the service packs and feature upgrades that came out for NT Server 4.0 post RTM. It was such a mess that Gates himself issued a mandate that no new product functionality would ever be included in a service pack again and that every service pack, from here to eternity, would be cumulative. This was a smart thing to do, it was learned from the challenging programmatic experience of trying to support a hodgepodge of hotfixes, rollups etc.

What do you have today? The exact same mess. Just try to figure out what order to install the Service Packs and hotfixes for TMG in. Even worse, Microsoft's own documentation for the hotfixes contradict themselves. On the one hand, they say no prerequisites and on the other, they list prerequisites. In the end, the only smart way to do a new TMG 2010 install is to install all the service packs and hotfixes as they were released - in that order.

Why the mess when Microsoft could easily incorporate everything into a single service pack? Because they don't care. Get this through your head, Microsoft does not care about you, their customer. They never really have although it was better when Gates was there.

The shame of it is that this dollars-first philosophy (and the customer be damned) has rewarded Gates financially. Unfortunately, his success in this manner has served to spread this philosophy to any/all businesses in general - to the detriment of business everywhere.

It was Gates who really taught people how to break up a product and make more money by selling it's individual components. It was Gates who met with Ballmer late one night and discussed how to drive the stock price down so that he could buy out Paul Allen. This is a fact, it's been broadcast on TV and Paul Allen has publicly spoken about this. Gates was an incredibly ruthless person - period. He killed many businesses on his rise to the top and he never lost sleep over any of it. That should tell you something about his character and the company.

It was Gates who taught everyone about outsourcing to India. Let's be really clear on that one. What's the state of the world's economy? Pretty darn bad. Do you think all this outsourcing that Gates invented, and proudly promoted to everyone, has had a positive impact on the US? Not a chance, The US has never been in such a mess before in it's life and a great deal of that mess has been created by the very same outsourcing that Gates so 'brilliantly' and aggressively promoted to everyone.

Just so we're clear on that, whenever you call into any large company and get a poor connection to someone with poor English skills, who doesn't really know what they are taking about at all, you can thank Bill Gates for creating the perception that outsourcing is such a wonderful thing.

It is for the company, it's not for the country.

Just last night he was on 60 minutes explaining how he was going to eradicate several 3rd world diseases. Nice. Great stuff, but from my view, it very much seems to me to be a case of a man who beats and robs a person of all their money, on a recurring basis if at all possible, and then elects to spend it on something he deems valid. Should we thank him for that? That's a moral/ethical judgment that I can't make but I do wonder about it often.

I mean, really, if I stole all the money from all the banks in the world and then decided to give it away does that make me a hero? Of course not. It came at the cost of an awful lot of people. It's worth noting that his wife assured everyone in last night's interview that he does actually have a heart. She wouldn't have married him if he didn't. That's good to know because if one really looks closely at Microsoft and it's actions one begins to wonder!

Microsoft's strategy has always been to own the entire market such that everyone is forced into buying their product. It really isn't by choice anymore. Yet Microsoft's defense against anti-trust regulation was that they needed to be 'free to innovate'. It really does remind one of Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler's need for 'breathing room' :)

Seriously, when you look at the big picture, what did Microsoft's pioneering work in outsourcing to India do for the US economy when you factor in all the other companies that followed suit and outsourced to China? It was Gates who really taught us these 'tricks' and showed us just how profitable they could be. But at what cost to our own countries? The US is effectively bankrupt. Nothing is being made in the USA anymore. Instead, everyone is pulling a 'gates' and squeezing the customer for the every last dollar they have, preferably on a recurring annual basis.

This truly gives new meaning to the words 'paying the Bill'.

On the one hand you have this huge self-centered money sucking business (Microsoft) designed to lock in and suck as much money out of you as possible, and on the other, you have this huge money giving enterprise (the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation) where the lion's share of the money comes from what they could effectively steal from the general public.

Maybe it's just me, but usually you have to vote for that level of authority. Should Gates go down in history as one of the great humanitarians of all time? I don't know. I really don't. But no analyses would be complete without a full understanding of how he got that money in the first place and much of that was through wholly unscrupulous business behavior. I mean, really, really ruthless stuff.

One thing I know for certain, Microsoft, as a company, has always needed a heart. They just don't have one. When Gates was there, I would see traces of it. With him gone, it's much, much worse. But, like Gates said in his interview, I don't mow the lawn either. I really think that's how he views Microsoft. His vision is extraordinary. What you/they now call 'the cloud' is what he called Application Service Providing more then a decade ago. So he's probably very much in a place of having to wait for his vision to come to pass (it could not sooner for various technical reasons such as bandwidth) but make no mistake, what that ultimate vision is is this, you never buy a CD with the software on it, you just rent it per use and run it off the Internet. Thus, he has the ultimate efficient machine to continue that recurring revenue stream while at the same time reducing operational costs to the lowest and most efficient manner. ie. Maximize the income and minimize the outgo.

What does this all mean? It's great for him but I can't help but wonder where the middle class went in America in this grand design? There's a lot to this issue and, as mentioned, it really comes back to the fact that normally you have to vote for someone to give them that power. On the other hand, we voted with our pocketbooks over the years although the Gates 'stranglehold' really has made it much less of a choice....

But muh free market and private business, lol.

Чтобы два раза не вставать, по этому вопросу знаменитый спич Такера Карлсона про то, что экономика должна служить народу, но не наоборот.

"Tucker: Leaders show no obligation to American voters" (Watch on YouTube)

Когда-то, лет 10 назад, глядючи на это из эрэфии йа недоумевал, как же так. Ну, в основном, потому что читал всякие говнолистки типа Нью Йорк Таймс или Вашингтон Псто, где, разумеется, об этом почти не пишут (разве что в качестве упреждающих "объяснений", ггг).