Wonderful The Rudiments of Wisdom Cartoon Encyclopedia created by Tim Hunkin.
Microsoft’s farewell to Gates
From a a report of yesterday’s farewell event…
Gates waited behind a black curtain, arms crossed and pacing, as Ballmer introduced him. He walked in to a standing ovation, grinning, and introduced his wife, Melinda, and his children in the audience. He talked about the company’s history, including the “David and Goliath” battle against IBM, saying with a smile that he thinks that story came out the right way. He talked about the competitive landscape, saying that he thinks it’s still right for the company to focus on software.
“We have so many opportunities to surprise people,” he said.
He acknowledged that it won’t be easy to move on, given how natural it has become for him to work at the company over the past three decades. Sometimes, when he’s driving his children, Gates said, “If I forget and start thinking about work a little, I start driving to Microsoft. They say, ‘Dad, dad, what are we going to do at Microsoft?’ ”
[…]
Asked about his biggest mistake, Gates said the key thing in software is to accurately anticipate new bends in the road. He said Microsoft was ahead of the curve in areas like the graphical user interface, but he also acknowledged that it has been behind in other areas, such as Internet search and advertising: “When we miss a big change and we don’t get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us,” Gates said. “It’s happened many times. It’s OK, but the less the better.”
The real Bill Gates
Lest we get overcome by the warm bath of nostalgia engulfing Microsoft’s departing co-founder, here’s a a useful reminder of what it was like dealing with him. It’s an extended recollection by a Zilog executive for whom Gates wrote some buggy Z80 compiler code in 1979/80.
“After a couple of weeks of calling and getting the same message from Gates, I finally pulled out the listing and went through it. It was terrible code. Sloppy, poorly documented and generally not something that I would have allowed my developers to send out the door. But that was all I had, so I spent a few days going through it and finding the errors that appeared to be causing the troubles with the tests. I then called Bill again and explained what I had done and where would he like me to send a copy of the corrections.
“He didn’t want them, as he could fix it himself! I went ahead and told him the areas that needed to be modified, but he became more and more belligerent as I went through the changes. He said, again, that he’d look into it. I seem to have hit a nerve there as I believe that I mentioned, more than once, what a crappy piece of code this was.
“After that whenever I would call, Bill and I ended up shouting at one another over these modifications. After a total of about 3 months of calling at least once a week I finally gave up and went to our company lawyer. His solution was quite simple — Call Mr. Gates one last time and present him with the name and phone number of our lawyer and tell Gates that the lawyer would be calling him the next week. I did this (quite calmly as Bill began our conversation shouting at me) and told him that I wouldn’t be calling him again.
“We had the patched and working code before the lawyer ever got around to calling him the next week. Seems I was an early recipient of the Microsoft Business Model.”
Grateful deadheads
Sign of the times?
Seen in a Post Office window.
Holy smoke
Well, as James Miller (who spotted it) says, you couldn’t make this up.
Police have forced London Mayor Boris Johnson to hand over a cigar case belonging to Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.
The ex-MP, who obtained the red leather case from Mr Aziz’s bombed-out home while visiting Iraq as a journalist in 2003, said the situation was “stupid”.
He said: “The police have no choice but to investigate this ludicrous affair.”
Under the Iraq (UN Sanctions) Order 2003, anyone possessing Iraqi cultural property must give it to the police.
Mr Johnson deposited the case into custody on Monday afternoon, following instructions from the police…
Dubya’s energy policy
Thomas Friedman is annoyed.
Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”
Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”
Hmmm… And Gordon Brown’s energy is significantly better, is it?
On this day…
… in 1948 the Soviet Union cut off food supplies to the Western sectors of Berlin and the Berlin Airlift began.
I Google, therefore I forget
This morning’s Observer column…
To judge from the volume of commentary that has followed his article, Carr has touched a nerve. He was ‘flooded with emails and blog posts from people saying that my struggles with deep reading and concentration mirror their own experiences’. Various über-bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Jon Udell and Bill Thompson took up the theme, adding their own twists. And prominent newspaper columnists such as Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald) and Margaret Wente (Toronto Globe & Mail) also revealed their private fears that addiction to cyberspace, and online media generally were, in fact, rotting their brains.
What’s surprising in a way is that people should be surprised by this. The web, after all, was designed by a chap (Tim Berners-Lee) who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things. Add powerful search engines to what he created and you effectively have a global memory-prosthesis. Who won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1904? Google will find it in a flash – and remind you that the race that year was run on 16 June, which is also the day in which all the action takes place in James Joyce’s Ulysses. What was the name of Joyce’s father? A quick Google search turns up the DNB entry, which reveals all. And what was the name of the woman who proved to be Parnell’s downfall? Ah yes, here it is: Kitty O’Shea… and so it goes on.
The combination of powerful search facilities with the web’s facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr’s powers of concentration…
End of an era
From CNN
Steve Ballmer was sobbing. He repeatedly tried to speak and couldn’t get the words out. Minutes passed as he tried to regain his composure. But the audience of 130 of Microsoft’s senior leaders waited patiently, many of them crying too. They knew that the CEO was choked up because this executive retreat, held in late March at a resort north of Seattle, was the last ever for company co-founder Bill Gates, as well as for Jeff Raikes, one of the company’s longest-tenured executives. “I’ve spent more time with these two human beings than with anyone else in my life,” Ballmer finally said. “Bill and Jeff have been my North Star and kept me going. Now I’m going to count on all of you to be there for me.”
Aw, shucks.