We partly didn’t know what it was, and certainly what the press said it was wasn’t what we thought it was, but even what we thought it was we didn’t end up doing all of that.

Bill Gates, explaining to the Financial Times why his ‘Hailstorm’ project (in which users were going to entrust their personal data to Microsoft) bombed.

Gates was speaking to the RSA Security conference about a new Microsoft desktop security program which would protect people from phishing scams and eventually make Internet passwords passé.. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest on the same day, Microsoft released seven new security patches, including two rated “critical” for its products, and then had to fix one of the fixes after it failed to install correctly. Verily, you could not make this stuff up.