Bill Gates Rants; Apple Rocks

It seems like Bill Gates had something to get off of his puny, nerdy chest the other day. He attacked Mac's OS X's security system, Apple's "Get a Mac" ad campaign, and the idea that many of Vista's features are already available in Mac OS X.

For an interview designed to promote Microsoft's new Vista OS and Office 2007, he spent a lot of time talking about the competition. One of the cardinal rules from my old sales days was never bring up the competition unless the customer does, never vilify the competition, promote your own product and services. Apparently, Bill chose to play offence.

Mr. Gates started off the interview by touting security features in Vista. Providing a robust security foundation was even offered as a reason for having left out many of the features originally planned for Vista.

Translation: It could have been a lot cooler but we were thinking of you (the consumer) That's funny -- Mac is able to provide rock solid security without having to give up the "cool" stuff.

"We made it way harder for guys to do exploits," said Mr. Gates. "The number [of exploits] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things."

Translation: No, Apple hasn't done any of those things because they haven't needed to.

Further Translation: Microsoft needed to because their security was like a leaking sieve.

In another portion of the interview, he added, "Nowadays, 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."

Translation: Gates is referring to a nasty hacker's contest called "Month of Apple Bugs" where they supposedly found a way to hack through Mac's security each day of the month of January. Many of the hacks were through third party software and every one of them were addressed and fixed by the next day. Despite this competition, there are no Mac viruses in the wild.

Further Translation: "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." Pretty big talk for a company that has an entire industry built around maintaining Microsoft's security. And this includes the new Vista. Otherwise what are McAfee, Norton, etc. doing out there?

Bill Gates seemed to have the most pent up anger when it comes to the "Get a Mac" ads that shows PC as needing to undergo major surgery in order to upgrade to Vista.

Mr. Gates said, "I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are."

That "somebody" would be Apple, of course.

He added, "And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to [the ideas about Vista upgrades presented in the Apple commercial he said he had not seen]."

Translation: Calm down Bill! You are absolutely right -- you don't get it.

Mr. Gates took exception to the idea that many of Vista's new features came first in the Mac.

"You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts," said Mr. Gates. "If you just want to say, 'Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,' that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done."

Translation: Let's see. Mac OS X has been out for over five years. So you're saying that you [Microsoft] pre-announced these features, worked for years and years to get them to the market, but Apple was able to implement them over five years ago based upon your too public blatherings . . . back then?

Further Translation: If Apple can take a concept and get it to the public immediately while Microsoft's "rocket scientists" fiddle over it for the better part of a decade, why should anyone wait around for Microsoft?

And after all of the huppola, at the end of the day, Vista is still a pale wannabe compared to Mac OS X.

But the thing I really don't understand is if Microsoft has over 90% of the operating system market and Mac is down around 7%, Why is Bill Gates so worked up?

It's sort of like God being mad at the Governor of New Jersey.

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