Ms. Gates: 'Bill does not use a Mac' Bill's better half, Melinda Gates, is no fan of Apple's magical and revolutionary tablet. "Of course not," Ms. Gates told The New York Times when asked if she owned an iPad. There's no love for Apple products at Chez Portes. When asked about the persistent urban myth that her hubby uses an Apple laptop, the co-chairwoman of …
"Actually, all the kids have iPods - it's really revolutionised their music listening. They never go anywhere without a fully charged iPhone, and they can't wait to get their hands on an iPad! Bill wouldn't dream of using anything other than an iMac to surf the 'net in his free time!"
Pull the other one - of course the Gates clan aren't going to endorse their main rivals - in much the same way as you'd never catch Steve Jobs claiming he owns a Windoze PC or an XBox. Why is this even considered news?
With the Windows flavours around 90% and MacOS/iOS/Linux making up the other 10%, even the "evil" Vista is 3x more popular than OSX not sure if "main rival" is really appropriate when there really isn't any competition.
Besides if she wanted to put "spin" on it she would have said, "We don't restrict our children at all, if they want an iWhatever that can have an iWhatever, we think children should be able to make their own choices even if it's a mistake and they end up with an inferior product to a Microsoft one".
While it isn't news it does give a credibility to iWhatever products that isn't there, besides, my Galaxy is better for me than an iPhone, my Zen Vision was better than an iPod and my Vista Business does everything I need (and my hacked 32Gb iPod mini running Linux still rocks).
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The iPods were / are pretty run of the mill, average quality, nothing special devices. they were lucky in putting the after-thought of the dock connector, which 3rd parties pounced on.
Similar thing happened with the Atari ST and it's MIDI ports, after all, how many Amiga's were found in recording studios?
"run of the mill, average quality, nothing special devices. they were lucky ..."
With sales now heading towards 300,000,000 (three hundred million), just think what they could have achieved had they produced something special...
I really wish I could invent, develop & market something so equally un-special
Quality product does not always equate to popular product.
Something that came up in Private Eye a while back:
The Sun - 3 million copies sold per issue
Private eye - 210000 per issue
Which one is of a higher quality?
Also, possibly more applicable here:
Windows 90% of the desktop market (possibly more)
Linux 5% (possibly less)
Which do you think is felt to be a more quality product by many commentators here?
what a ridiculous thing to be defensive about - whether there are apple products in your house or not because your husband is chairman of microsoft. so what? maybe he wants to check out how they perform against his products? in fact, i'd be worried if he didn't have a few apple things knocking about simply for evaluation if nothing else. silly woman doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about.
Apple's idea of style: being able to navigate lists quickly and easily. The contemporaneous competitors: having to press a discrete button once for each list item, to navigate gigabytes of music. Even up to and including the original Zune, which has discrete push buttons but designed to look a bit like a scroll wheel to the unwary. Which definitely isn't style over substance, honest.
I don't really see how Apple can come off worse in a Microsoft versus Apple debate. Even the least generous commentator would surely say they're as bad as each other?
Ms Gates should have just feigned ignorance or made some sort of comment that the issue had never really come up. She should be arguing that Apple are completely irrelevant in order to convey the necessary confidence.
Wow. It sounds like fanboi-ism, but I think it's worse: it's fear.
What's pathetic about it is the degree of paranoia and insecurity that it reveals. If ever there was a clear confession that Apple products are pretty good, it's that Gates (apparently) won't allow his kids to use them and compare them to Daddy's toys. It's shameful, too, that he's stunting their minds by forcing them to use one single interface and one single set of products -- monocultures dull the brain.
Just wait until they get to college and have access to all the stuff that Papa & Mama wouldn't let them use!
iOS is an OS for mobile devices and as such it is one of many. If you don't want to use it then by all means buy another product, there are tonnes to choose from out there.
Apple does not bully all phone manufacturers into using it thereby removing all consumer choice.
If they did that they would create an iOS phone monoculture.
I'm sure that we can all agree that this would be bad for businesses and consumers around the world.
Choice is a good thing.
We can see the end results from when such monocultures evolve when we look at what has happened to the PC market and its Windows monoculture.
The PC market is a stagnant, user hostile place that has achieved few of the lofty ideals that were imagined during the 80's under the stewardship of Microsoft.
FTA: Back in March 2003, she told Vogue: "There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household...But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids."
Since the iPhone wasn't launched until 2007, Mrs Gates is showing incredible foresight here, or else she has some inside knowledge of Apple's future product line. You'd have thought that she'd have informed Ballmer, so that the WIndows Phone 7 development could have started earlier. Or perhaps she did and it's taken them that long to not-quite catch up.
He immediately set his best writers to work. You don't think you can come up with "(laughs) it costs how much? And it doesn't have a keyboard, so it doesn't appeal to business users." just off the cuff, do you? They were in a room for over two years trying to decide what number of times to say 'developers' to achieve maximum impact.
Remember, Melinda is the person who was responsible for Microsoft Bob.. For those who don't remember it (and you don't know how lucky you are) it was sort of the Win95 equivalent of the Kin cellphone. Only worse. Much worse. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob> for more. It made #7 on the PC World list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. Windows ME made #4. I'd have switched their positions. It should be noted that MSIE v6 made #8.
And, oh, yes... just to make things complete: it should also be noted that Comic Sans was developed, produced, and intended for MS Bob. Yes, Melinda is responsible for Comic Sans.
The world does not need any further innovation from Melinda Gates.
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