Bill Gates is not afraid that Linux will steal Windows'
crown.
Speaking during his California tour the Microsoft chairman and
chief software architect told technologists, “Microsoft has had
clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to
document that.
“I’m not saying, ‘This computer will go away’, but OS/2 was
supposed to kill us.” Microsoft has seen other potential threats to
its dominance come and go, Gates said. IBM, with 10 times as many
employees as Microsoft, could not stop Windows with OS/2, he
pointed out.
“[It] was said that Novell will kill us, Borland will kill us -
and that makes my job interesting,” Gates said.
An member of the audience said that almost half the servers
being bought today are running Linux. But Gates disputed the
figure. “It is just not a right number,” Gates said. “Well over 50%
of servers that are sold run Windows Server,” he insisted.
“First, start with the facts, then proceed from there,” Gates
said, adding that Unix, not Windows, is being displaced by
Linux.
“We do compete with Linux. The shift of Unix share to Linux has
been dramatic,” he said. “[Linux will] wipe out a lot of the stuff
that’s been out there down to very small numbers, [based] on
current trends.” Windows and Linux will dominate the market , he
said.
Unix lacked the advantage that Windows has in coming from one
supplier with one set of instructions, Gates said.
Gates said not all situations suit grid computing, pointing out
that it may not be economical to ship data far away for processing,
because of networking costs and latency.
But grid is being done on Windows and Microsoft is building the
notion of grid into its web services capabilities, he said. The
company’s Beowulf project for clustering on Windows entails grid
computing, he added.
The problem of spam was diminishing, Gates said, thanks to
filters. “Spam is down by a factor of 10 from where it was a year
ago.
“The bad news is this malware thing is so bad,” he said.
Microsoft will provide a malware cure to address issues such as
adware, he added.
Identity theft and phising need to be addressed through
“info-card” technology he suggested, adding that password
technology, meanwhile, needs to be succeeded by smartcard or
biometric technology.
Gates also spoke about digital rights management, suggesting
that licence fees will be used at the consumer level for accessing
movies and music over the internet.
In software licensing, markets that had been used to getting
Windows for free, such as China, Korea, and Hong Kong, are now
moving over to licensing. “Fifteen years ago [in these countries],
you didn’t buy software. Today, their compliance level is almost as
good as the US,” Gates said.
Gates said he was surprised that technologies such as speech
recognition and ink-based computing had been slow to take off, but
he expected them to grow with the passage of time. He also
predicted the gradual replacement of USB with wireless and wideband
access technologies.
On electronic voting he said that voters demand a high degree of
certainty with the technology. “We ourselves are not going after
the e-voting market or the nuclear reactor control market,” Gates
said.
Written by
Infoworld staff