There ’s an iconic image of Bill Gates that might aid explain our corporate fascination with this legendary businessman and his most celebrated creative activity , the Microsoft Corp. It ’s a smiler shot from 1977 , admit after Gates was pulled over in Albuquerque , N.M. , for a traffic violation [ source : The Smoking Gun ] .
The photograph show a chinless 19 - year - old flake with tinct ethical drug glasses and an undeniable smirk . How , we ’re left to wonder , did this goofy - see college dropout with questionable driving acquisition ( and wearing an even more questionable blossom shirt ) end up becoming the rich man in the universe ?
If you go look for for answer to that question online , you ’ll discover a fortune of half - truths and misinformation . It does n’t help that Microsoft has made more than its clean share of enemies over the years . It really does n’t help that most of those enemies have web log that enable them to share their enmity with the world . They ’ve accused the troupe and its former chief operating officer of everything from willfully running a monopoly to steal some of its biggest technological innovations to in reality being evil .
The myths surrounding Microsoft and its founder are closely tie to the creation myth of the personal computing machine itself . To start off our list of top 5 Microsoft myths , we ’re go bad to explore a common misconception about the extraction of " window . "
5: Microsoft Invented “Windows”
In 1968 , when 13 - year - old Bill Gates was still programming tic - tac - toe in BASIC , an engineer named Douglas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute bring in the world to the mouse [ beginning : Reimer ] . To modern computer users , the computer mouse is nothing more than a mundane technological necessity : How else could you click icons , scroll through menus and move cursors ? But computer users in 1968 happen the mouse subversive exactly because no one had ever take heed of those things back then .
Englebart is credited with inventing thegraphical substance abuser interface , or GUI ( pronounced " gooey " ) . In the other seventies , a team of researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( PARC ) expanded on Englebart ’s concept and make the Xerox Alto , the first personal computer that featured the now - stock " W.I.M.P. " GUI : window , icon , carte and signal twist [ source : Webopedia ] .
The Xerox Alto ran on an operating system / development surroundings called SmallTalk that was make in - firm by Xerox PARC researcher . In 1979 , 24 - year - old Steve Jobs of tech arriviste Apple Computer , Inc. paid $ 1 million in Apple stock options for a elaborated turn of the Xerox PARC facility . Blown away by the SmallTalk GUI , Jobs exact the product ’s expert documentation , which Xerox unwisely handed over [ source : PBS ] .
With the specs for the SmallTalk GUI in hand , Apple unblock the Lisa in 1983 , the first commercial computer to boast a " window " GUI . task would practice a standardised GUI for the much more democratic Macintosh models . When Bill Gates , who wrote software for the Mac , released Windows 2.0 in 1987 , Apple sued Microsoft for blatantly stealing the Mac ’s look and find – something Apple steal long ago from Xerox [ root : Reimer ] .
Apple eventually lost the case and Microsoft ’s subsequent dominance of the PC securities industry made " window " synonymous with Windows .
4: Microsoft Doesn’t Care About Security
Microsoft is the Little Dutch male child of software manufacturer , constantly plug certificate holes in its operating organization and practical software software . These backdoor vulnerabilities allow malicious hackers to bring in access to unprotected computers , turning them into unwitting bot that spread out computer virus and worm to even more computers .
You hardly ever see newspaper headline reading , " Apple Warns Users About Serious Security Hole " or " Red Hat Races to Issue Patch to Thwart Hackers . " That ’s because few coder would bother to write malicious code and nasty computer viruses for Macs and Linux computers . The reason for this is quite bare : If you ’re a hack and your insidious destination is to envenom the most automobile possible , you ’d train your quite a little on the operating system of rules used by more than 90 percent of the macrocosm ’s personal computers .
Despite the overzealous criticism of the security failing of Windows XP , it ’s wrong to say that Microsoft does n’t give care about certificate . Microsoft apply some of the sharpest minds in the field of cyber security , including security measure chief Michael Howard and Linux security expert Crispin Cowan [ source : Ho ] . In late twelvemonth , they ’ve launch several tenacious - term , far - reaching security initiatives , including Trustworthy Computing , End to End Trust and most recently , Microsoft Security Essentials . They ’ve also built Windows Vista to be well more secure than XP [ source : Jones ] .
The real interrogation , concord to old-timer tech author Rob Enderle , is whether anyone at any society could successfully disgust the nigh - ceaseless barrage of attempt that plague Microsoft products . To make matter worse , he say , brag about security features is bound to attract hackers athirst for a challenge . As an example , the writer cites an announcement from Oracle that call its late creation " bulletproof . " It was successfully attacked the next day [ germ : Enderle ] .
3: Microsoft is a “Natural Monopoly”
Some critics of the U.S. government ’s on-going antitrust pillow slip against Microsoft defended the software human dynamo as a legalnatural monopolybecause it make its dominance by outmaneuvering its free marketplace competitors .
The real definition of a natural monopoly is actually quite unlike from its conventional signification . In economic idiom , a raw monopoly is a company that is allowed to monopolise an industry because it ’s in the near interest of the land and the consumer .
Utility companies are classic examples of natural monopolies [ source : Investopedia ] . In most cities and townspeople , you have no pick about which electric fellowship to use . That ’s because there ’s a vast barrier of entry for starting a competing electric company . You ’d have to construct power plants and string mile of cable to make a workable infrastructure . It ’s cheaper for the consumer – and more efficient for the state – to have one tightly influence individual company running the show .
On the surface , Microsoft looks like a natural monopoly of the figurer industry . Since the fellowship has some 90 percent of the global operating organization market share , Microsoft enjoy Brobdingnagian economies of musical scale . For instance , smaller computer software developers could never spend as much as Microsoft can on intersection development and merchandising . They would never make the money back without ingest to charge much more than Microsoft would for the same products .
The biggest remainder is that Microsoft used its " prodigious grocery power and immense profits , " in the Logos of U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson , to not only erect higher barrier of entry for its competition , but to threaten and restrain anyone who dared knock at the door [ source : Moore ] . And there ’s nothing " natural " about that .
2: Microsoft isn’t Innovative
Microsoft has a well - deserved repute in software system circles for being technologically derivative . In other words , Microsoft has borrowed or buy every good idea it ’s ever had .
This theory is n’t unfounded . For example , Bill Gates and ally did n’t write the computer code for MS - DOS . They bought something forebode QDOS ( Quick and Dirty Operating System ) for $ 50,000 , tweaked it and licensed it to IBM for Brobdingnagian profits [ germ : Moscovitz ] . They did n’t cypher the original cyberspace Explorer , either : They licensed the source code from Spyglass Inc. , Godhead of the Mosaic web internet browser , and used that same introductory codification for three or four versions of Explorer [ source : swallow hole ] .
Defenders of Microsoft sleep together that the company is n’t such a great technical innovator – Gates did n’t realize the potential of the Internet until 1995 – but they will say the company has some of the most cutting - boundary business estimation in the battleground [ source : Colony ] .
Think about it . Before Microsoft add up along , no one had think about the idea of selling software and ironware separately [ origin : Rapoza ] . IBM license MS - DOS from Microsoft because it wanted to concentrate on computer hardware . Gates , Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft executives foreknow the lucrative electric potential in licensing their operating organisation to lots of different PC hardware makers .
When the Harvard Business Institute take the secrets of Microsoft ’s winner , they pinpointed the companionship ’s innovative approach to its intellectual belongings [ source : Silverthorne ] . Microsoft has created a jumbo subroutine library of proprietary seed code " components " that work across the Windows platform . If a developer proves his loyalty to Microsoft , he have access to that codification library – and C of trillion of likely Microsoft client .
1: Bill Gates is Evil
self-important . Bullying . unpitying . Stubborn . All of these are adjective that former and current Microsoft colleagues and competitors have used to draw William Henry Gates III . But would those critic describe him as evil ? Not in a million years .
When Gates announce that he was ill-treat down from daily process at Microsoft in July 2008 , it spawned a flood tide of articles about his legacy . Some compared him to Henry Ford , another person who took an expensive , exalted technology and contrive an ingenious fashion to selling it to the masses [ source : Ferguson ] .
Microsoft ’s prospicient - fourth dimension mission was to have " a PC on every desk and in every rest home . " Indeed , Microsoft operating systems have been used on 1000000000 of microcomputer worldwide since 1981 [ source : Hamm ] .
Some journalist and pundits pick out to compare Gates to Henry Ford , but a more pertinent comparison might be to Andrew Carnegie , the steel big businessman who engage in ruthless business practices before dedicating the final years of his life-time to philanthropic gift . By the metre he perish in 1919 , he ’d give away all of his ill - gotten riches to found museum , library , parks and numerous charitable organizations .
Gates may be guilty of many underhanded patronage maneuver , but has yet to order mercenary troops to attack his own factory ( as Carnegie did ) . As a philanthropist , he ’s poised to become the cracking giver in the history of the world [ source : Gralla ] . The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already invested tens of trillion of dollar bill toward the eradication of disease and poorness in develop nations and eventually will give away all of Gates ' wealth . How malign could that be ?
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