Good to see it happens to Gates as well.... (1 Viewer)

[Andrew Pratt]

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/TechNews...810338-ap.html

 

[Patrick_S]

It's funny but also nothing new. I personally have been to a press launch for MS products that Gates was conducting and had the PC crash.

It's always good for a laugh but I was glad that I wasn't the person in charge of the equipment because I'm certain backstage things weren’t just laughed away.

 

[DaveNel]

Yeah Bill Gates kinna chuckled about it, And said well we know why its still in Beta (LOL)

But I betcha he was seeing red, And if he took those glasses off he coulda melted something (LOL)

 

[Chris Bardon]

Well, to be fair it is beta software, but it's still funny.

This is why many "live" demos are actually carefully staged-I know that I've done this more than once...

 

[Ken Chui]

Who could forget the Windows 98 demo at COMDEX (video link)? :b

 

[John Watson]

From a newspaper article a few days ago : "Competing technologies and different standards governing digital rights management remain impediments to fully interoperable products"

As for Gates' Digital Cyberia - Convergence, yeah, but on his terms. :frowning:

 

[NickSo]

http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2-5517693.html

 

[Chris Lockwood]

I saw Gates speak in person circa 1990, & whatever version of Windows he was running (probably 3.0) crashed during his demo. I wonder if that is a trademark of his, like Jack Benny's violin.

The main focus of his talk was how the next big thing was going to be "pen computing", sort of like the tablet PCs that just finally started coming out the past couple of years. So I'm not sure if his speech was a decade ahead of its time, or he wanted to do stuff that wasn't doable with the state of hardware back then.

 

[John Watson]

The difference is, Jack Benny was not seeking world domination.

 

[Carlo_M]

You know, I have no love for Microsoft, and I definitely don't like the "take over the world" mentality either, but I have to admit that I'm glad that there's one dominant OS for most everyday users out there (with apologies to UNIX, LINUX, Apple, Sun & Co.).

It at least has set a baseline standard for most people to successfully interact and share files. Could you imaging the nightmare scenario of Apple OS having 20% share, Microsoft Windows 30%, and various other OS's comprising the other 50%? Sharing files and compatibility issues could potentially be nightmarish.

So while I have no love for the company, I'm finally at the point where I think I'm okay w/ Windows XP. And unlike the OS's before, I think with XP Microsoft got more right than they did wrong. It's the first OS of theirs I've used that I actually am fine with (and I have used 3.11, 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 in various stages of home and work, along with owning a Commodore 64, Apple II+, PowerMac 6300 (I think that was the number) and an a G3).

Still it is funny (and relieving) to see that even the "head honcho" gets BSODs and program hangups. Hopefully that will keep him (and his dev team) on their toes.

 

[Ken Chan]

But files don't have anything to do with the OS unless you do that on purpose (aside from platform-specific line terminators in plain text files -- comically, all different). Even Microsoft Office documents are cross-platform. Throw in PDF, XML, just about every image format beside BMP....