Bill Gates and Woody Allen

Created , updated 1 minute read

I found a link to Bill Gate’s WinHEC Keynote in this Slashot article and was struck by three things:

  1. What a terrible public speaker Bill Gates is; not only his monotone voice and total lack of humour, but his continual use of the word "customers" to refer to "users".
  2. What an uncanny resemblance he bears to Woody Allen in terms of physique, dress and mannerisms.
  3. How much of Longhorn is a blatant rip-off of Mac OS X. If you watch the keynote and skip forward about one hour and three minutes you’ll see a sickeningly buzz-word-filled demonstration of transparent windows with movies playing in a window behind them, and watch in awe as windows shrink in slow motion when you minimize them (curiously like Mac OS X’s "genie" effect). This kind of thing has been being demonstrated on Mac OS X since the days prior to the first Public Beta. I don’t know what’s more astonishing: that Microsoft has taken this long to copy Apple, or that their implementation is such an ugly facsimile of the original despite all the time they’ve had to work on it…