Steve Jobs vs Ballmer + Gates - New comment on Rebuilding Microsoft in Wired Magazine

Arnold Ziffel has left a new comment on your post "Rebuilding Microsoft in Wired Magazine":

OK, Microsoftie Borg, you want Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates? No one's going to fight you for them.

For those posters who think Bill Gates is the next best thing to an Egg McMuffin...well, he probably is, but that just says something about the sad state of American fast food.

History is full of people who have made mounds and mounds of money, and I'm glad Mr. Gates is finally going to give some of his away. Perhaps he ought to reimburse the millions of people on earth who have suffered through BSODs, malware out the porthole, and other maladies foisted upon people by his "creations."

From what I gather, Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ives, et al., are motivated at least in part by the challenge to produce exquisite products, not to see who can make the grossest profit on products, which often resemble the debris field left after an F5 tornado.

Airbus has been taking huge hits in the aerospace world recently, due to the fact its latest product, the A380 Whalejet, is (gasp) more than one year late with further delays soon to be announced. And MS has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $8,000 million to produce an operating system (Longhorn/Vista) that is YEARS late. That's roughly half of what Airbus has spent in developing what is to be the largest passenger aircraft yet produced. Holy schmoly!

And then there's the fact that Apple has had OS X out now for over 5 years, and it makes Windows look like it was made in the Paleozoic Era. I have to use Windows 2000 NT at work, and honestly, I'd rather be running Mac OS 7 on my old Mac SE than running the rubbish that is installed on my Dell.

I am grateful for the likes of Steve Jobs and the others at Apple, who strive for (and often achieve) greatness. Thanks to their efforts, I've not once lost any data, projects, etc. to malware on our Macs, and I get to work with computers that are stable, reliable, unobtrusive, and fun.

Granted, Mr. Jobs is not perfect--he just seems so when compared to Ballmer, Gates, and their minions.

(If I had a time machine, I'd go forward 25 years just to see what the post-Apple / post-Microsoft world is like.)