Bill Gates Leaves Microsoft with a Practical Joke?

Bill Gates was understandably upset today as he handed over the keys to the Microsoft kingdom to Steve “Monkey Boy” Ballmer.  I would have cried, too.  This will only accelerate Microsoft’s downward slide.

I guess the question at this point becomes, “Which will be more embarrassing for Microsoft:  Steve Ballmer or Vista?”

Just in case you haven’t seen it, here is one of Ballmers defining moments at a developers conference a couple of years ago (I have never watched the whole thing… it’s too painful).

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Well, best of luck to Bill and his foundation, regardless.

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Vista Wins “Award” on CNET

CNET has picked Windows Vista as one of the 10 worst tech products ever made.* I haven’t had much of a chance to work with Vista, and from a distance it looks a ton better than XP. However, the eye candy doesn’t deliver better functionality. We are still in using XP at work, and the more I read about Vista, the more I understand why.

I don’t recommend relying on user posts for factual data when researching a product, but this comment from a user about Vista on CNET’s site was a good summary of the experience a lot of upgraders have had with Vista:

Aaaah… Vista! I loved the smooth transition from XP on my 12 month old hardware. I got my Gig of RAM, check, my overly expensive graphics card, check. Everything looking good, here we go… no problems whatsoever, everything running like clockwork. THEN, I suddenly woke up and realized I’d fallen asleep midway through the 6 hour install process (including downloading all the required driver and software updates with the requisite restarts every single time. I got so bored waiting for the PC that during one of the annoying restarts I decided to upgrade the 8 year old Mac I have lying around to Leopard (Nice 800MHz G4 with 256Mb RAM) – all went well and the Mac was up and running again in less time than it took the PC to boot back up. In fact, I then used the Mac to download all the other driver updates I needed for the Vista ‘upgrade’ because it was just quicker that way.

Regarding the Leopard install comment, his 800MHz G4 doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements (867MHz G4), so either he is making that up, or the newest OS from Apple is more backwards-compatible then we realize.

*In fairness to Windows users who feel that the list should have included a Mac product of some kind, you should note that the “hockey puck” mouse from the iMac G3 in the late nineties. 🙂 Oh, the memories…