Want to hear one of the smartest minds in tech opening his mouth and saying something eye-rollingly dumb? Check out Bill Gates telling CNBC that the iPad is being “held back” by its lack of physical keyboard and, of course, Microsoft Office.
Bill Gates is doing an IAmA on Reddit right now. Basically, he’s telling everyone what it’s like to be a super-rich philanthropist who wants to rid the world of polio and other diseases. Bill’s a pretty cool guy. He likes to tour garbage dumps and missile silos with his kids. He loves Weezer. And he even liked Pirates of Silicon Valley.
One thing you didn’t know about Bill Gates, though, is that he uses a ginormous touchscreen computer. Like, yeah, he’s got a Surface Pro, but that’s not enough for him right now. Look at the size of that beast in the picture above.
I just got my Surface Pro a week ago and it is very nice. I am using a Perceptive Pixel display right now – huge Windows 8 touch whiteboard. These will come down in price over time and be pervasive…
So while we’re all over here happy with our new 7.9-inch iPad mini screens, Bill is living it up on a touchscreen that’s bigger than your living room wall. And you know what? For a guy who’s trying to rid the world of HIV and reduce carbon emissions, we think he deserves every pixel on that humongous display.
Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. I’ve always relished any opportunity to see either of the two information-age titans reference the other (this ultra-rare instance of the two sparring side-by-side during an All Things Digital conference still gives me goose bumps).
In this case, it was Bill Gates in his first appearance on the Stephen Colbert show last night when Colbert gingerly brought up Steve in the last moments of the conversation.
Earlier this month, Melinda Gates told an interviewer in the U.K. that “of course” her kids asked for iPods for Christmas, but the Gates won’t give their children Apple products because “the wealth from our family came from Microsoft so why would we invest in a competitor?”
This isn’t the first time Melinda Gates has piped up on the subject of giving her children Apple products. Two years ago, Melinda Gates took part in another interview in which she said that she had “gotten [the] argument” that her children should be allowed to have an iPod. She said that her response was to say, “You may have a Zune.”
Today, the FOX Business Network did an interview with Bill Gates, in which he says his children have never asked for an Apple product in their lives. Ever! Someone’s lying.
It’s hard to believe we’ve just finished our 50th CultCast! But we’re not stopping to celebrate just yet.
On our newest episode, we say why Apple Maps integrating with Waze maps makes too much sense not to happen; why Bill Gates just made Microsoft Surface the new Christmas coal; and as we prepare to journey to Las Vegas for CES, we review which new gadgets and tech we’re most excited about, and give you the inside scoop on what it’s really like to report live from one of the biggest tech conventions in the world.
All that and more on our all-new CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
Here’s a sure fire way to spark a riot on Christmas: give your kids Microsoft Surfaces instead of the iPads and MacBook Airs they wanted instead.
Who would be that Grinchy? Microsoft founder Bill Gates, apparently. He gave his two daughters and son Microsoft products for Christmas, instead of the Apple products they asked for.
Author Malcolm Gladwell made some waves when he said that history would remember Microsoft’s Bill Gates more fondly than it would Steve Jobs. The remark was founded on Gates’ philanthropic bent of late, and was meant to praise Gates more than villify Jobs.
Yesterday, talk-show host Charlie Rose posted an interview with Bill Gates. The interview is an hour long, and touches on a lot of issues, including technology, as we would suppose. When Rose brought up the comments of Gladwell, though, Gates showed more class than most.
We’ve seen a number of images of Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in recent weeks as the Two and a Half Men star films the upcoming indie biopic jOBS. But these, which show Kutcher portraying Apple’s co-founder and former CEO under the influence of LSD, are possibly the most colorful so far.
Thanks to Ken Segall’s new book about Apple, Insanely Simple, we have heard about how Steve Jobs was willing to dress up as Willy Wonka, and how he felt about the negative reaction to the infamous hockey puck mouse.
Here are three more great anecdotes about Jobs from the book. They include Jobs asking the President to help with Apple’s Think Different campaign, the untold story of how NeXT got its name, and how Jobs almost integrated advertising into Mac OS.
For years businesses across the world have attempted to dissect Steve Jobs’ career to figure out what made him so incredibly brilliant and successful. Not only did he change the way we use technology, but he changed movies, music, retail shopping and more. His entrepreneur skills were some of the best the world has seen, which is why Fortune magazine declared Steve Jobs “The Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time” in their ranking of the top 12 entrepreneurs of recent memory.
The fantastic Letters of Note blog has posted an amazing letter that a 30-year old Bill Gates sent to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassée back in June of 1985.
In the letter, Gates argues that Apple should license their hardware and operating system out to other companies, making Macintosh a “standard.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it should: after being ignored by Apple for six months, Microsoft took the idea and ran with it, bringing Windows to the world.
Back in 1981, Bill Gates co-wrote a PC game called Donkey, commonly known (as some apps were back in those days) by its filename, DONKEY.BAS. If you’re old enough to remember those days and old enough to yearn for them, you might enjoy playing Donkey all over again on your iPhone.
Microsoft founder and renowned, mega-rich philanthropist Bill Gates recently sat down with The Telegraph to talk about current affairs and his relationship with the late Steve Jobs. Despite their professional rivalry, Jobs and Gates had been good friends for many years.
Gates revealed in the interview that he sent Jobs a personal letter that was kept by his bedside during his last days.
While the pair were huge rivals at the helms of two competing companies, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still somewhat fond of each other. In a recent interview with ABC News and Yahoo!, Gates recounts his last visit to Jobs’s house during his final months, the conversation they shared, and how Jobs’s passing has affected him.
Do you remember Microsoft’s top secret Couriet tablet project? It was a dual screen, book-like tablet first leaked well before Apple unveiled the iPad, created by J. Allard, the mind behind Microsoft’s fantastic Xbox console.
It’s a concept that has aged well, mostly because it’s one of the only tablet designs around that isn’t just trying to rip off Apple’s idea of what a tablet should be wholesale. It’s still, in fact, brought up as an example of how Microsoft could have competed with Apple in the tablet market from the get go.
So what happened to the Courier? Why wasn’t it released? It all came down to the fact that Bill Gates had an “allergic reaction” to the project because it didn’t run Outlook.
Last night, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was on ABC News to discuss continuing foreign aid as well as his philanthropy work. During the interview, he was asked about Steve Jobs’s less than kind words about him in Walter Isaacson’s bio: specifically, the part where Jobs (unfairly) says that Bill Gates had no original ideas and got rich just by ripping other people off.
Gates’s response is gracious enough. He says that Steve Jobs and he had a long history with each other, and their relationship as colleagues-turned-competitors was complicated, but that he doesn’t fault Steve for anything he said about him.
For me, though, the weird part is when Bill Gates says he helped create the original Mac. Maybe Gates doesn’t spend all his time ripping off other people’s ideas, but he sure seems to like ripping off posthumous credit for them.
The iPad has been a staggering success for Apple since its inception in 2009, but if it wasn’t for one loud-mouthed Microsoft employee, the tablet may have never been born. Steve Jobs decided that he would create the device after listening to a Microsoft employee boast about a Windows tablet over dinner. When he got home that night, Steve said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet really can be.”
A Steve Jobs memorial held at Stanford Memorial Church on Sunday attracted a huge number of people who came to pay their respects to Apple’s former CEO and co-founder. Among them were a long list of celebrities, musicians, CEOs, and even a former president.
During his time as head of Microsoft, Bill Gates was famously anti-Apple, going so far as to issue an emphatic decree banning all Apple gadgets on the software giant’s mega-campus. Since then, however, Gates has been replaced by Steve Ballmer and the prohibition against iPods and iPhones has gradually loosened up… but there’s one place where Gates’ fierce rivalry with the House that Jobs built continues unabated: the palatial mansion of Bill and Melinda Gates.
Sadly this is kind of true about the new Macbook Air, since even the base model is two, three, or more times higher in price than most Windows-based netbooks. However, if you compare the two platforms I think you’ll still be better off with the Macbook Air.
[via Macenstein]
Ex-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld break bread with a stereotypical American family in a second ad that attempts to rejuvenate the Windows maker’s image.
When Microsoft’s in a bind, this is the kind of advertising it comes up with. Something really risky and new.
