Maybe Bill Gates Should Stop Making Predictions

from the you-said-what-now? dept

Just days after Bill Gates didn’t solve the spam problem by the deadline he had promised two years ago, it looked like he might be spouting off again. This time, Reuters says he’s claiming that we’ll be able to beat software piracy in China and India — though, he’s giving a longer timeline. This time it’s 10 years… and the details actually suggest it’s not quite as crazy as the Reuters headline suggests. He wasn’t saying that Microsoft would beat software piracy in those countries, but that the level of unauthorized copying would decrease to about the same level as in the US and Europe. Also, he seems to be indicating that this is a natural progression as the local economy builds its own software industry.


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Comments on “Maybe Bill Gates Should Stop Making Predictions”

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18 Comments
Rickler says:

Re: No Subject Given

Bill defeating software piracy would be a huge boon to OpenOffice! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if MS wins the piracy battle but loses the war by forcing cash-strapped Asian consumers to use open source applications instead of bootleg MS Word.

MS Word Office and all those products if I’m not mistaken is sold at significantly lower prices in countries not used to spending their day to monthly pay on a piece of software.

Same goes with DVDs, thus the region codes.

SimonTek (user link) says:

Re: Lets do all we can....

I Love that, Best laugh of the day. But seriously, my father has a hotmail account, he gets more spam then carters got pills. to prove a point, I opened a hotmail account, and within a month it was full of spam, i never gave out the email address. I have since given my dad an email off of one of my domains.

pooopstainzmcgraw says:

Re: Re: Re: omg, stupid people

OMG, your a jackass dirt merchant. Open source is bullshit, there is no free lunch, for what you dont pay licensing costs you pay for in buggy piece of shit software written by acne dotted 15 year olds, that write viruses for the shit in their spare time. If popular open source products were relatively close in market share to Microsoft, you’d see their flaws and security issues exposed to 10 times the scale of MS products. Go jerk off to Hackers you little punk.

John Doh! says:

Re: Re: Re:2 omg, stupid people

Being unable to argue a point without calling names is a definite sign that you lack any of the intelligence necessary to even judge which computer programs are buggy.

The only other thing I have to say is follow your own advice, except change the word “Hackers” to “crackers.”

Anonymous Coward says:

pooopstainzmcgraw: obviously you've never used a d

such as the Mozilla Firefox you are probably using right now (if you’re still using IE, you might as well hump MS’s leg, and if you’re using Netscape, go hump AOL/Time Warner’s leg – only thing besides Firefox that could possibly be worth using is Opera) – ya, Firefox is open source, or did you not read that on the fronpage of the Mozilla site?

How about OpenOffice.org – its every bit as good as MS Office – AND it has the corporate backing of Sun Microsystems which developed the old StarOffice Suite which OpenOffice is based on (they made it open-source and now its OOo), along with backing from Google and an assload of other billion dollar multi national corporations.

And as for the article? everybody knows hotmail sucks, hell, even yahoo mail is better… but better than that, just ask people you know that have Gmail accounts if they would be so kind as to send you an invitation. I have not once gotten a single bit of spam with Gmail unless it was from a website I registered at, and the websites always have an option to not receive the email letters.

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