LE> Gates : 1 inadequate man. 1 inadequate vision. Many inadequate products.

RS> Who had managed to achieve a HELL of a lot more than you have when he was
RS> your current age Lew. No use getting all bitter and twisted about it boy.

DH> No he didn't.

Corse he did.

DH> He wrote one (1) program, once.

Which just happened to take the micro world by storm, appeared on just
about every micro platform, apart from a few who went to the trouble of
cloning it. That alone is a HELL of a lot more than Lew has done Dave. Lew
may well have written as good stuff, BUT none of that has ever got within
a bulls roar of the importance to the market that that one of Gates did.

DH> He then conned other, more productive and skillful
DH> men into producing things for him to sell.

I never said he wrote them personally Dave. He did however manage to produce
what could arguably be described as the biggest industrial success the west
has seen in the last decade or so, producing 3 billionaires, the richest
person in the world, 2K+ millionaires. Which is STILL an area where the US
utterly dominates the world, when vast amounts of US industry has migrated
to asia. That aint too bad, and I dont expect to see Lew or you do that.

DH> His major skill is, and remains, that of the conman.

Its bullshit Dave, bitter and twisted bullshit. Ken Olsen never
did all the work that became DEC himself personally, Tom Watson
and IBM ditto. It just aint ever going to be possible to do an
operation of the size of any of those personally by just one man.

As far as MSs apps are concerned, a very large part of their success in the
market is that they didnt get too many gross footshots. IBM produced such an
utter series of unspeakable dogs of apps for the PC that hardly anyone can
actually name them today they were so awful. Wordstar dropped the ball badly
and went down the tubes. Lotus went with an ace of going down the tubes
trying to move on from their first very decent market success. Borland came
within an ace of going down the tubes with the Ashton Tate buy up and has
essentially been broken up to stay afloat and never did have a full Office
suite when the whole world was moving to those.

Thats the opposition blowing their feet of at ever opportunity Dave,
not Gates conning anyone. Or are you seriously suggesting that those
were all because of moles Gates installed in those operations, to white
ant them from the inside ?  Likely you with your hell of a tendency to
believe conspiracy theorys would believe even that.

DH> Enough so that his own staff are still convinced he knows more
DH> than each of them does, in each of the fields they specialize in.

Welp, he does tend to have a reasonable capacity to predict where the
market is headed, tho he doesnt always get it right. Virtually the whole
industrys laughed themselves sick about Windows early on, all the pundits
proclaimed it would never fly, the GUIs were unspeakable etc etc etc.
Eventually the hardware in use out there had enough horsepower for adequate
performance and with Win 3.0 it took off like a rocket, rather buggy tho it
was. The users didnt give a damn, they knew damned well that it was what
they wanted, and the mainstream commercial app developers all fell right out
of their chairs and decided that it really was going to fly and that if they
didnt get off their arse and move their apps to it, their prospects were
going to go straight down the tubes. Gates got absolutely stinking rich coz
he got that right. The likes of you and Lew get to be all bitter and twisted
and look very silly. The users dont give a damn and use it anyway and even
IBM has to eventually wake up and realise that is the future even for them.

--- PQWK202