[–] TurquoiseLover ago (edited ago)
We could have left everything in COBOL and IBM OS and just added a GUI and internet connections. Just think how much time, money and resources were wasted converting everything. And then most of it didn't work very well on PCs (didn't scale well and the "security" was horrible). The typical shop I worked in spent 1/3 of their resources on maintaining current apps and 2/3 on converting and installing new languages and OS and many were dismal failures. IBM already was building relational databases, etc.
[–] G45Colt_II [S] ago
If I have a few bones to pick with Gates, top of the list would be whatever it was he did to make the learning curve on every piece of MicroSuck SW as steep as possible. Even the most basic of things - start to quit? WTH MS. Sure, there's 3 ways to do anything, but good luck finding any one of them, or figuring out how to decode the maze without taking several MS classes or reading 3 books. I just need to do something simple, this isn't part of my job, but I have to waste a day figuring out what used to be easy. There was competing SW that was powerful and easy to use, and MS somehow managed to kill off every one. Even Skype. How the hell did they manage to ruin Skype? It has 1 simple job to do, that it used to do well, and.....
Second would be why nothing MS can run for any length of time without crashing. Word has been better of late, but that was a PITA for quite a while. What's worse is I have a pretty good idea why, and instructing the team to do that (or letting the programmers get away with doing it), is criminal.
[–] monsterdoggie ago
Skype is a good example. They bought it so they could break the encryption enough that they could record all your calls. Gates was working for the NSA.