Gates grouses about schools

This guy is so weird. Microsoft kicked the living day lights out of innovation and now he complains. You have to feel sorry for the guy.

You've captured my viewpoint, exactly. Microsoft has done more to stop innovation (at least since they acheived market dominance) in the computer sector than anyone.

It's pretty clear that MSFT does NOT want ANYTHING to upset the apple cart. This shows in many ways, from their creepy fascination with copy protection oops I mean DRM, to their low rent ideas about tieing individuals to a particular computer.

You can see MSFT's fear in their new commercials, those ones where some 6th-grader is giving a report and a crayony line draws a spacesuit around the kid, or a 20-something riding on a bus sees a boarded up storefront, and a crayony line spruces it up and it becomes a "bistro", or a dreamy artsy type women sips from an artisitic coffee mug and crayony lines draw "sophisticated" hats on millinery models and everyone around.

None of the "innovations" appear as anything other than personal endevours.

None of the "innovations" appear as multinational corporations, large businesses or in the tech sector (astronauts don't count, they're test pilots or scientists, and they're government-supported).

MSFT does not want to provide anyone with the tools to compete with MSFT itself.

Sounds like a good system to me. I would be interested in seeing any flames in this case. What could they be? Just because you use proprietary openish-source software?

Aaack. Wrong thread. Please remove.

About MS and innovation:

I can tell Microsoft blocks innovation from my own experience. You see, I was in college two years ago, applied phyisics. Some of my friends didn't have time to go to college cause they were to busy Xboxing instead of innovating. OK, that one was a bid childish. But speaking of those Chinese: there aren't enough tech students in The Netherlands as well, and because Dutch students are far less ambitious than American ones, Dutch tech universities have a lot of Chinese students. They always work after six, when all white people went home. They don't play on the Xbox a lot. They don't come in pubs that much (Studying in Dutch is almost equivalent to drinking lots of beer and partying). So, when uncle Bill needs smart people, he should open an office in China (when you look at MS'es USPTO patents, the inventor almost always is some Asian name). But they screwed up in Asia by threading the governments with patents and imposing fines for piracy via the WTO. At the moment, those Chinese don't like uncle Bill anymore. The only ones to blame for that is MS. Talking about the lazy white Europeans, well, much of them are also busy fighting against software-patents, to help innovation. But MS isn't helping them, as anyone knows. So the problem (for MS) is not only in America, it's also in Europe, and even in (Asia) China as well.