Letterman's Tribute to Bill Gates and Microsoft

I temped at the evil empire lo so many years ago, and this video is right on. Like when they kept trying to have company-wide meetings via NetMeeting, and it invariably crashed. Or later, when I went to work for ZDNet and attended a few release shows, and baby did they ever throw a good party, the big demo always failed. It was a standing joke. So attendees got the best of everything- great eats, music, swag, and comedy when billg or steveb were left onstage holding a smoking ruin.

Your post answers a long standing question that I have always had. I do not know anyone who has ever worked for Microsoft and I, like many others have heard the stories and seen the videos of some of those meetings.

Did any of them ever come off? Ever? Am I left to believe that the food and entertainment were so good that no one really called them on it and said, "Hey, This is a piece of (insert favorite curse word here)"

I am not trying to sound accusatory towards you at all. Please understand, you temping there makes you an authority compared to me. I just wanna know 'cause I don't know.

Sorry, I had to sacrifice good grammar for a cool one-liner.

By the way, I finally got my Internet back up. Its like a gift, a real gift. :-)

>"By the way, I finally got my Internet back up."

There went the neighborhood. er, um, I mean,

Welcome back, Scott!

tuxchick2 temping at the Evil Empire is a source of continual shame for her. She forgot the blasting caps and we've all suffered ever since. All these tutorials and reviews she writes are for penitence.

In the short time I was there nothing much worked. :) They were migrating their nice reliable internal Unix servers to Windows NT, and that was pain itself. There were a lot of Unix geeks in the company back then, and the wails of protest rose to the heavens, to no avail.

Their public failures were reported with giggles, but it never seemed to matter, and anyway the tech press is just as lame now as it was then. It always amazed me how often something as important as a product release, with all its attendant glitz and and attention, would fail and it didn't matter, like the merits of the product were irrelevant.

You have not experience simultaneous boredom/stunned disbelief until you have listened to Billg speak. Back then he was still unbathed and rocked like was autistic, and talked like a simpleton. And everyone ate it up. Finally his handlers got him to bathe and hold still, but to me his public speaking still sounds like a stoned grade-schooler imitating Mr. Rogers. "Rich media delivering a rich experience is really neat! Can you say really neat rich media?"

I've forgotten most of it now, but you must remember some of their more notorious Comdex onstage blunders. Big events with Steve Jobs and other industry celebs, and of course all the Apple stuff was letter-perfect, and then comes the Microsoft stinkbomb. I never got to go, but I heard plenty from my co-workers.

grouch, I was a spy. yeah, that's it, a fifth columnist. My codename was Mata Hari Kari.

>Hari Kari.

So that's why so much of their stuff dies so often.

It's pretty easy to understand why "the merits of the product were irrelevant", in hindsight. By the time of NT, all of the necessary anti-competitive tricks and traps were in place.

grouch -

> all of the necessary anti-competitive tricks and traps were in place.

except, of course, for a decent platform to run all that crappy software on.

dino:"except, of course, for a decent platform to run all that crappy software on."

Whatever happened to that elusive product anyway? Have they ever come out with a decent platform to run all their crappy software on? Will they ever?

Rascalson -

I believe they have outsourced that effort.

What the heck did they call it?

Let's see...it would take a miracle to make Windows into something really good...

Kind of like turning water into wine...

Wait! That's it...wine!

Slow going, though.

I can't use YouTube. So, can someone mention what day on Letterman this happened, so I can pull it down from mininova?

How about this? Let's say we all stop using phrases like Microsludge and Microshaft and Windoze and just start saying "the Microsoft...uh...thing".

Quoting:This means anyone may make use of Mahesh's product using the validation key but would need to pay Microsoft a royalty a part of which would reach this shy lad from Palayamkottai in southern Tamil Nadu.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1761926,0008.htm

true colors..... ;-P