Mr. Gates goes to college

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A contradiction in terms

Mr. Gates dropped out from the University to pursue his code/application development visions. That's not uncommon. He has been extremely successful financially so far.

It is ironic yet didactic that in his latest tour to prestigious schools, he is exhorting people to pursue higer education and strive for innovation and good results.

What is more ironic is his latest 'seen the light' conversion to become a secure infrastructure evangelist. He is preaching to students that security and computer science innovations are a must if we are to recover from the IT industries downturns.

If he had stayed in school he would have realized that all the theoretical and practical knowledge to develop secure, efficient, robust and scalable applications is ALREADY HERE and it has been taught to students since decades ago.

Ofcourse he opted to go one pursuing his dreams in developing or leveraging on, then, a new type of computing: the PC (personal computing). Although there is no doubt that initially MS helped a great deal in spreading the PC innovations, its lack of good designs and development methods for applications and platforms alike, have trapped millions of users and 1000s of organizations into a vicious cycle of the continuous 'cleaning up the trash'.

Had he finished his degree, he would have picked up some more reasonable techniques on ow one can go about and organize large groups of developers to deliver code that is reliable and can be evolve with changing requirements.

The MS 'model' of design/development is going to be used in the future as the most convincing set cases of what to AVOID doing if you really want to be responsible to your customers.

For MS (and BG) the idea is simple: be there FIRST and make LOOK GOOD. The continuous PR campaigns and the endless cycles of 'corrections' would do the rest.

This may work in small scale cases where a couple of programs need to be continuously rewritten and redesigned to fit the real needs and not the half-cooked ones on the fly.

Unfortunately, the 'big success' of --MS which is te ubiquity of its platform-- has also magnified its prominent shortcommings. And this has become obvious to a massive extent on a global scale.

It is easy to correct the shortcommings of a prototype when only a small group is using it under controlled conditions. However the MS products, which are pretty much still in a prototype stage, are now been used by large numbers of people who rely on them to carry out their daily business.

Tell them NOW that security was never designed into apps and platform. Let them see how easy it is to let one PC get compromised over the Internet. Tell them that, after all these cycles of excessively exagerated promisses and mediocre producst (w3.1, W95, W97, NT3.5, NT4, w2k, wxp) they will STILL have to wait until the nebulous longhorn to solve all their problems. Let them experience the incompatibility of the file formats accross versions or platforms. Then tell them that .net will cure all illness. But tell them that now they will have to use MS XML and they need to buy the conversion utilities. Or they can get them for free but they will have to pay to 'upgrade' to the latest XML specs that you just patend.

Why would people believe the big promisses only to get dissapointed, for SO MANY TIMES, is beyond logical explanation. I guess the home user can trust the fancy ads with butterflies that keep the baglava vendors outside your household and find them 'cute'. I cannot explain why CIOs and 'technical perosonnel would get deceived SO MANY times, even when the budgets are SO tight and SO MANY PEOPLE would have to get fired.


It is NOT the Universities' fault no teaching basic design and development techniques or principles. It is the greed and teh indiference that lead to IGNORING them. So Mr. Gates, you go back to school get a BSc degree at leas and then you will see that you started a culture of sell now and pay later.

This will go down in history as a case of prominent managerial short-sightness and massive masochism.


Cheers and happy longhorns.

-m

Posted by: michael-t   Posted on: 03/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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