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A friend has sent you a link to the following article: http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/1122/ It had to happen. Bill Gates, world’s richest man, and head of Microsoft, is angry. Gates has become so angry at constant comparisons of Windows Vista to Mac OS X that he is on the offensive, attacking Apple and the Mac with lies. Microsoft launched Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 this week. This is Microsoft’s week to bask in the glory of finally launching Longhorn Vista to the masses. What happened? There were no long lines of customers waiting to purchase Vista. Media reviews were highly critical of Vista at worst, tepid at best. Worse, nearly everyone in the media who interviewed Bill Gates during his company’s week of public glory, pointed to comparisons of Windows Vista to Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger. Here’s an example of Gates becoming flustered and resorting to lies and distortions when confronted with yet another comparison of Vista to OS X. Steven Levy, writing in Newsweek, interviewed Bill Gates and posed some tough questions to the billionaire businessman. “How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade? Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.” Bill Gates lost his cool. As to exploits already found in Windows Vista, Gates responded with ”it’s totally according to plan”: “So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.” So, Apple hasn’t done anything to improve security in the code base, and Microsoft has? How much of that do you believe, considering the fact that Windows, whatever version, is exploited regularly, while Mac OS X is not? Apparently Levy didn’t believe Gates either, and pressed on. He asked Gates if he was bugged by the Apple TV commercial where John Hodgeman (I’m a PC) has to undergo surgery to upgrade to Vista. “I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.” Gates has never seen the commercial yet knows what it’s all about? Right. Still, Levy presses forward, cornering Gates with more comparisons of Vista to Mac OS X, noting that many Vista ”features” are already in Mac OS X. How does Gates respond? Vehement gibberish. “You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is.” Of course, no comparison was given. That was done earlier in the week on TV when Gates claimed Vista’s innovations included parental controls, a movie making application, a photo album application, and the ability to burn DVDs. Oh, and security. Do you recognize those features from Mac OS X? Speaking of security, the questions continued to compare Mac OS X and Vista. In an obvious attempt to divert attention to who stole what from whom, Gates blasted away: “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?” So, Bill Gates thinks that security guys break the Mac every day, but dares anyone to do it even once a month on Windows Vista. I have little doubt that many will try. And succeed on Vista, and fail on Mac OS X. {embed="adsmac/Content_336x280"}Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world, but those riches came from running a company which engaged in illegal tactics to bully vendors, customers, and competition. They’re a convicted corporation with an executive team that suffers from delusions of grandeur. No one expects Microsoft to fail any time soon. Windows Vista will be a success, if anything, measured by the fact that 90-percent of the world’s new PCs will ship with Vista installed. Meanwhile, back to reality. It’s become obvious that Microsoft executives, ever so paranoid, watch the trends of current events. Media throughout the world have compared Vista to Mac OS X and recognize that Microsoft copied Apple again. This time, customers by the millions are recognizing the same thing, and are making the switch away from Microsoft to the Mac. As exploits to Windows Vista grow in number will more personal computers switch to the Mac? Yes. Apple’s market share is growing rapidly, the company has a diversified product line, and larger base of satisfied customers than ever before, thanks to the iPod and iTunes. The War of the Words has only begun. The future will see more of Bill Gates and his deputy sidekick Steve Ballmer extolling the virtues of their latest and most expensive operating system ever. This will be fun.