Forum Moderators: open
Finally someone to take on Gates ;)
The IKEA OS:
You wander into a store with 500 computers on display all running different variations of the IKEA OS.
The StudentFlauger: No frills OS bundled with Text Editor, SpreadSheet, DBase (for those research projects), and a Web Browser (again, for research projects, and to view **** when you're killing time before a deadline). Optional extra: the Deadline 2K, a prefab list of 2000 (printable) excuses for blowing a research paper deadline.
The PoppaMeister: Ideal for that businessman/father who likes to work from home occassionally so he can pretend he's actually spending time with his family. Comes complete with a wide range of business apllications, including "ÏKEA Presentations", a multi-media presentation suite, "ÏKEA Edit Pro" a text editor with hot keys to spew useless corporate jargon, a spreadsheet, database, chequebook balancer, and an F12 function to "Call Techie" every time he comes up with a new and interesting way of crashing the system.
The Mumzieker: For that stay at home mom. Massive cookie and soup recipe database included, and allows you to store more family recipes in a password protected, triple encryped file of their own. Also comes ready to plug in up to 15 webcams for monitoring the baby's room, the teen's room, and hubby's office with a neato "nekkid secretary" detection algorythm.
Th GamerLamer: Optimized to work with 3-D rendered heavy graphic processor hog games, and designed to crash spontaneously whenever someone tries to install something usefull/productive on the hard drive.
wanders off whistling "Oh, what a wonderful world"
-Grelmar
[edited by: Macguru at 9:58 pm (utc) on April 5, 2004]
But according to the furniture store, the magazine forgot that Mr Kamprad has not owned Ikea since 1982.
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
And of course Ingvar and IKEA are going to argue he doesn't really own it, because if he does, then they're liable for a really big tax bill.
<reason for edit> brain-finger-keyboard interface error</edit>
Ingvar "donated" the company in 1982 and lives in Switzerland so he can dodge Swedish taxes - brilliant scam!
Ingvar "donated" the company in 1982 and lives in Switzerland so he can dodge Swedish taxes - brilliant scam!
I wouldn't call it a scam, I'd call it common sense. In a country with the highest taxes in the world and where receiving social benefits rather than promoting economic growth and wealth building has been the policy in vogue for the last 30 years, the only option you have is to vote with your feet.
As a result of a perverted taxation system put in place by hard core left wing politics, financial assets have been systematically transferred out of Sweden for a long time. The government's own estimate is around $30 billion. This is a low estimate, the real number may be up to ten times that amount.
In the long run such an absurd taxation system can of course not be sustained. Harmonization with the EU tax structure and adaptions to the global economy will inevitably bring about major changes, perhaps in just a few years time. When that happens, I'm sure that Mr Kamprad will consider the option to resume direct ownership of the IKEA company again.
Some people hate and despise what some other people love and admire. That story is as old as humanity.
This is a crazy world where so many rich and or famous people suffer from gambling habits, sex addiction, drug addiction, pedophilia, narcissism, and whatever the heck makes a person steal from Macy's for kicks.
Ever heard any of those types of stories about Bill or Melinda Gates? No, they will go down in history (rightly so) as the most charitable couple who ever lived. Think their kids will be fiilthy rich? Rich, yep, but most of their money will go to the better the world, not to their kids.
To all of those who hate Bill Gates, what are you doing to make the world a better place?
[usatoday.com...]
But where did the money that they're so charitable with come from? Bill Gates has not contributed anything to the development of computing, getting rich on the ability to make money from other people's efforts - and contributing to a situation where technological progress is being held back (see numerous complaints on this forum for examples of this).
Microsoft is not a story about creativity and invention - it is a story about piracy and greed.
Gates didn't build DOS - he bought it for a song. He didn't invent Windows, he copied the idea from Steve Jobs and Apple. Gates didn't invent the spreadsheet - he copied the idea from Visacalc.
Along that way, it is a story of using business muscle to over power better ideas that should have won out in the market place.
Much of why Microsoft is so hated in this environment is best summed up by Microsoft themselves when they said their strategy for the internet was to
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish the competition. That has been Microsofts battle plan since the beginning. It was not to create, adapt, and innovate - it was to embrace the standard, extend/obfuscate the standard, and extinguish the standard. aka: wordperfect, lotus, novell, stacker, netscape, real player, symbian, palm, and next up is AOL and Google.
IBM fired a shot across the bow when they started pushing their linux server series last year.
This year, its their "The Future is open linux" campaign. Ridicule IBM if you want, but they still hold a lot of perceptual clout.
With more and more PC makers embracing Linux as a bundled OS option for delivery, MS's power is increasingly threatened.
And if there's one thing MS definitely DOESN'T understand, it's what people want in internet content and usability. They've been trying for years to become THE internet portal, and year after year, they've done nothing but lose market share.
And an MS search engine? Excuse me while I go and laugh for a half hour... short wait ensues ok I'm back. MS can't even make their own site navigable and informative, nor can they make it easy, or even possible sometimes, to find information you need there. If there's technical information I need from the MS site, I use google to find it, not their own internal search, which is less than useless. That, in and of itself, pretty much tells the story of how successfull the MS search engine will be.
>Gates didn't build DOS - he bought it for a song. He didn't invent Windows, he
>copied the idea from Steve Jobs and Apple. Gates didn't invent the spreadsheet -
>he copied the idea from Visacalc.
I call it business sense. Many websites succeed by taking the model of someone else's existing site, but making one bigger/better/easier/etc. (I even know of a forum or two that came about like this.)
I think Bill is awesome. I thank him for what he has done. I don't think we would have the unified PC experience we all benefit from right now, without Bill. It's doubtful I would be typing this message without Microsoft doing what they have done. Think about it.
I hate some MS products, and I may not agree with all their practices, but Gates/MS/Windows played a huge part in what we have today.
>their strategy for the internet was to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish the competition
And how many webmasters here wouldn't want to do the same? It's business.
I have to disagree.
MS takes models, but creates worse copies.
Nothing creative here.
And, yes, I hate this, even if it is a winning business model.
<added>maybe I've not understood your statement</added>
Let's just bash MS some more, Gates can take it. ;)
Hmm, you didn't invent Perl, nor did you invent fora, or SEO fora, or webmaster fora. Nor did you invent the PC you used to write the code for this forum. Did you have a hand in the AND circuit? Hmm, nope, that was Tesla...
It appears that ideas aren't all that important. It's the execution of an idea that is important.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." -Isaac Newton
There is no creation ex nihilo. Give the invention bit a rest. Solomon observed, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
and
"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.".
Wise words. Unless of course you just want to bash MS. If so, then carry on. ;)
