[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Then Microsoft made the biggest mistake in its career: It
started making profits. But that didn’t happen without
competition. Just as there are now, there were other operating
systems available at the time, such as OS/2. But every one of these
other operating systems failed to make much headway in the
marketplace, because they simply didn’t work as well as
Windows….”
“I am not saying that Windows is totally flawless. It has some
errors, and sometimes it even shows its dreaded Blue Screen of
Death, but it’s impossible to write software that will work without
any problems on millions of computers all around the world. At
least they try to fix it as soon as new error is reported. But here
comes a new rival: The wonderful Linux, written by a smart kid from
Finland. What an incredible story! He writes it while he is still a
student, and then gives it out for free. It’s almost like a teddy
with a torn ear, in comparison to the big mean grizzly bear
Microsoft.”
“Because it’s free and open-source, people all over the world
contribute to the development process. I admit that it’s really
cool to think about it in this way, but is it a better operating
system? I don’t know. I don’t like it. I’ve tried to install Redhat
on my computer once or twice, and the first time I couldn’t get the
network card to work. When I tried it several months later, after
the new version came out, my network card was detected in less than
a second. But in the meantime I got a new, at the time huge, hard
drive and I had to cheat Redhat a little bit, because it didn’t
want to play along with my 14 GB Maxtor. I had to remove it a week
later anyway, because it was screwing up my Windows partition.”