Before I start, this isn’t some impassioned plea for one side or the other on the DRM debate (but I guess I’m acting a little like a headline whore mainstream journalist by including the words play and fair.
Gruber, in his rather great web site, Daring Fireball, writes about whether the interview with Bill Gates conducted by Newsweek’s Steven Levy was fair enough.
I agree with Gruber. It was bogus.
We expect Gates to be in favour of Vista but his statement that:
“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.”
is, as Gruber writes,
Flabbergastingly false.
I may be old-fashioned here but when an interviewee comes up with something that is flabbergastingly false enough to be considered at best a downright lie or perhaps worse a cynical loogie in the face of the general public whom Gates assumes must be stupid, hairless tree-dwellers, then I would expect a journalist to actually comment on it. The article read like a press release. Was that the price that Newsweek paid to get Gates on board for the interview?
I can only assume that when you’re that rich and you’re trying to buy your way into heaven, you have to have some sort of mental aberration from sleeping on sacks of dollar bills. We know the man has some sort of problems. He can probably remember most of the lines of code he’s ever written but he couldn’t recall the shady dealings his company was convicted of during the infamous flop that became the DoJ trial. Now he’s under the delusion that Windows is secure.
My explanation for the latter is this:
Bill Gates doesn’t do his own IT, is not the first person to see his own email and has probably never had to actually reboot one of his own computers. He’s never had to deal with spyware or viruses because he has legions of Microsofties to filter everything for him. He doesn’t use instant messengers, has no idea what Web 2.0 is and would be very surprised if he realised the morass that his customers find themselves in. He honestly believes he is being picked on.
My explanation for Stephen Levy’s lack of journalistic integrity:
His editors told him to cut that bit out as Bill’s first answer was not convincing. And it’ll fuel the link revenues anyway. Bill has a history of not being an effective speaker and I can guess that his first statement was probably as unconvincing as his interviews during the DoJ cross-examination. And Levy doesn’t give a damn.
