That was very enjoyable to watch. While I have little interest in Microsoft anymore, I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates and the road they paved.

I have to agree. Bill Gates is cool; Microsoft isn't. Both have good and bad deeds, but on the whole, the former has good karma, and the latter doesn't.

Yeah. It was The Road Ahead that caused them trouble.

I really enjoyed that. When Bill talks about growing Microsoft, and the early days, it always make me remember really great products like early Excel and Word, and the sheer excitement when MS Access (Cirrus) came out.

It's kind of a shame that BG kinda let the technical aspect get out of control. The state of current MS tools, critical stuff like VS2005, is deplorable in comparison to the tight good performing code that MS used to have. I remember laughing at early versions of NetBeans, but slightly clunky though it is, I would much rather be in NetBeans than in VS.

This sloppiness is all over the most recent versions of Office also, and it seems pretty clear that the race to the bottom in software hiring has really hurt Microsoft, especially with the devastating mess that was the Longhorn 'reboot' and Vista mess.

That's rather unfair. Visual Studio 2008 is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and much more responsive than NetBeans. NetBeans is cleaner, but once you get used to VS you'll realize it's the best IDE. This, coming from someone who used to live and die by IntelliJ & NetBeans. Visual Studio is a really great IDE, and togther with the .NET Framework is one of Microsoft's greatest achievements and a huge boon for coders working on MS' platforms.

I agree with the rest of what you said though, but I don't think it's applicable to VS.NET. For instance, you could have talked about how bloated Office has become; while it still has tons of good new features, they're inefficiently done. You could have discussed how while Windows is a decent design/principle it has an increasingly more shitty implementation with each and every revision. But Visual Studio?? Well, I wish I could use it on Linux right now!

Well, I came from VC 6.0, and I found that VS 2003 wasn't too bad, but VS 2005, on a 2 Gig dual proc Dell laptop runs like crap. I get frequent pauses and delays while typing, and it just breaks your flow. (to be fair NB can sometimes do this too)

However, the worst aspect for me with VS2005 is the brain dead UI. Example 1. Pop-up tabs next to the scroll bars. Nuts. Example 2. The remove the output window by hitting escape that was in VC6.0 is gone. Nuts. Example 3: Horribly slow output window and constant unnecessary redraws. See next para.

Try this and let me know if it works. Run any app over remote desktop, like Word, Outlook etc, then try running VS. At least on my setup, RDP is great over broadband running almost anything, but when I run VS, I get bizarre slow bottom to top refreshes about every 5 seconds, or when I type. This makes it almost unusable unless you look away from the screen when typing.

I used to do quite a lot of development on a server box running VS, rather than run it locally and have to go to Oracle over a VPN connection. This is now almost unbearable.

To be fair, I think .NET is at least decent, and C# is a friendly enough language, with delegates and some nice things in 3.0. (and really nice in 3.5!), but development of anything outside the MS ecosystem is like living in a vandalized neighborhood. e.g. Most cool stuff is broken on Windows.

I shouldn't disparage Windows. I think the kernel is decent. I know how to program GUIs. XP has always been rock solid for me. But ... Windows has been left behind by most of the fun stuff, and it's just irrelevant to most interesting development outside of a corporate environment.

There's a Mac in the background in the 6th picture.

Newsweek also has an article about the re-shoot of the famous 70's staff photo - http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636

And audiotrack, to go with the slideshow.

I enjoyed this.

Is there some reason that alpha-males like Steve Ballmer always wear pink shirts? A play for contrast?

I know from experience that such shirts tend to come as gifts from hot girlfriends. So if there is any correlation between alpha-males and such shirts it is probably related to a correlation between alpha-males and hot girlfriends.

When was Steve Balmer an alpha male? Steve Jobs, sure, but Balmer? He's a big, fat, bald guy who has spent his whole career in Gates's shadow.

He's a very, very, very rich beta-male.

So by your reasoning there can only be one alpha-male at Microsoft at a time?

The definition of beta male is that they act as second-in-command, subservient to the alpha. Usually, they're either dethroned, former alpha males or future alphas on the way up.

It could be an attempt to project an image of innocence. Or could be a self put down. Something like: I will wear ping, so I better make it up in behaviour.

Then I will wear pong so I dont' have to behave well :)

I thought this was great.

I really think corporations should open up their media archives, such as photos, videos, press releases, and put them all online.

I certainly wouldn't have seen it on the front page of cnn.com -- CNN is not something I regularly check online.

I come to HN mainly for the general interest stories (as opposed to the strictly "hacker news" posts), so I'm glad this is on here. Most of the time the comments from HN contributors are of equal interest to the story itself. They are generally quite insightful and definitely add value.

Yes I can go to reddit for this kind of stuff, but I find the comments aren't of the same quality and I don't really like the colours/layout, nor the ads. I much prefer HN's simple lo-fi layout.

I understand your point completely, and I agree. I, too, am an exceedingly awesome world-renowned hacker who has been unfairly treated here. PG doesn't really care, or he likes it this way, or he's too busy doing other things. We need to build a TRUE hacker's community, and this website isn't it.

Remember: the internet routes around damage.