Monday, October 6, 2003

The Dork Prince


Posted by MacDood
link

Comment: and he's really really really rich---

I don’t usually like to descend to the level of taking potshots (or participating in Mac versus PC debates), but I just can’t resist mentioning Bill Gates’s official “home page” (thanks to my brother Bobby for turning me on to this, by the way). The site, which collects a number of Chairman Bill’s most vital essays and speeches, is a revealing glimpse into what passes for deep thought in Redmond these days.


The tone is immediately set by a photo of our hero, hand clenched at his breast, staring off into the distance, the mildly smug expression of a man who “gets it” on his face. And what does he get? Well, just take a look at the witty anecdote emblazoned in big bold letters beneath his portrait:



“My daughter and I were walking down the street and I said, ‘Let’s go to the record store,’ and she said, ‘What’s a record?’”

How insightful! Truly, he is a man with his finger on the pulse of technology and youth culture!


What’s that—you’re not convinced? Then scroll down the page a little further and marvel at the profundity of his Wall Street Journal op-ed/marketing piece, provocatively titled “Why I Hate Spam!” Only a truly bold leader would be willing to take such a controversial stand on something so near and dear to the hearts of email users everywhere. Obviously, Bill has an almost preternatural ability to home in on and analyze the important issues of the day (Spam == Bad)!


All of this sarcasm may sound a bit snotty, considering I’m picking on targets as easy as Bill Gates and the notoriously wooden Microsoft marketing machine, but it gets at an annoyance I’ve had for a long time: the tendency of average people to think of Bill Gates as some sort of all-knowing technological oracle whose every utterance is a glimpse into the future (witness, for example, the late night TV ads that offer a quote from Bill Gates as evidence of the growing market for public access Internet terminals). Let’s get this straight people: Bill’s record as a businessman is stellar, but when it comes to bleeding edge technology, most of the better webloggers out there are a lot more savvy!


(Update: Here, for the benefit of posterity, is a PDF of the Gates home page as it stands today.)

[Sci-Fi Hi-Fi]

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