Regaining Control of Your Own Domain Name

How do People Feel About Bill Gates as Mr. Rogers

from the he-still-scares-us-all dept

Mon, Jun 19th 2000 11:44am — Mike Masnick

An article that looks at people's responses to the unavoidable downpour of Microsoft/Bill Gates commercials ensuring us all that everything will be okay. They talk with a number of advertising execs most of whom think it's a terrible campaign. Personally, you just get the feeling that the smirk on Gates' face isn't reassuring us, but laughing at us. It's like he can't even hide the fact that he's trying to pull one over on us, and he thinks he's so smart that it doesn't even matter.

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liz, 19 Jun 2000 @ 1:27pm

stupid witch hunt
bill gates is not evil incarnate, for god's sake. the man is a great businessman that built a great company and deserves to be recognized as such. yes, microsoft does whatever it takes to squash competitors. welcome to the world of capitalism. that's how it works. members of the media agree with the concept when it's putting food on their tables and paying for their kid's college education, but if big business gets rich from it, there's a problem. (unless, of course, by "big business" you mean Time Warner, News Corp, etc...) it's incredibly hypocritical. what would the everyone prefer microsoft do? step out of the way and let competitors slowly eat up their market share? altruism has no place in business and to exhibit such behavior would be corporate suicide. i've worked in companies that considered microsoft a competitor. there was no whining about how microsoft had unfair advantages. that would have been an acknowledgement that we had no real grounds to compete with MS. i don't think the general public is exactly outraged, either. microsoft knows how to play the game and plays it well. people respect that. bill gates didn't get to be the richest man in the world by "pulling one over on the public," and I don't think any sizable portion of the technologically literate population is going to stop buying MS products because they don't like the smirk on gates' face. it's not personal. to the customer it's about quality and price and bill gates' personality is irrelevant. give the guy a break.
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Mike (profile), 19 Jun 2000 @ 1:53pm

Re: stupid witch hunt
Okay... good points all around. Let's just be clear. I was only talking about the commercials in general and not him as a whole or Microsoft. I didn't say he was evil incarnate. My point was simply that the commercials did not seem to do what they were supposed to be doing, but rather came off as doing the opposite.

As for your other points, though, about Microsoft, to some extent I agree. Gates has made some very good moves from a business standpoint. He's also made some very questionable moves from an ethical standpoint. I still use MS products and made no suggestion I was going to stop.

My point was that throughout this whole ordeal Microsoft has appeared to refuse to take any of this seriously. That's what's amazing to me. Here's this company run by extraordinarily smart people, who seem to think this whole lawsuit is some sort of joke, and that it's being put upon them by a bunch of morons who they're not going to pay any attention to.
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