Windows Vista Tour - Bill Gates does Jon Stewart's Daily Show

Bill Gates kicked off his world tour to promote Windows Vista's worldwide retail release by appearing on the Jon Stewart's Daily show. This promised to be an interesting meeting as Gates isn't known for irreverent conversation. Stewart gave the Gates appearance a double sized interview slot. Most of his interviews appear after the final commercials for the last segment only. Only a few interviews get final two segments before the Stewart introduces Colbert's show which follows.

The conversation was snappy and Gates appeared comfortable against Stewart's goading wit. Not surprisingly some of the exchanges appeared scripted. Stewart picked up the issue of security flaws in Microsoft products. He asked how Microsoft can outsmart a worm created by a Danish 13 year old hacker. Gates joked that they hire 14 year olds. This was Gates segue into a few of the key Vista security features including web filters and parental controls.

The interview was a bit thin on laughs but it was an historic meeting. It seems that Jon Stewart has become a sort of establishment gateway to the perceived hip young demographic. Politicians have tolerated the Daily Show's interviews for years and now cultural icons in need of a lift are reaching out to Stewart. Last year it was the Oscars and this year it's Bill Gates and the Windows operating system.

Windows has taken a beating lately seeing much of its dominance under attack from upstarts like Linux. This is mainly because of the dominance the Internet has on the operating system experience. The current software - as - service computing paradigm threatens Microsoft. It's probably no accident that Daily Show's own John Hodgman appears as the PC in the famous "I'm a Mac" ads. The new version of Windows is likely to be released to more yawns than cheers. Compared that to the Windows 95 retail release where people were lining up at midnight to get a copy. This release is likely to be a disappointment.

 

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8 comments
Posted by www.gizmogates.com on June 19,2007 at 3:02 AM

vista is best

Posted by MAC on February 8,2007 at 11:02 PM
I was a PC guy for my entire life (I'm 34) and have just converted to Apple. Everything works fine on apple and they always have all the drivers you need ect...Since they switched to the Intel chip they're not any more expensive either. The only drawback I can see is online gaming. They have to catch up on that part.
The beauty about the future is the OS won't matter anymore because most everything will be online.
Posted by Mike on January 31,2007 at 1:58 AM
Windows 2k was good...until Windows XP came along.  Windows 2k is THE slowest booting OS. I boot XP in 15 or less seconds.  Windows 2000 took 30+ seconds.  And my PC isn't a slow piece of junk.  I don't have ANY stability issues with XP.  My laptop is running Vista Ultimate and I don't have any stability issues either.  It responds just as fast as XP as well.

On another note...if you don't like the OS, go create a better one.
Posted by Wayde on January 30,2007 at 1:35 PM
I'm still waiting for them to fix ME
Posted by kather on January 30,2007 at 12:28 PM
i dunt nowats going on
Posted by xntrk on January 30,2007 at 11:36 AM
More versions of windows???

It hurts me inside.  How bout they fix ONE of the many step-children they've developed and THEN decide on making a new OS based on and OLD OS that was broke'd to begin with.  Confused?  Let me dumb it down a bit.  Candy-coated poop is still tastes bad.  Build a new OS, Microsoft. From scratch.  Not from the patchwork foundation win 95/98 sat on.  In my opinion, by far the best windows OS is still Win2K pro.
Posted by LinuxLinus on January 30,2007 at 11:30 AM
Ha.  BSD - open source baby all the way.
Posted by Brando on January 30,2007 at 11:08 AM
I agree that Vista is hardly receiving the popular support of Windows 95, but few other operating systems have in the last decade.  That's simply because few OS' feature the radical improvements that 95 offered, and in some cases Vista fails to do so, too.  However, Microsoft's new product is still an impressive jump on previous versions of Windows.  Perhaps, too much.

The main attraction of Vista is Aero, the brilliant new graphical facelift.  Unfortunatel,y it requires some impressive 3D accelerator support, a first for an operating system.  This, along with relatively steep CPU requirements, could be the downfall of Vista.

I, for one, would like to have it.  I agree with MS that pretty graphics certainly are easy on the peepers (especially during a long work day).  On that note, I'd also like a Blu-ray packing, cell processor using PlayStation 3.  Unfortunately, I don't have hundreds of dollars laying around for either Microsoft's new OS or an overpriced console.