When Bill Gates first heard about Linux
WORLDWATCH
By Annikka Mutanen
Do you know who was responsible for telling Bill Gates about Linux for the first time?
My dear husband offers up this question to aquaintances at regular intervals. Then, as they shake their heads, he replies: "My wife."
The standard response is disbelief and a look that suggests hubby dear is completely mad. As his wife, I can assure you that this is not so. It's a true story.
As nearly everyone in the wired world knows, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, the founder and principal owner of the software behemoth Microsoft, the company responsible for the Windows operating system that runs in the majority of the world's PCs.
Eleven years ago, at the end of September 1994, Gates invited a group of Scandinavian journalists to London for an audience.
I was the young journalist, not long married, working for the Finnish News Agency (STT), who was prepared to fly off to London for a working weekend at just a few hours' notice.
My husband was already an intrepid internaut; he logged on and dug up the relevant information that allowed me to rough out Mr. Gates' position in the universe before the interview took place.
I was already well aware of one nuance linked to the subject in hand. The Finnish press had featured a whole bunch of articles on one Linus Torvalds.
Along with countless other super-nerds around the world, this young computer science student at the University of Helsinki had been working on a most excellent new operating system. It had been dubbed Linux.
By the latter half of 1994, Linux had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and - even better - it was absolutely free.
I read these pieces with interest - not least because Linus's sister and his mother were my colleagues at STT.
And so it was that when we were ushered into the great man's presence in a reception room at a plush London hotel, I asked with trembling voice whether Gates had heard of something called Linux.
He said he had not (I should perhaps point out at this stage that this is the weak link in the story, since I cannot vouch for the truth in Bill Gates's reply).
I presented to Gates my knowledge of Linux in two previously-prepared sentences.
"Oh, great. Free software", said Gates. Room enough in the world for that.
Gates added politely that this Linus was clearly a talented chap, since making an operating system is no easy business.
He did not, however, believe the statements of users, to the effect that Linux could run web servers more efficiently and more reliably than Microsoft's own Windows.
Now Gates knows a good deal more.
According to Technology Review, at the end of 2004, the open-source Linux had captured around 67% of web servers in corporate back-offices. Linux is also pecking away at the monopoly Microsoft enjoys in personal desktop and laptop computer operating systems.
A few years ago, Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO and Gates's warhorse, declared that: "Linux is a cancer".
In London back in 1994 Gates himself commented so tetchily about his then competitors that he, too, must by now have come up with some suitable pejorative term for Linux.
And what else did Bill Gates say eleven years ago?
He wanted to tell us about his company's new objective: a computer in every pocket.
Well, Linux is beavering away in pockets, too, for a start embedded in the smartphones made by Motorola and Panasonic and in Nokia's Internet Tablet.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.9.2005
ANNIKKA MUTANEN / Helsingin Sanomat
annikka.mutanen@hs.fi
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| 20.9.2005 - THIS WEEK |
 When Bill Gates first heard about Linux |
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