AS WE SAID in another story earlier, Bill Gates was sat in a chair in a museum in Berlin tonight, and gave a whole series of remarkable sound bites to the assembled audience of CEOs, CTOs, venture capitalists, and one lone hack.
But surely one of his more remarkable claims here at the Etre conference in Old Berlin was the following bite.
Bill said that developing its next generation of Windows operating system software will cost as much as it cost the United States government to put a man on the Moon. That?d be Neil Armstrong.
What?s not remarkable are the amount of dollars ? it?s fully forty years in five years time when the USA had that man step down on Planet Green Cheese saying it was one great step for mankind.
No, there?s been a heap of inflation between then and now, and the dollars in themselves aren?t important ? what?s important is that Bill thinks that the two events are somehow congruent.
He admitted to the audience of people at the Etre conference that it would take Microsoft a little longer than it expected to produce the operating system, given that it would have to take advantage of the fantastic hardware developments that were happening.
We checked our notes again. Bill definitely said that the next version of Windows costs as much as the US spent putting a man on the Moon.
Next story. Bill says hardware drives the industry, not software. Oh, and some pictures.
Source:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12143
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