Kotaku
Sure Microsoft's recent Xbox Live issues ticked off a bunch of new Xbox 360 owners and led to the company promising to hand out a free game down the line, but it was really just a hiccup says Bill Gates in a recent interview with sister site Gizmodo.
Actually we're not entirely sure what he says. He seems to start speaking tongues halfway into his whole reliability-issue-was-a-hiccup comment. He says something about downloading curve, or something about him, or maybe he mentions peanuts, it's hard to say. But he definitely does call the Live reliability issue a hiccup. Can anyone else make sense of the full comment? Maybe he's spilling some beans about why Live was out. This is what I got:
Xbox live, which was immensely risky, we hadn't been in the hardware business. We even had a hiccup in terms of ahhhhh... me not downloading curve... on that one reliability issue we ran into it. But Xbox alone has been fantastic success. A huge asset for the company.
BIll Gates Explains the Difference Between Microsoft and Apple [Gizmodo]
Comments
Forgive Bill..he was too busy counting his billions of dollars to focus completely on what he was saying.
DUBYA TEE EFF?!
"Me not downloading curve?" File this one away for best quote of 2008. It may actually win.
So... the reliability of Live ran into a downloading curve, a risky venture to begin with, which caused a hiccup issue. Geez, even translated, that doesn't make sense.
Say what?
WHAT!?? That's possibly most nonsense I've ever heard from a non-institutionalized mouth.
He's talking about the RROD issue--that's the one major reliability issue they've run into. He was referring to the whole XBOX business unit as "XBOX Live," that's why he mentions that Microsoft "hadn't been in the hardware business." XBOX Live isn't a hardware business but the XBOX and XBOX 360 are.
I've become incapable of writing in English after reading that quote.
@elint6:
he still doesn't explain what's up with Live tho
Hmm, that definitely looked and sounded like he was stopping himself from revealing something.
Though I think what he meant for "me not downloading curve" was probably "we underestimated the downloading curve" as in its been more successful than we anticipated
Now that I think about it, this quote is pretty strong evidence that Bill Gates is a robot, and he had been running conflicting script there, which caused the equivalent of a verbal blue screen of death.
If a man of his wealth and stature can't seem to make sense, I see no reason to continue trying my best to avoid grammatical mistakes.
@neoakira:
no, he doesnt, but somehow I feel he was never talking about the Xbox Live issue. He just had some issue expressing his thoughts, but he was referring the entire time to the RROD issue as a "hiccup."
@elint6: I spoke with Wilson Rothman who did the interview and he says he believes Gates was talking about Live, because it was one of the things they had been talking about not during this clip as well.
"We had a hiccup in terms of ahhhhh..."
Well obviously he was getting a BJ when the interview was going on.
@ brian crecente
Thanks for the clarification. Now, I just want to agree with peryite.
Someone needs to ctrl+alt+del him. Time for a reboot Bill.
@elint6: I don't see how anyone else could interpret this differently. I know, you have to go on what the interviewer states, but just from the text, well...
Just like all the windows programs experience "hiccups" the first couple years right? Yeah XP may be good now but it wasnt long ago it was getting thrashed worse than Vista. For computing "experts" they sure have a lot of these so called "hiccups"
He definitely says learning curve, not downloading curve.
"or maybe he mentions peanuts," Very funny, I can not stop laughing.
Was that bill gates, or a beauty pagent question and answer transcript?
Yeah, the Live issues are a "Hiccup"
...if we are taking about something like Jennifer Mee and the 5 weeks of hiccups she had.
@Sparx88: Go watch the whole video. This is exactly what he's talking about; MS takes risks in innovation that other companies generally dont try.
If I had the hiccups for over 2 weeks, I would probably start to contemplate suicide.
Is it wrong that I have a little Portal related chuckle whenever I see the words "huge " and "success" in the same sentence these days.
@AGiES: "MS takes risks in innovation that other companies generally dont try."
I'm not quite sure which part of the 360 is an innovation but ok. Unfortunately even if that is true Miscrosoft seems to fail with these innovations (RRoD & Vista)
@ killtacular
I don't quite understand what you mean, but I'll try my best to answer. What I'm basically saying, going by the excerpt, is that if you remove the word "Live" from "XBOX Live" then RROD fits the "issue" perfectly because he's talking about the hardware business. Maybe he didn't really mean to say "Live" but the service-oriented Microsoft business strategy (that pushes a service like Live over products, although they are complementary in this case) just got him temporarily confused.
@AGiES: That's the funniest comment of the year. Microsoft is long known for being anything BUT innovative. What they are ridiculously great at is identifying others' good ideas and then creating the best in class for that idea.
The Gizmodo constant Apple/Microsoft thing in the comment section almost mirrors what we see here on Kotaku with the PS3/360.
It would be funny if every Gawker site had the same thing with two major players going on and the comments sections were always flooded with the two sides taking stabs and defending...or not.
@AGiES:
I have to disagree, MS is the biggest "me too" company in the world
Bill has no clue what is going on in the Xbox end of the company. I bet if you ask a question about Vista he will talk your ear off. Or just stare blankly at you and say, "Wanna play money tag!?"
@captltrl:
Thank Jeebus you aren't Charles Osborne then! (look him up on wikipedia)
@elint6: No :) I was saying I agree with your original interpretation of what he was saying- that it was about the RROD, not Live issues.
McWhertor's at CES now, right?
Maybe he can sneak up on Bill Gates and scare him. That usually cures my hiccups.
Well that was ... bizarre.
Maybe its just that I am not an Xbox 360 owner / LIVE subscriber, but it doesn't seem like the "hiccup" he is referring to is the outages over the past couple of weeks. It sounded more like something to do with LIVE at the very beginning... ?
/shrug
I dunno. It just sounded like he was talking about something else. Even though what he ended up saying made absolutely no sense. XD
"me not downloading curve"
Take a stand, Bill! I've heard Curve is a horrible gaming experience. Me not downloading it, either.
As far as the "hiccup" -- it's more like an elongated beer burp. I still can't get to the Marketplace or get an online game going.
Wow that's a real quoted comment right? Geez reading that made my head hurt faster than reading posts in a really bad forum.
@kingclip: i know exackly. HE is so funny.
@NeoAkira: The question he is responding to is more about the difference between approaches that Apple and MS have. Apple tends to stay in its own end of the pool, while MS trys its hand at alot of things (tablet PCs, Xbox, DVR...)
Bill Gates BBC interview
[news.bbc.co.uk]
lol
"ahhhhh... me not downloading curve... "
I smell a new meme...
@ChiisaiRamen: No, it's not really a quoted comment. It's Crecente's best, if flawed, attempt at transcribing a muddled sentence.
I think that Robo Bill was malfunctioning..
xbox live is unreliable.....Error, error.... Me not downloading.. Restarting in safe mode............/-\:/-\:/-\:/-\:
he clearly tripped over the cord.
Sounds like Ozzy Ozborne or something...
Go see some of the old DOJ testimony he gave when his company was convicted of being a monopoly - he comes across as either an incompetent fool or an almost child-like terrible liar. He seems terrible when he's put on the spot and under pressure (not that he's Mr Charisma normally, with his $5 hair cut and crummy glasses).
@AGiES: Actually, I'm quite confident that the ONLY word he says that I'm sure about is "downloading." I have tried again and again, and I can't here "learning."
hear, either
I think Xbox Live is directly tied to Robotic Bill's central processor/heart. So when RoboBill malfunctions/gets the "hiccups", Live does as well.
"NOW YOU SHALL ALL RECEIVE FREE GAME FOR SCREWY INTERVIEW"
I'd venture to say that, yes, at some point in my life peanuts have given me hiccups also.
nice, another quote to be run into the ground with poor jokes. no one bothered to ask him which game was free?
Honestly, I think Bill is wrong when it comes to his answer. Apple has always taken risks and quite frankly, their success ratio, while not perfect, is a lot better than Microsoft's. Microsoft would rather perfect something than create something. Considering they still haven't perfected anything, I think it is not a coincidence that the Apple brand is considered to be stronger in the marketplace.
@ killtacular
Makes sense. Anyways, I was about to say that we are reading way too much into this, but he is, after all, Bill Gates. And this is, afterall, Kotaku :)
That really sounds like the game creator from Grandma's Boy. Just imagine him breaking in in the robot voice "ME NOT DOWNLOADING CURVE, PLEASE SIT ON MY FACE".