[TV Show] Inside Bill’s Brain

March 31, 2020
4 min read

I’ve recently got a new OLED TV and wanted to see something in 4K, so I started with Netflix and the first thing that popped out was this three part documentary about Bill Gates. It is interesting how it was divided in parts instead of making just one movie, sure there were three different stories, but I don’t think anyone would watch this documentary one by one in a span of couple of weeks. My guess you would either binge it or you would stop whenever.

The visual quality was indeed great, it looked very real on the big screen, although there was some historical footage, which was so blurry you couldn’t recognize faces (but it was very rare).

I’m not a movie critic and I don’t watch a lot of documentaries (unfortunately), but I’ve had a couple of thoughts while watching this I wanted to share.

Western Rich

Although I’m very interested in western culture and I’m much more knowledgeable about it than most of my friends and acquaintances it was still shocking to see two of the richest people in the world talking in the car with one of them driving. I know it is part of the acting, but still, they looked very natural and I don’t see Russian richest people behaving the same way.

The Reason Behind Windows 8

It’s not a secret that Windows 8 was one of the most hated operating systems in recent time, with all those tiles and all-screen interfaces. I didn’t hate it, but it was not loved by me either, but looking at the shots of Gates working I could see how all those decisions got made. Focused management work, you read one article at a time, you write in one document – I bet it worked perfectly for him and a lot of senior management in Microsoft.

Also, as a side note, it was interesting seeing Microsoft ecosystem there, with PCs, Microsoft Outlook, Office etc. As someone who is all-in with Apple, refreshing look.

Books

I was surprised to see Bill reading paper books, I even got a desire to read couple of physical books myself. For the longest time I’m reading either on my iPad or iPhone and lately added audiobooks.

Also the amount of reading is astonishing and those are not thin novels or bullshit leadership books. They are deep and focused on something very niche and to be able to read 14 books in the span of two weeks is just amazing.

Nuclear Power

I actually like the way it was portrayed in this TV show. Because of the two big disasters in the minds of the people of course it has a bad rap in minds, but looking forward it is the most realistic source of energy from what we have available right now.

It looks more like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ad and story about it and all the work it does than a story about Bill’s brain. It’s not a bad thing, they do interesting and important work, but I was hoping for something different considering the name of the documentary.

All this talk about reading and Gates says almost nothing about it during the documentary. You hear other people describing it, but it would be much more interesting to hear the process from Bill Gates himself.

You get a glimpse of how he manages his time (or someone is managing it for him), but a more deep dive would be appreciated.

Looking at the name of the documentary and my expectations I would love a more personal story about himself and not the foundation.

Bill Gates Says His ‘Greatest Mistake ever’ Was Microsoft Losing to Android

July 7, 2019
4 min read

Tom Warren at The Verge wrote an article about Bill Gates interview and I want to start with one particular part.

Many had assumed that Microsoft’s missed mobile opportunity was a Steve Ballmer era mistake. [Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone]() , calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”

This is a pet peeve of mine. Ballmer did laugh at the price of the iPhone, but what nobody mentions again and again – Apple cut the price shortly after the release of the phone. The price was too high at that time. This doesn’t excuse Microsoft form blowing the mobile, but I think journalists should be factual.

Regarding Gates statement, Google did win the smartphone war, but after that Microsoft became so much more. For the user all of this is good. The more companies there are the better. If Microsoft dominated mobile market together with the desktop, I don’t think anything good would come out of it.

I’m mostly all-in in the Apple ecosystem, but I still use Microsoft Office and gladly pay for it (as Microsoft made it pretty easy). I try not to use Google products, from the privacy perspective. I have Google account at work, but try not to use anything for personal stuff.

Another interesting point is that in technology somehow, we’ve come to the place, where competition is not as strong. We have one dominant player, second – distant one and nothing after that. Take desktop OS as an example, there is Windows which is dominant, than there is a macOS and … it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. Only now, when the market went to tablets, do you see ChromeOS emerging mostly in schools and universities.

Search is another example. In most of the countries there is Google and nothing else. In post-soviet countries Yandex mostly dominates with Google being second. But even Microsoft with all of its money and position with desktop OS can’t make Bing a worthy contender. And taking it back to the Bill Gates quote – mobile OS. There is Android which dominates market share. There is iPhone which dominates hardware revenue and nothing else. A couple of players tried to enter the market, but without the 3rd party developer support there won’t be users and without users, developers won’t have reason to build their apps for another OS.

Although two players make competition, but duopoly is not the best situation. For most of the people there is no choice. In the mobile OS market, if you want to choose another player you loose a lot. If you want to leave iOS for Android, you will become green bubble, you will lose access to your movies and TV shows, maybe music you bought. You won’t have first party end-to-end encrypted messages. You won’t be able to use Apple Watch. AirPods won’t work as good as with an iPhone.

Consider car manufacturers. First of all there are a couple. You have an actual choice. Japanese, German, French, Italian, Korean, American, etc. If you drove BMW and want your next car to be Audi, what will you lose? At most the membership in the Facebook group. Nothing else. You will just change your car.

Vendor lock-in is an interesting dilemma. I benefit from it a lot in the day-to-day life. Having everything from Apple makes it play together nicely. As an example, I unlock my Apple Watch with my iPhone and later my MacBook with an Apple Watch. It all syncs, I use Apple Music as it works better with a Watch and Siri, although Spotify might even be a better product. But on the other hand, if Apple starts (or one might say already started) making shitty notebooks, it will be hard to buy Windows PC or Chromebook, as they won’t play so nicely with my other devices.

And here we come to a point. Although I am a strong believer in the market making everything right, maybe in some cases some intervention is good? It helped to stop Microsoft dominance, because it felt government looking over the shoulder at every move the company made, so decisions were informed by that. Should the US government break-up Apple? I don’t think so, but we should be asking those questions and not blindly following everything the company does.

Windows Software

September 24, 2014
3 min read

Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.

Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.

Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.

Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.

Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.

Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.

Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.

Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.

That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones.