Microsoft Research: Also Fumbling the Future
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 29, 2008 at 3:49 PM PT
Success, as the old adage claims, has many fathers–even Apple’s success, much as CEO Steve Jobs would like to think otherwise. So it’s interesting to hear that among the progenitors of Apple’s current renown is Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research.
Speaking at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles today, Rashid talked up his Apple (AAPL) street cred, reminding attendees that he helped develop Mach, the operating system microkernel that’s now the foundation of Mac OS X. “If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly, I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago,” Rashid said. 
“If you’d asked me 25 years ago if I thought code I was [writing would be] running today on a cellphone, my reaction would have been, ‘What’s a cellphone?’ It just shows you things really do survive and get used in interesting ways.”
Used in interesting ways in Apple products, anyway. Just ask PARC.
[Image Credit: Someecards]
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Comments
Honestly he would not recommend?
Yeah, why use something that just works, when you can get stuff that requires constant monitoring? Vast amounts of processor cycles to protect and clean up predatory attacks from virus makers and malware vendors, who would not exist today if it weren’t for the massive security flaws in Windows intentionally left wide open? (Don’t forget, Microsoft bought one malware vendor (Gator) and then their anti-malware software refused to detect the offending software.
Posted by Eric Welch at October 30th, 2008 at 8:49 am