[Am-info] Royal Bank of Canada -- not moving past Microsoft

[Gene Gaines]

,


Royal Bank of Canada and I have seem different views of Gates
and Microsoft.

Royal Bank appears to believe that Gates is a great innovator
and is responsible for making small computers and operating
systems accessible to the masses.

But I believe that Gates is responsible for preventing good operating
systems from being available to the masses.

I do know that, seven years ago, Royal Bank was an aggressive
"only Microsoft here" operation.  I'll send an email on that
later.

First,

A look at the Royal Bank of Canada's web sites, using Royal
Bank's web search capability.

Number of documents found:

Documents containing "Microsoft"   1000
Documents containing "Bill Gates"    18
Documents containing "Linux"          2 (in an ad by a web hosting company)
Documents containing "SCO Group":     0

(Note that a large number of Royal Bank pages and documents have
both French and English versions, so cut the above numbers in
half to eliminate English/French duplicate versions of the same
text.)

Here is an excerpt from a Royal Bank publication sent to
customers:

Royal Bank Letter
Vol. 79 N=B0. 3 =97 Summer 1998 =97 Empires of the Mind

...

Twenty years ago, nobody =96 well, almost nobody =96 had ever heard
of Bill Gates. He was a mere 23 years old, and had formed a
company based on his work as a teenaged student developing a
programming language for the first microcomputer, the MITS
Altair. During the reign of mainframe computers the size of city
buses, the gangly young man looked like an ineffectual dreamer.
He talked of a seemingly fantastic vision of a fully functional
computer on every office desk =96 or, more outlandishly, in every
home.

Today, Bill Gates is a household name even in households
occupied by folks who quaintly think that language is solely
concerned with words, and that hardware is something you buy in
a hardware store. As chairman and chief executive officer of
Microsoft Corp., the world's largest supplier of software for
personal computers, Gates heads a vast global enterprise. He is
a darling of the media, writes a popular newspaper column, and
is a best-selling author and a leading philanthropist.

He is arguably the most famous business personality since Henry
Ford, a mythic figure with whom he shares many distinctions.
Both came to dominate an industry almost personally. Both,
indeed, came to personify an age =96 Ford the age of machinery,
Gates the age of cybernetics. Both believed in making the
precious fruits of technology available to the masses by
rendering them easier to acquire and use.

But the main similarity between these two entrepreneurial giants
( aside, perhaps, from being unbelievably rich) is that they
both proved to be innovators of the highest order. An innovator
is someone who finds and introduces new ways of doing things.
Innovation is often confused with invention, but invention comes
first and innovation after. Innovation takes up where invention
leaves off.

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, and Bill Gates did not
invent computer software. What they did was take an existing
product and work to make it accessible to the ordinary citizen =96
Ford with the simple design and assembly line techniques that
produced his Model T and Model A, Gates with operating systems
that enable people to work or entertain themselves with
incredibly powerful computers that can literally sit on their
laps.

....


Gene Gaines
gene.gaines@gainesgroup.com
Sterling, Virginia