Happily N’Ever After Double Bill [DVD]
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Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
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Happily N’Ever After 1 & 2,
Four stars for the first one and Five stars for the second.
The first one is not as good as the second one but is still a good family film. Since watching the second one (Happily N’Ever After 2) I have to say that this one in hindsight isn’t as good however we still really enjoyed it. I can see that it has had quite a few negative reviews and everyone is entitled to their own view on it but for us we still really enjoyed the film. This one is based on the whole Cinderella and wicked step mother tale and didn’t have as many funny moments in it as the second one but I would definitely say it is still worth a watch especially for younger girls/kids.
The second one is an all round good family film. We had no idea that they had made a Happily N’Ever After 2 until seeing it on TV, just that they had made the first one which we had enjoyed. The characters Mambo and Munk are back again in this sequel and it was even funnier than the first one. In the second one we see the tale of Snow White and how she has to learn responsibility to manage the kingdom rather than just going out partying with her friends. Some of the scenes had us laughing out loud (can anyone say “Holler!”) such as the club with the girls jumping the queue and the seven dwarves just being well themselves! If you want a good kids film that you can watch with them without being bored then this is definitely the one for you as it’s definitely enjoyable for all ages:)
Happily N’Ever After [DVD]
Happily N’Ever After 2 [DVD]
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|A compelling insight into the man behind Microsoft,
Regardless of what you may think about Microsoft, its products, or Bill Gates himself, this book is a compelling read. Released in 1992, this book only covers up to the release of Windows 3.0, but that is most of the real story, most people know the rest. This work covers Gates’ childhood and education, his early introduction to computing, and the foundation of the Microsoft empire.
The book does not fawn over Gates, nor does it condemn him, the authors are investigative newspaper reporters, and have been thorough in their research. The story covers every aspect of Gates’ life, including his social background, personal relationships, and business relationships.
The technical coverage is excellent and accurate, while not so deep as to loose the non-technical reader. The original development of Microsoft BASIC for the MIPS Altair and other early microcomputers, the development of DOS and its displacement of CP/M, and the struggle to make Windows a Mac beater are all covered.
As a history of micro computing, the book is excellent, every key player, (Gary Kildall, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Dan Bricklin etc.), and development is covered in fascinating detail and in an historical context that really demonstrates the importance, and influence of these pioneers on todays computing and applications environment.
Bill Gates does little to give away the real man behind Microsoft; this book provides insights into a complex personality not normally perceived by the popular media. If nothing else, this book will give substance to any opinions or prejudices you may have about Gates, and may actually change those opinions!
Includes a middle section of archive photographs.
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|critical, but admiring: a balanced book, if outdated,
This is really a story of how Gates led Microsoft to its apex, ending in about 1992. It is well written and a good balance bewteen criticism, an explanation of the business model, and historical detail. The story is, to put it mildly, remarkable no matter what you think of MS and Gates.
While a student at Harvard in December, 1974, Bill Gates III and Paul Allen informed Ed Roberts by telephone that they had invented a BASIC computer language for the MITS Altair 8080, which was the first “personal computer” kit for hobbyists. Could they license it along with each Altair kit, Gates asked, to customers for a royalty fee? It was an audacious proposal, because not only had Gates and Allen invented no such thing, but they neither owned an Altair kit nor did they even know the technical specifications for the Intel 8080 chip. Skeptical of their claim, Roberts replied that whoever demonstrated a working BASIC would win the account: Gates and Allen were in competition, he told them, with 50 other “geeks” who already had made the same claim. Gates and Allen then hunkered down for 8 weeks to write the first BASIC for a microcomputer. The resulting “software”, which immediately won over Roberts, was the first application of what would become Microsoft BASIC. Gates was 19.
As the company founders, Gates and Allen shared a vision that virtually every home and every office desk would eventually have a PC on them, all operating with their software. To run Microsoft full time, Gates dropped out of Harvard in January, 1977. Their business quickly expanded beyond the Altair as competing brands of personal computers emerged, including the Tandy from Radio Shack and the Apple II computer; they were also called upon to program BASIC into a number of other electronic devices. All along, Gates’ goal was to gain market share, in effect setting the software standard for most, if not all, PC users. As a true believer who intimately knew the product, Gates was the principal salesman, while Allen concentrated on technical development.
During this formative period, Microsoft’s corporate culture was established. Perhaps as a result of hiring many of his programmers straight out of university, Microsoft’s offices (and later the campus in Redmond, Washington) took on the look and feel of a college campus, that is, an informal and a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere with “late hours, loud music, walls full of junk, anything goes dress, Coke, adrenaline, unbuttoned behavior.” Employees tended to be very young with a programmer or engineering mentality; they designed their products for tech-savvy customers – male in their early 20s – like themselves, a kind of fellowship for computer adepts. Like Gates, they loved to play with and program electronic gadgets.
Microsoft hired the brightest programmers with demonstrated practical abilities. Employees were also expected to work extremely long hours as a team toward a common goal, not as strident individualists. Gates encouraged them to develop their entrepreneurial passions, forcefully advancing their own ideas of useful products for new markets. Overseeing it all was Gates, who gained the reputation of a harsh and challenging critic with a relentless drive for excellence, whether to beat the competition or out of fear of falling behind in such a fast-changing industry. As the sole remaining founder after Allen’s departure in 1983, Gates remained deeply involved in both technical and business details as well as the general direction of company strategy. Nonetheless, as the principal revenue generators, Microsoft’s product groups increasingly became the seats of decision-making power, in spite of Gates’ active engagement.
At the end of 1979, Microsoft had $US 4 million in sales. Most of these revenues came from BASIC, which enabled programmers to create applications, such as word processing and accounting spread sheets. The level below BASIC and the other languages under development at Microsoft was the computer operating system, which performed the most elementary tasks required to run computers. With the prospect of providing software to IBM for the basic PC it was planning to market for a reasonable price, Gates and Allen began to acquire the rights to, and then develop, software for a computer operating system. Known later as DOS, it again set an industry standard that would enable Microsoft to efficiently develop languages and software applications in a single engineering environment rather than painstakingly customize them for a variety of incompatible operating systems. This would immensely simplify Microsoft’s programming process as well as enhance its efficiency.
As Gates foresaw, this was a near-ideal position to occupy at the moment that the PC market was poised to grow explosively with the introduction of the inexpensive IBM PC, which was made of off-the-shelf components and hence easy to copy, or “clone”. With the…
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