Gates at Appomattox: why the US surrendered

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Author: JT Smith

The Nation: “The announcement that HP
will use “$25 billion” of grossly overpriced HP stock to buy an almost
worthless Compaq will save Carly Fiorina’s job for a while (a religious
doctrine of US capitalism says you can’t fire a CEO-even one who
has missed three consecutive quarters of earnings projections-while
she’s in the middle of this big a deal), but although the merged company will probably soon fire twice the 15,000
workers it has already said will go, no one but Bill Gates can save HP/Compaq and the others.

He can do this by releasing a new operating system even more bloated, slow and enormous than his current
excrescences, thus requiring a general round of expensive and pointless consumer hardware upgrading-pointless for
the consumers, that is, but not for the manufacturers, whose interests for the next few months lie in supporting Gates.”