Steven Levy on His Interview With Bill Gates

Steven Levy, regarding my criticism that he should have pressed Bill Gates on his claims regarding Mac OS X security:

I have found that when one has limited time in an interview with someone like Bill Gates (not that there’s many like him), one’s time is better spent drawing out the genuinely interesting things that person has to say as opposed to engaging in lengthy debates on technical issues that almost certainly won’t be resolved on the spot. (That doesn’t mean I won’t repeat a question or push a point when I want to hear more on a certain issue, or I feel that persisting will be beneficial to the interview.) The interview was to focus on Vista, and I had some specific areas involving Gates’s thoughts and involvement in that OS (and the next!) that I hoped to cover.

It did occur to me that Gates’s swipe at Mac OS X security was tangential to the main thrust of the interview, which was regarding Vista’s launch. I still wish he would have at least asked Gates for the source of these “daily” exploits.

Levy continues:

Gruber professes to worry about “the typical Newsweek reader” being misled by Gates’s claims. Spare me. I think that Newsweek’s online readers are smart enough to understand that Bill Gates is a passionate partisan of Microsoft, and to assess his comments on the competition in that spirit.

Fair enough.

★ Monday, 5 February 2007