Bill Gates and the art of the 'dis'

Old habits die hard when you've spent the better part of three decades perfecting the art of the "dis." Bill Gates may be on his way out, but he hasn't mellowed when it comes to appreciating the technical capacity of the competition.

So before slipping into the role of full-time philanthropist, Gates had some few less-than-kind words for Google's technical chops as he held court at the company's SharePoint conference.

Google this!

(Credit: Dan Farber)

"In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space...

"If you've seen...the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don't have the richness the responsiveness. You can see that relative [to] the success they have had there. Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day and then after that..."

That's a nice sound byte for the press but this was a throwback moment, something we expected from a younger, brasher Gates when he was busy talking himself into an antitrust confrontation with Uncle Sam's trustbusters. Maybe he really does believe Google is that lame. To be fair, Google hasn't yet proved it can supply the needs of enterprise customers.

Matt Asay tells it straight (no chaser): "Google's continual failures in just about everything else" other than in search.

We can quibble whether that's really true. But so far, Google's done better branching into applications development than Microsoft's fared branching out from its core businesses into search. And search is where the serious bucks are being made.