With the release of Vista, Newsweek's, Steven Levy sat down with Bill Gates and discussed the new OS. Gates came off looking like a world class doofus.

First he admitted that main reason to get Vista was that it looked better than XP:

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, "Bill, why upgrade to Vista?" what would be your elevator pitch? Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos.

Then he gave a somewhat nonsensical answer:

How about the [Apple ad's] implication that you need surgery to upgrade? Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And then Bill Gates goes into fantasy land:

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system. You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise.

HUH?

Apple has been coping Windows all these years. Exploits are released "every single day" that allow people to get root on a Mac and Windows is more secure than the Mac OS...

That paragraph proves that when you have as much money as Bill Gates you don't need to smoke the cheap stuff, you can score the really good narcs.

Seriously, his PR people need to write some better stuff for him. That was embarrassing.