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Comment by wyday | Hacker News Reader

Is this actually real? I couldn't find anything on the Focus Magazine website.

It’s real. Here’s the article in Focus’s archive (German): http://www.focus.de/wissen/wissenschaft/forschung-und-techni... (quite easy to find, actually)

Interview and transcript are not exactly the same. The transcript sounds more like, well, a transcript, the published interview is a lot smoother. Since all printed interviews are highly artificial products this is certainly to be expected. The transcript really seems to be the raw transcript. Even if it isn’t – the content is the same, the printed interview only sounds nicer.

So Bill's comments are a translation of a translation? (English -> German -> English)

Perhaps that's why they sound so unrealistic.

I don’t think so. The linked transcript seems to be the real deal, the raw transcript of (a part of) the interview that was later translated for the magazine.

The transcript sounds pretty natural (then again, I’m not a native English speaker) even if it might not fit the usual style of Gates. The German interview sounds a little strange (you immediately notice that it was translated). I don’t think it was translated by a very skilled translator. I guess the English version would sound quite a bit more strange if you translated the German interview again.

Looks like people investigating this in 2006 hit a dead end too: http://msgboard.snopes.com/message/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_t...

No reply from either the magazine or Dr. Jürgen Scriba

At the bottom of the page it says:

Text for this page is extracted from the RISKS archive: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html>; This is the raw interview transcript (from which the magazine article was transcribed in German) kindly provided by the interviewer, Dr. Jürgen Scriba. The introductory text at the top is from Klaus Brunnstein, as found in <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.43.html>.

I saw that too. But the question still stands. Is this real?

I don't think it is real. I've listened to Gates speak several times, and this piece sounds nothing like him.

I'm sure he wouldn't talk that way in a controlled presentation, but I believe it's likely that he could have answered that way in an interview back in 1995 in part because of his nature and the reasoning behind the statements.

I thought this was going to be a new interview, but I remember reading this interview and discussing it at work back in the 90s. I know, this anecdote doesn't really give this much of an air of legitimacy, but archive.org does confirm that it's been around that long (which of course validates my memory more so than if Bill Gates actually said this stuff).

He'd been in business for an awfully long time already in 1995. Where's the evidence to suggest he was so ridiculously unpolished after all those years?

Nobody says "No! No! No!" to an interviewer over and over again.

Oh please. A google search of "bill gates arrogance" returns over 200,000 hits. People like Bob Cringley and James Wallace have made small fortunes selling books about Gates's foibles, frustrations and outbursts.

"evidence to suggest he was so ridiculously unpolished after all those years" see his testimony in US v Microsoft in 1998... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...

I was going to say the same thing. I think it's faked.

"No!" "No!" "No!" "Did you ever think of that?"

Bill Gates is many things but a petulant 3-year-old he is not.

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