The retirement of Bill Gates reminds me of the end of the Lord of the Rings, it seems to have happened about eight times. I remember him announcing stepping down as CEO, stepping down as CEO, stepping down as Chief Software Architect, announcing his retirement, doing his last CES, doing his final developers keynote, doing his wacky retirement video, announcing his retirement date and now, finally it seems, actually leaving (except he’s still doing one day per week at Microsoft). Like many Microsoft products, it seems there are may versions of the Gates’ retirement. Even in reporting it I have caught the disease and described it twice.
Gates is the standard by which all other technology entrepreneurs will be measured. No doubt there were better coders than him but there is no better strategist. Even though Apple saw the potential of Xerox PARC’s Graphical User Interface first it was Gates who recognised hardware didn’t matter and staked his entire company on that insight. And won.
Even his fiercest critics
These days those insights are as sharp as ever. It was Gates who put in train the company’s greatest innovation – the Xbox – and with it the one genuinely distinctive product, Xbox live. In 2003 he predicted the computerless home in an article which I have not seen bettered for its brevity and insight. And now instead of wasting his money on yachts he is giving it away to promote education and combat disease. If he does to malaria what he did to Netscape the world will be a better place.
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good afternoom
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…sorry?! “It was Gates who put in train the company’s greatest innovation – the Xbox”?!?!?!?
1st: considering the Xbox an innovation means you’ve never known the gaming world before the Xbox… it’s just another PC with just another graphic card and just another PowerPC at its heart….
2nd: “genuinely distinctive product, Xbox live”… did you ever play with FFXI online? PlayOnline was there much earlier.
3rd: Gates didn’t believe in the Xbox. He did not even wanted it. It was an internal fellow suggesting to enter the gaming world with a M$ machine. And he didn’t want. But when the guy insisted, then he said “Ok, give it a try…”.
4th: Probably the PS3 did not reach the popularity, but that is absolutely a great innovation. At least it’s got a brand new processor in it (Xbox got a processor borrowed from old Apple machines….).
Its very easy to comment…and very easy to find faults…
GATES THE FATHER OF TECHNO WORLD.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think Linux, and Open Source in general, owes Bill Gates. If IBM used CP/M, and HP, Novell, Digital and others kept using their own versions of unix, I don’t think anyone outside of academia would have seen a need for an Open Source system. M$ was the big nasty corporation that nearly crushed Apple, and convinced many that a better alternative was needed.
bill gates was a good programmer but an even better strategist.
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Hey that’s a visual studio ad, and you haven’t mentioned what a successful product that is anywhere in your article. Bill Gates sure as hell wasn’t using anything close that kind of IDE in his coding days…