This week marks a change that finally arrived: Bill Gates is retiring from full time work from Microsoft – a company that he founded over 30 years ago, and which he lead to be the leading software company, and in the process put him as the richest man in the world for over a decade, a record which in today’s dynamic world, may be hard to eclipse.
His partial retirement was announced over 2 years ago – a turnover process that was planned and executed well over the standard 2 week or 4 weeks with most employee’s departures. Now, he will devote his time to giving away his billions through the biggest foundation in the world Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation– with an estimated over 60 billion dollars worth of money. Half of the money came from him, and the other half from his good friend, and now world’s richest man, Warren Buffett.
Well, bill Gates is probably among the most respected, and at the same time, the most criticized CEO in corporate America. But it is worthwhile to ponder on his legacy, and what he really did for the technology arena. By the way, he is not retiring full time. He remains the Microsoft chairman, and a part time employee. Expect the intensity of his being part time, as still as awesome as many full time people!
He made being a programmer and a nerd cool! I guess that so many people aspire to be geeks, and that legions of techies aspire that one day they would be rich probably draws inspiration from Bill Gates more than anybody else. As he said once, ” never underestimate a nerd, because you may find yourself working for one.” He lead the way to prove the belief that you could get into a business previously marked as esoteric as ’software’ and in fact make money, and lots of it.
And, I guess I will be debated and criticized for that, but among his many legacies would be that he did a lot to make software cheaper… by mass marketing it.
I remember people saying that software is now the most expensive component of the personal computer.
I remember also hearing say that over the last 30 years, the price of computing power has come down 8,000 times.
In fairness to Microsoft, who is always now perpetually accused of making computers expensive, but I think relatively, prices of software has come down. After all, I remember more than 20 years ago, Wordstar, or Lotus 123 used to cost hundreds of dollars.
Now, you can get a whole suite of Office, software that can down probably hundred times more features, and functionality for the same amount. 20 years ago, DOS would cost you what Windows Vista cost now — but Vista is probably legions of times more expensive to develop, and probably a lot more functional.
Of course, the criticism is the price of software did not fall as much as hardware….
But we have to admit that Microsoft - mostly on the receiving end of expensive software, did play a part in driving software costs lower…Obviously since then, other than mass marketing, other movements like shareware, or freeware, or open source has spawned which lead to even possible lower cost of software.
But in hindsight, Microsoft played its part, and even now, if you look at its offerings, whether it is developer tools, or email server, or databases, or operating systems, or some productivity products like project management, or some middleware/groupware or even business applications, Microsoft has always been in the middle part—not always the most expensive, always priced to get tens of thousands if not millions of users, and for that – it gives the consumers a choice, and always act as a force to lower software cost, and go for mass adoption.