Friday’s tech news on the internet was dominated by the fact that it was going to be Bill Gates last day at work at Microsoft, the company that he founded which so helped the personal computer revolution take off. I know, there is the whole question of the companies that came before Microsoft, and the role of Apple with the Apple II and the Mac, and what would have happened if any number of things had gone a different way–but love it or hate it, the house that Gates built is the keystone for so many things about the PC era, its difficult to imagine it without the world’s most respected nerd in charge.
I am a dedicated Macintosh user, and I’ve been one since 1985, through bad times and good. But during that time, I’ve also been a Microsoft user too. I bought a copy of version 1.0 of Microsoft Word for my IBM PC in 1983, and I’ve loved and hated it ever since. I used Microsoft Excel as the first spreadsheet on the Mac. I have used MS-DOS computers at work until Windows 3.1 made the graphical interface acceptable in the workplace. Like most information workers, I currently use a PC at work that runs Windows XP and the suite of Office software, along with specialized software for newsrooms that only runs on Windows.
Many have criticized Gates and his methods. And everything that has borne the Microsoft name has not always been innovative or reliable. I have lost a day’s work in Windows on more than one occasion with the untimely arrival of a blue screen of death. I have fallen asleep watching countless PowerPoint presentations–including some of my own. I have cursed and wailed at the software with the Microsoft name for well over two decades. But the reality is that much work that I have done would not have happened were it not for the tools provided by the folks in Redmond, Washington.
Gates, as everyone knows, has amassed a huge fortune and now plans to work towards making the world a better place through the foundation that bears his and his wife’s name. It would be easy to scorn him as just another multi-billionaire philanthropist, but just imagine if the man who once said that his goal for Microsoft was “a computer on every desk and in every home” could change the world as much as he helped to change the way we all work, play and communicate?
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1818989,00.html
Here’s another take on Bill Gates for you to read. I don’t know that I agree with it, but it does make you think a bit.
Pam,
Indeed it does. Gates has been accused by more learned minds than mine of adapting more than creating, and there is some truth to that. But what if Microsoft had just bought out Mozilla instead of making IE the only browser that got the MS seal of approval.
What the internet continues to prove (to me at least) is that anyone who thinks they know how this era in America’s history will play out, is bound to be wrong.