“Thank You, Bill.”

On June 27, 2008, Bill Gates left his day-to-day work at his office for 30-years at Microsoft and moved on. The person in charge is now Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. There are many talks and speculations about the future of Microsoft, post-Gates era. One of which is will Microsoft be open source friendly at ZDNet. Open source? Microsoft is a bit “open” lately with the release of their express edition of their visual studio 2008, which is a good sign. But in my humble opinion, talking about openness, you can find better sources of better documented and better supported APIs elsewhere.

Apart from that, shall we move on to another topic? Bill Gates contributed a lot to the world of personal computing (PC), from his vision of “a computer in every household” to establishing one of the world’s biggest software company and making himself one of the richest man in the world in the process. It’s like every computer geek’s dream comes true.

David Letterman’s Tribute to Bill Gates

The product he offered may not be as innovative and hassle-free as his competitors had (a small bite of Apple, anyone?), but he managed to pulled it off by proving that the majority of people use his instead of theirs. Even in one memorable presentation of his then new operating system “Windows 98” (if I’m not mistaken, correct me if I’m wrong), the Plug and Play feature produced a “Wouw…” “Blue Screen of Death” (BSoD), but still he managed to convince a lot of people to use it.

The notorious Blue Screen of Death

But now, the question is “Is the future still belong to Microsoft?”, some may ask.

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, somehow doesn’t meet most people’s expectations. Some choose to stick with Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP, mostly because XP is “lighter” than Vista in terms of system requirements.

Microsoft’s late entry to the WWW scene opened up a big hole that enabled companies, such as Google, to triumph. Microsoft tried to takeover Yahoo! but somehow thwarted by Google, some may say. So what do you think? Will Microsoft still dominate in the post-Gates era? Or is it Google’s turn? Or perhaps Apple’s? The Open source community?

All in all, we ought to deliver our many thanks to Bill Gates for his realizing his dreams, putting the word “personal” into computing, otherwise we don’t have the luxury of having a computer in our household (other than calculators) or perhaps if you want one you should buy a big “space-consuming” mainframe computer instead.

Here’s the exact words from Microsoft’s official biography: “Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates’ foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.”

References:

• Microsoft’s official biography of Bill Gates
• Bill Gates’ Wikipedia entry
• ABC News: Bill Gates’ Retirement, It Won’t Last Long