NEWS
Bill Gates is arguably the individual who has had the biggest impact on the world of technology and his departure from Microsoft on 27 June will mark the end of an era.
During his career Gates has made Microsoft into one of the biggest companies in the world with products that have long been ubiquitous for computer users.
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But the company has also suffered from accusations of anti-competitive behaviour with well-publicised battles with US regulators and the European Union.
So what is Bill Gates' legacy as he departs from the mega-corporation he built from scratch and how will his time as Microsoft figurehead be remembered?
Rob Horwitz, co-founder of analyst firm, Directions on Microsoft, compares Gates to car manufacturing pioneer Henry Ford.
He said: "Gates took an arcane technology that was accessible to few and figured out how to re-engineer, extend, package and market it so that it was relevant and affordable to the masses."
He added: "Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, and Gates didn't invent the computer but the brilliance of both was in figuring out how to make their respective products ubiquitous."
Mary-Jo Foley, Microsoft expert and blogger on silicon.com sister site ZDNet.com, says Gates has created legacies in both technology and philanthropy.
She said: "On the tech front, I'd say Gates will be remembered for making good on his goal of helping popularise personal computing. Microsoft did end up enabling consumer and business users to deploy - almost - a PC on every desk."
She added: "He helped create a partner ecosystem, via which a number of hardware, software and service vendors built entire businesses around Microsoft software."
But Foley also noted that Gates played a major role in putting numerous companies out of business through Microsoft's aggressive competition.
"Some of these companies claim Microsoft stole their ideas; others collapsed from being squeezed out of the market by Goliath [Microsoft]," Foley said.
In terms of what Gates will be remembered for, Foley said many will recall him as a "hard-charging competitor who was in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the personal computing boom".
On the other hand, she said others may remember a "ruthless competitor who got away with a lot of illegal monopolistic behaviour".
But she concluded: "I think both sides will remember Gates as a nerd who made good - and ultimately did a lot of good with the billions he made through his Foundation work."
Forrester analyst George F Colony says the ruthless way in which Microsoft achieved its dominant position under Gates wasn't as detrimental as others would argue.
Writing on his blog Colony refers to the behaviour employed by Gates as "constructive monopolism" due to the benefits it created for technology users by creating a set of standards.
Like Directions on Microsoft's Horwitz, Colony compares Gates to another famous figure, Thomas Edison. He said both created good technologies and "worked to get them accepted by more users than their competitors".
"Gates has been a business innovator, not a technology innovator. [He] had the vision to see this future and he possessed the competitive drive to force his technologies into monopoly positions in the marketplace," Colony added.
Colony also suggests part of the reason Microsoft has failed to convincingly combat Google - and why Steve Jobs has been able to resurrect his career so spectacularly - is that Gates has been focusing much more on his philanthropic activities in recent years than the company he founded.
Colony summed up Gates' single most important legacy as: "The ability, through monopolistic business practices, to make Microsoft's products global, de facto standards for business and consumers."
David Mitchell, senior analyst with Ovum, said Gates' legacy centres on technology produced before the modern "Vista generation" of the company.
"He helped to create a generation of people in the industry that focus on usability and making computing a simpler experience that ordinary people can manage," Mitchell said.
He added: "He was one of the people responsible for the democratisation of computing, taking it from the hands of a technical elite into the mainstream of business and the home."
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Comments
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1. Alistair Thomas
Lots of people love to knock Bill Gates and Microsoft but the brutal reality is that without them, we'd still be running at 486 speeds, with poorer graphics, and incompatible peripherals and systems, and probably paying 3x what we pay today for it all.
The Mac, Linux et al world criticise Microsoft as lacking innovation and being anti-competitive; where would their world be without the CPUs, graphics, memory, hard drives, monitors, batteries etc., etc. that have been honed, refined, reduced in size and price, etc. etc.
To my mind, the single most important thing that Microsoft/Gates realised from the outset, is that technology is just a tool for people to do something with. In the medium to long-term, people’s investment in applications and content will far outweigh even cumulative investment in technology. Technology comes and goes, intellectual investment lasts for ages. Their commitment to backward compatibility protects this soft investment, albeit at a cost to innovation. Admire them for sticking to this principle.
Regardless of whether they created them or just copied / adopted them, four milestones stand out for me:
1. DOS gave us a common platform for clone manufacturers
2. Windows 3.0 made a GUI accessible to most at a reasonable price.
3. Windows 95 Plug and Play gave us peripherals that just worked, more or less.
4. Right click providing context-specific help enables anyone with basic Windows knowledge to explore completely new applications.
Well done Bill, I hope you can bang a few heads together in the philanthropy world to drive common levels of decency and purpose as you have driven standards in the PC world.
2. Simon
Why does this report make me want to run to phone Huey on the big white porcelain telephone ?
Describing Microsofts activities in setting up Windows as the one and only global standard is a benefit ? Short term maybe, but in the medium term (which is already with us) it's hitting back much harder in the lack of diversity and choice. And to say that this was responsible for us having user friendly computers - give me a break, Windows isn't user friendly ! There have been many other attempts, some arguably far superior, that have failed for no other reason that "it's not Windows" - and without Windows I believe we would be much farther down the road of "user friendly" than we are now.