Thursday, June 26, 2008 Ng: Bill Gates’ legacy By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
A SIGNIFICANT event occurred this week—Bill Gates is retiring from full time work at Microsoft, a company that he founded more than 30 years ago.
Gates led Microsoft to become the world’s biggest software company and, in the process, made himself the richest man in the world for over a decade—a record that in today’s dynamic world, may be hard to eclipse.
His partial retirement was announced over two years ago—a turnover process that was planned and executed well over the standard two- or four-week transition for most employees who leave a company.
He will devote his time doing charity through the biggest foundation in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a $60-billion funding at its disposal. Half of the money came from Gates while the other half comes from his good, rich friend, Warren Buffett.
Gates is probably among the most respected and, at the same time, most criticized chief executive officer 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 to be Microsoft’s chairman and a part-time employee. Despite his part-time status, his contribution to the company will be as much as those who work full time.
Gates made another significant accomplishment. He made being a programmer and a nerd cool! Due to Gates, I think many people now aspire to be geeks, and that legions of techies dream of one day becoming rich like him.
As he said once: “Never underestimate a nerd because you may find yourself working for one.” He led the way to prove the belief that you could get into a business previously considered as esoteric as “software” and make money, lots of it.
I could get into a debate on this, but I think one of his many legacies would be 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 also remember hearing people say that in the last 30 years, the price of computing power has come down 8,000 times.
In fairness to Microsoft, although it is often accused of making computers expensive, I think prices of software have become relatively cheaper. 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 contains probably a hundred times more features and functionality, for the same amount.
Twenty 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, people point out that the price of software did not fall as much as hardware. But we have to admit that Microsoft, mostly at the receiving end of expensive software, played a part in driving software costs lower.
Nowadays, apart from mass marketing, other movements have occurred—like shareware, freeware or open source—which lead to further lowering the cost of software.
On hindsight, Mic-rosoft played its part and even now, its offerings—whether it is developer tools, email server, databases, operating systems or some productivity products such as project management, some mid-dleware/groupware or even business applications—are not that expensive.
Microsoft has always expressed, through its pricing, the intention to enable thousands of users to adopt its software.
