After 33 years of intense activity, today’s the day William Henry “Bill” Gates III leaves his full-time job at Microsoft to dedicate himself to the charity foundation named after him and his wife, Melinda.
Whether you like him or not, nobody in the IT field could say that this is not a moment to be remembered. While little will change in the immediate future (Gates’s leaving was announced more than a year ago and had surely been carefully planned in advance), the software industry will probably be different without a man like him.
A very controversial magnate, Bill Gates has definitely been a key figure in defining the role that computers have today in our lives. A brilliant programmer and software developper, he became quickly known during his years at the Lakeside preparatory school. As an eighth-grader, he wrote his first program, a tic-tac-toe game with AI. He was later banned for a short while when the owner of a PDP-10 discovered that he and other three students - including the future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen - had exploited bugs in the computer’s operating system to obtain free computer time (back then, computers were only rented to organizations). Gates was fascinated by the computer’s ability to execute code perfectly, and his own skills allowed him to hack into every system he could put his hands on
In 1975 he convinced Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System that he had developped a BASIC interpreter for the Altair platform. He actually hadn’t, and only intended to test MITS’s interest in the deal, but when they accepted the offer and asked for a demo in their Albuquerque offices he and the Lakeside guys managed to deliver the interpreter in a few weeks. Their demo was a success, and Microsoft was born in New Mexico.
The rest is history. Microsoft bought the rights on 86-DOS, an operating system for the upcoming IBM personal computer, and later distributed it as MS-DOS. The huge success of IBM clones made MS-DOS a great commercial success, and the first operating system of most non-technical users. In 1985, the first version of Microsoft Windows was released, following Apple’s innovative graphic user interface. In ten years, Windows became such a successful product that its 4.0 version was launched with what is still remembered as one of the greatest launches in the history of IT industry.
Bill Gates, whose technical skills had been partially overshadowed by his aggressive business management, was widely criticized through the next decade, when shortcomings and bugs in Microsoft’s operating systems, together with an Anti-trust trial in which he was first condemned and then absolved in appeal, made him the target of public hatred, sometimes as a joke, but with a deep sincerity on many occasions. His large and increasing personal wealth contributed to depicting him as a ruthless businessman, incapable of delivering a stable and easy to use system, especially when compared to the much less commercially successful Unix-based Linux and Macintosh systems. There was even a conspiracy theory connecting him to Satan himself, though that was incredibly stretched and maybe a joke.
The facts show that William Henry Gates was indeed a great programmer, and that he personally went through most of the code his company released. In an era of chief executives who don’t know how to produce what their companies produce, Gates stands as an uncommon matching of both technical and business skills. While it is undeniable that his products were often flawed to their core (one word, five letters, ends with “ista”), Microsoft is one of the few companies that provided a commercial system with a high degree of compatibility (I’m talking of course about self-compatibility, and I’m of course taking Vista out of the discussion); which can’t be said of Linux, where hundreds of specialized and not always interoperable distributions are released as open source projects (which requires much less business management), or of Macintosh, where users are supposed to “do it Apple’s way”, which is usually a great way, but offers less freedom.
I think the IT world will miss Bill Gates. Even though computers would have probably invaded our workplaces anyway, we owe to him such a fast and wide success in the home market field. Ironically, that very sector is now being taken away from Microsoft, as more user-friendly and “2.0″ alternatives face up.
Gates’s focus has always been placed on developpers like him, and that’s why the greatest IDE is currently Visual Studio. That’s also why business customers still have a great time with Windows and its virtually never-ending software park - and after all, crashes and general slow responsiveness gives employees the excuse for slacking a bit at work…
Microsoft and his CEO, Steve Ballmer, seem oriented to follow Gates’s vision, which will probably make them keep their huge advantage on competitors in the business range. Home market users will probably be a bit more of a challenge, though. As much as I hate the sound of this sentence, maybe this time it will be useful to not have a developper make the decisions. But without the developper, the name would not have existed in the first place.
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