One of the main reasons he succeeded was his willingness to build central control into his systems, however daft some of the controls may be. The corporate market loves the ability to grind the life out of its users under the heels of spotty MCSAs and their RTFM sekuritty pollysees.

The stability and function of the system doesn't matter too much, as long as you can prevent the plebs swapping the corporate wallpaper for a picture of their cat or, heaven forfend, actually displaying 1280x1024 pixels on a 1280x1024 TFT monitor.

If I ever find out who was responsible for the password policies in WM6 with Exchange there will be a extended blowtorch/bollocks juxtapositioning coming their way.

Don't worry Bill, Satan's keeping the forks warm for you.

I get the distinct feeling this is being ghost written. OK Mitch Kapor put down the keyboard, we get it you, got outplayed, stop doing a Jens Lehman and admit it.

Various things I felt missing from this article:

a. The world would not have been a green-screen place if MS had not come along. Apple, Commodore and others were already on the scene back then and developing computers which by mid-1980s had become common place in the classrooms as well as homes

b. Microsoft's lack of ability to create their own ideas existed back in their foundations, when they purchased and re-labelled Q-DOS and changed the name to MS-DOS. So this was not just something of the Internet/Open Source age, but from the start

c. By the time Microsoft went to a WIMP environment others had already gotten there first (Apple, Xerox, UNIX, etc)

d. Saying Microsoft products were easier to use could be true if compared with niche UNIX-based products of the time, but compared to other platforms were generally designed a lot more unintuitively. Products like their Office suite and MSN chat client seemed to be the exception though, and this is something many people used primarily on their computers

e. Microsoft claimed the Internet came about through the invention of IE (Win95 days), despite Mosaic, Netscape and all that offered the Web to users before IE!

f. What of the Y2K bug which seemed to affect Windows more than any other mainstream platform at the time?

g. Microsoft's choice to go down the DRM path lost them a lot of favour with their user base

h. Various of the key components of Windows actually came through companies Microsoft had acquired rather than any internal projects (ie DirectX, DirectAudio)

i. As the article mentions, they failed to capitalise on Open Source for their own good and instead fought it tooth and nail, Apple has been smart and utilised it Open Source well (alongside *NIX vendors who nicely screwed over Open Source projects as soon as they could make a buck out of it!)

j. Part of their success was due in their earlier days to their divide and conquer strategy, often being known at the time to take competitors to court or buy them out, anything they could do to avoid competition

k. Google has already launched their own productivity suite applications on-line.. free, Microsoft still has nothing here ready for the public

Microsoft's/Bill Gates credit was to find technologies they felt accessible to a mass market, copy it, and make it significantly more affordable than what had come before it. They also had the smarts to know how to market things better than most others before or after them were able to (Where Do You Want to Go Today came before any of Apple's current signing dancing ads).

Microsoft/Bill Gates also had the intelligence to create their own software market by reeling in developers to make sure the platform was well supported and covered applications people were likely to need. But this point is one which is retrospective now, as the article points out the market place changed and they failed to adapt quickly, weighing themselves down with legacy ideas than copying new trends sufficiently.

Microsoft, as mentioned in article were also good at getting their products up a grade and bringing it to a level which allowed some of their products to become industry standards (as to how good people considered whilst using them varied). But then all you have to do is look at something like Vista (ME v2) to see this too is an area Microsoft has gone backwards on.

History will remember the man in such a way which is typically afforded to people who pass, with rose coloured glasses. He will be viewed as the innovator he wasn't, but accurately will be remembered as being able to bring a product to a mass market on a level previously never achieved before his day. His failure to adapt to change will probably be left to only obituaries of his career.

Mines the coat with the History of computing in the pocket...

Judging from the photo on the third page Bill already has a future mapped out: setting up Playmobil scenes for the Reg.

exactly, nothings changed, he STILL WORKS THERE EVERYONE!!!!

i'm sick of hearing that he's left, he hasn't, he still goes in one day a week and is still the chairman and still controls 99.9% of what microsoft says, hears and sniffs!!!

will the whole of the worlds media STOP SAYING THAT HE'S LEFT!!!!!

FFS!!!

And when he leaves, what will be left? A company which rose to power on a good idea, and stayed at the top through grabbing the good ideas of others (not a bad thing), and is now slipping because others are now doing the same (google, anyone?).

That said, the really *good* old guard companies never die, they just refocus on what they're good at. Newspapers never died when online news appeared, they just shuffled up a bit. A smaller slice of a bigger pie. It may be that Linux or OSX become the OS of choice for Laptots and consumer PCs, but windows remains as the OS of the megacorp. More expensive licenses, fewer, richer customers. Or maybe they'll embrace open source and slip into the pool of modular and infinitely customisable software out there...

The icon is to say "what now for IT?"

Except perhaps a business model based on copying then undercutting any company which had original products.

When daddy installed in him the teachings of the lowest aspects of the lawyering trade, the second oldest profession in the world and the first most despicable. With Bill being a crafty exploiter rather than a brilliant(or even adequate) coder and that he was in the right place at the right time, he had the lack of morals and ethics to exploit this opportunity.

He made his fortune, but the rest of the industry but uses his products, dearly pays the price.

With Exxon having its compo payout reduced for its crime against the environment in Alaska, don't expect any compo from M$ deep pockets, any time soon. The EU should not spend the procedes of the M$ fine until the overdue payment of the check clears the bank.

"Had it been left to companies like DEC and IBM, computing today would likely be a different, analogue, green-screen world."

I gave up reading here. MS-DOS, the cornerstone of the empire, was provided by Microsoft at the behest of IBM's fledgling PC division. When Microsoft started making inroads into GUI systems in 1985 with Windows 1.0, Apple, Xerox, Atari, MIT (x-windows) and Commodore (among others) had already created or were creating graphical interfaces. Not only that, but Windows 95 was an offshoot of the OS/2 project, a collaboration with IBM.

Gates has done a lot of good things on top of the bad, but we can write his professional sort-of-obituary without resorting to fantasy and misleading statements like this.

Why say that Bill is not a visionary? His decision to, if not actually leave (thanks richard for that incisive commentary), then at least edge a little closer to the escape chute, may prove to be a fine piece of foresight.

Am I the only one that noticed that one of the guys in the photo (centre right, ginger(ish) long hair,beard and glasses) is now a chick!

I also love the way BillG is sitting as far away from everyone he can while still being in shot.

I would dearly love to see what might have happened if, at the meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club following the publication of *that* Open Letter, Bill Gates had been dragged into the Gents' and given a stern lecture, accompanied with head-flushing and other visual aids, on the unownability of software.

Well, the NEED to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL must be a legacy of his, I suspect.

@I saw a Unix OS recently

Hey, troll! You must have used only MS DOS (if even that, which I doubt) then, if you think that they are the same. Just because both are command line based, do you think it's all the same thing? Sometimes I have the impression a test and a license should be necessary for some people to be allowed to use computers...

At the end of the day, the man gets a cut of the sale of almost every PC sold. Now that sounds like good business to me.

So he bought MSDOS instead of writing it ? So what ?

So DEC and Xerox had GUI OS's already ? So what ? Where are they now ?

Face it, MS are here to say and it matters not one bit how many people slag them off and say MACOS is better or UNIX is better. Windows rules the corporate and home market by virtue of the fact that most people can't be bothered wiping their new PC and setting it up again. They wan't it to look like it does in work or in their kids school.

Bill - if you're reading this thread (and I would hope that you read El Reg in your spare time), congratulations on your retirement.

Don't forget that Bill G's Dad was a high powered patent attorney, specializing in Intellectual Property law and that Bill's Mom is the one that got IBM looking at MicroSoft:

"In 1980, Mary Maxwell Gates, Bill's mother, got to know John Opel, the chairman of IBM, through their work at the United Way Foundation.

At the time, IBM was preparing to release the first PC, and it needed an operating system. Opel chose tiny Microsoft as its OS vendor partly on the strength of his connection to the Gates family -- a decision, Dash writes, "that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created."" -Machinist's Blog, Salon.com

So, not a garage visionary, battling Goliath's, but a rich kid with connections, later willing to use MS leverage to spread FUD when running up against new tech, hoping to slow things down until MS could release their version. Heck of a vision, Billy!

[looks down list]

You're a jerk, Gates. A complete kneebiter.

[flies off]

Bill gates was lucky, got the DOS deal with IBM and ran off with a sackful of cash, then used advertising and the 'it runs on an IBM pc' to run off with even more cash, mostly from dumb business types who are still looking for the 'any' key when the PC says 'press any key'.

Then started using dodgy tactics to buy up rivals, and/or squeeze the competion out of the market.

Remember Spyglass, who created IE 1 for microsoft and sold it to them for a % of each IE sold..... then microsoft gave it away free and spyglass got shafted.

Then came the years of the abominations where WinMe springs to mind....

and the years of anti-trust suits

Finally releashing windows Vista on an unsuspecting world that was using WinXp Sp2( a decent OS after 20 years of trying).

Yupp, in the past 20 years CPUs, HDDs, GFX cards have all been getting faster and faster.... so why does my PC boot and run slower than my olde worlde win95 box I use for legacy testing.

Thanks for a few things Bill, but please dont come back to the world of computers

Boris

PS The reason why m$ refuses to release its windows code as open sauce is because we'd be able to see how much of it was lifted from the open source operating systems

His tombstone will be blue.

He will be remembered for the hours of lost work, the crashes, the failed installs, the rip it all out, format the disk, start agains....

"Procuctivity" ---- Pah!

So much envy in here, we all got fat off Bill G.

Fair play to the man. I mean, imagine it was you that had bought Q-DOS for 20k bucks and become the worlds richest man by doing so. Would you be struggling with your conscience? I would have been a little more pliable once I had achieved what he did in the 90s, but we can't all be the same. I think John Carmack is right up there in that respect.

I worked for Microsoft Upgrade Centre (the only company in the UK at the time selling upgrades for Microsoft) either side of Windows 95 and regularly visited MS in Winnersh and later in TVP. There was a cultural shift in the workplace due to imaginative, innovative companies like MS and Cisco. Out went the ties and the vending machines, and in came dynamic, exciting people. Perhaps this is more his legacy; brute-forcing the business ways of the geek into the workplace.

On the subject of progress being a little stale at Microsoft; as long as there are shareholders who aren't also employees, margins will tighten and wages will fall. It happens to all companies, they reach critical mass, sit on their haunches neglecting their customers ride along on the crest and then when people really get pissed off, they throw a few million at their image and they're back in business. (Ballmer/Yahoo)

Microsoft aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Vista was rushed, but the ideology is sound. It's addressing the security issues that have plagued Microsoft and its legacy code. Sure it's a major PITA and maybe they should have waited and made Windows7 bulletproof instead, but they put the idea out there, we know what's coming and programmers are going to have to stop insisting their applications run with administrative rights.

The more applications move into the cloud, the more attractive *free* OSes will become, this will inevitably drive down the price of a much securer Windows environment and it will all be rosy. We'll be able to pick and choose.

Seems there will always be some die-hards who refuse to buy MS, just because some clever bloke made some intelligent business decisions. It makes me laugh, I worked at Apple in Uxbridge occasionally too (back when they had to halve their workforce to pay the rent, about the same time as MS bailed them out with a massive cheque). The reason it all went wrong for them, was because they refused to lower the price of Macintosh's when threatened with the low-cost IBM compatible/Windows machines and look at the outcome. When I worked in the city at a stockbrokers, they were all using Sun SparcStations (between 20 and 50k each) and Unix. Then along came Compaq dual Pentium Pros and WindowsNT for 3k and you know what happened next.

Protectionism? Fsck that, innovate! (Apple finally got the message with the iPod, here's hoping the media cartels do too)

If they gave him the 3 finger salute as he left the building...

What an utter load of bollocks. If you wish to write a eulogy for a retiring exec, you should at least make sure you get your facts straight.

Gates is a crook, who was in the right place at the right time.

The only noteworthy thing he did was to lie to IBM when he answered "yes" to IBM's question, "Do you have an O/S we can use on our new toy PC?". A bold move when he had no such thing to offer. After DR dropped the ball, his rushed purchase of qDos outright for peanuts was pretty shrewd too, although I expect he was "economical" with the truth there too.

He took advantage of IBM, who didn't recognise the potential in PC's and signed his infamous OEM deal while Big Blue was asleep at the wheel. Once the clone makers came along he convinced them to accept the idea of the "Microsoft Tax" and from there the MS monopoly was born, surviving to this very day.

If Microsoft had not gained such a complete stranglehold on the emerging market it would have evolved into a very different beast for sure, however I seriously doubt whether we would be all still using "analog green screens" without Bill G's input.

And no, he didn't invent the gui either. His first decade of experimenting with GUI's was notably pathetic. It wasn't until WFW3.11 that Windows became at all usable.

No seriously!

Thats why the current Mac OS X icons for windows computers you browse on the network are monitors with blue screens.

And if you are curious and zoom the icons large on Mac OS X you see the windows computers icons are in fact, you guessed it Windows Blue Screens Of Death.

Got to love the legacy. It lives on forever in the competition.

> Remember Bill is primarily a lawyer, from legal stock, rather than a software engineer

Bill is (or at least was) a *programmer*, with little or no formal training in software engineering practices. The breed was very common at the time, and probably explains a lot of the bugginess in later projects. Many software engineers start as programmers (without a firm eye on the specification & design process) but most eventually learn better.

The fact that his father was a lawyer does not make Bill primarily a lawyer, although I'm sure it gave him some useful insights. My father was a truck driver, but that doesn't make me "primaily" a truck driver - I don't even have a licence. (Although I do have some idea of how tough life can be for truckie owner/drivers.)

...Ronny