Gates' Last Day At Microsoft

mrogers writes "Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft. After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"

Comments

Retirement Gift

[ilovegeorgebush]

Blatantly a tux toy.

For all my *NIX & FOSS zealotry, I can't help but respect what he's brought to the world. His & MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows :)

Re:Retirement Gift

[Darkness404]

Well lets see... Not much technologically but...

Managed to fool Altair to pay them for a non-existent software at that time. Managed to buy DOS and sell it to IBM, managed to get out of an anti-trust lawsuit, managed to recover from disasters such as MS Bob, ME, etc. Basically, Gates couldn't compete with code, so he competed with a business.

Re:Retirement Gift

[clem]

And cheap commodity hardware. Ushering in the age of the desktop assured that.

Re:Retirement Gift

[stretch0611]

...MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows :)

I do not agree with that assumption. First off, Unix was not created because of MS and/or Windows and Linux was created as a Unix clone, not specifically to compete with windows. If the pc hardware was not around it would have been built on different hardware.

Next, even without MS, IBM would have still been looking for an OS for its new computing platform. Because it was IBM, which at the time was the de facto standard/monopoly, there still would have been a clone market even without MS's help. If the clone market did not provide enough cheap hardware, there would have been cheap hardware from either the computers running CP/M or even the home market (Amiga and/or older 8bits computers)

Linux evolved from someone's desire to clone minix, not from a need to use something other than windows.

Re:Retirement Gift

[notaprguy]

This gets modded as interesting? Jeesh. I'll give is a try. What did he achieve? Well, most important, he was the one who had the vision of a computer on every desktop and who recognizead that software was the key, not hardware. It sounds obvious today but when Microsoft started, computers were for big companies or a small number of hobbyists. Gates and Allen realized that the microprocessor would eventualy make computing available to everyone and realized that software was what mattered. They didn't rip anyone off. That's a myth. They were smart enough to sell IBM a version of DOS that they purchased and modified with a non-exclusive license. They realized that having a standard platform on commodity hardware would lead to a huge amount of innovation. Before then, "personal computing" was a bunch of little islands...random UNIX's, MacOS etc...none of which worked with each other. All proprietary. Windows in that sense was very open. Microsoft made it easy for millions of developers to build any type of software or hardware that worked on Windows and spurred a wave of innovation. Did they make money doing so? Yes. So what? Go ahead, trout out the old nonsense about them achieving everything by stealing or cheating. When I hear that it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh... He has the evil ability to take a truth, turn it completely around and still call it truth.

Re:Retirement Gift

[Anonymous Coward]

He founded and grew Microsoft from a small group of friends to one of the largest companies in the world.
He brought computers to the masses.
He has donated billions to charitable causes.
He was named one of the most influential people by Time magazine numerous times.
He has been featured as one of Time magazine's people of the year.
He was the richest man in the world for 12 years or so.
He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire.
He was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle.
He has been happily married for over 14 years and has 3 children.
He is incredibly smart.

And in the end, he really doesn't seem like a showy or arrogant person. I think that might say a lot more about what he has accomplished than anything else.

Now, what have you personally achieved?

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

When can we look forward to a day without Ballmer? That would truly be a day to celebrate.

Re:So...

[Zwicky]

I know you're joking ("funny cos it's true" humor?), but - and maybe I'm not giving Ballmer enough credit here[0] - I really can't see Ballmer keeping Microsoft afloat in the long-term. Call it a gut feeling. The man is but an ogre really.

If anything saves Microsoft - aside from its stockpiles of cash - it will be Bill's advice imparted on his one-day-a-week-on-Microsoft-business.

I am certainly not enamored with Gates by any means, but I do recognize that (in my view) he was the brains behind the outfit: Ballmer is Robin to Gates' Batman; Cashman and Dobbin? "Holy developers, developers, developers, Cashman!"[1]

Personally unless Microsoft pull something exceptional out of the bag I expect to see them decline as 'market leaders'. I am interested in hearing others', perhaps more informed, thoughts.

Anyway that's how I see it from my point of view but IANABA (business analyst).

[0] Stop laughing, I'm trying to be impartial :)
[1] That right there is why I don't write comic books.

Re:So...

[ConceptJunkie]

The idea of Ballmer standing on Gates' concave chest and dangle-spitting on his face until he gives in his bullying, triple-Y chromosome demands is quite amusing, but Microsoft was corrupt and hated long before Ballmer was in charge. Or does nobody remember Andrew Schulman exposing Microsoft's monopolistic abuses with "Undocumented Windows" almost 20 years ago?

Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.

Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.

Gates was always a total bastard of a businessman (and only marginally technical at best, just listen to anything he says, he doesn't have a clue) and I don't think you can give credit to the chair-tosser for his long reign of corporate evil.

Re:So...

[drsmithy]

Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.

Indeed, it's a myth without the slightest shred of credible evidence to back it up.

"DOS ain't done until Lotus does run" would be a more accurate reflection of reality.

Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.

Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses". It is completely normal in any non-trivial piece of software.

Re:So...

[Keen Anthony]

McDonald's actually had great food once, early on. And Microsoft wasn't always hated. Remember back when IBM was the big bad? IBM and HP, two sucky companies that wanted to rule the world. Microsoft and Apple were the underdog then.

Re:So...

[Gewalt]

How the hell did you get modded interesting? You cite no proof. No links. No sources. Nothing. Just your own damned worthless opinion. If I had mod points, your post would burn in hell.

Maybe because people considered my opinion interesting? You know, they didn't necessarily have to agree with it to think it was interesting.

Re:So...

[Phydeaux314]

In the end, does it really matter? They're making money. As long as it's not obviously unsustainable to the shareholders, anything that brings in cash is good.

Re:So...

[ConceptJunkie]

Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses"

You're right, much of it can be attributed to Microsoft's pathetic documentation. Nevertheless, in 1990 you couldn't do many very basic things without reverse engineering. There are multiple books written on the topic that leave it beyond a doubt that only back in those days Microsoft or Microsoft's special "friends" had the information necessary to write software that could compete, performance-wise (as ironic as that is) with Office, or do debugging, or compete with Microsoft fully. they stacked the deck in their own favor from the get-go and have never let up.

While this may no longer be true, especially because Microsoft products these days are almost never the best in their fields, and are often pathetic also-rans, the damage was done long ago. In fact, these days Microsoft has been coasting on inertia for years, all their efforts going into maintaining lock-in and stifling competition because that's all they have left.

Re:So...

[hairyfeet]

Look at how many PCs sold VS how many copies of Vista,and that will tell you the true story. When my 67 year old mom who don't know squat about computers comes to me and goes "What is Vista and why does it suck?" you know you have a problem. Also look at the emerging markets of green PCs and netbooks,neither of which will EVER run Vista. And how many billions are they losing on the x360? I know Sony lost 3.3 billion on PS3 and after that recall and warranty extension I doubt they are doing better.

Trust me,I am no Linux or Apple fanboi,having used and made money off MSFT products since the days of DOS and Win3.1. But the simple fact is even teeny boppers that don't know the difference between a PC and a VCR come with their parents to get a new PC and I mention Vista I get an EXTREMELY loud EEEEW!,like I took a crap in front of them or something. Even my local Wal Mart has been making it clear that on every sale of a laptop they'll at no extra charge put XP on it just to keep from losing sales. And after being given a copy of Vista for being a beta tester and giving up after nearly a month to get that POS to run decent on my 3GHz Celeron I gave up and gave it away,only to find out later that it keeps changing hands like a bad fruitcake. So far I've had 4 people install it just to go "Yuck" a week or two later and go back to XP and pass it off to someone else.

The simple fact is inertia can let them go for awhile. But I've had more businesses lately start asking about "This Linux thing"(which for some reason they insist on calling Lienucks no matter how many times I correct them) than I have ever had before. If Win7 doesn't come out a lot more like XP and a lot less like Vista then I predict that those with money will be switching to Macs and those without will either pirate XP or come to someone like me to build them a PC from scratch with XP on it. I just hope that after Jan 2009 I'll still be able to find XP OEM cds or I might be buying a lot of used barebone systems just for the XP CALs. But so far my customers are willing to pay extra NOT to have the Vista "experience" on their new PC. And as always this is my 02c from out here in consumerland,YMMV

Re:So...

[that this is not und]

You distilled out the one point Ballmer makes that matters, and just shuffled it into your parody without noticing.

'Developers' is really, really important. The lack of developers is what killed BeOS. It is one of the only things saving Linux...

Criticize Ballmer and Microsoft for many things. The 'Monkey Dance' was just a ludicrous delivery. The message was VERY valid.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're joking ("funny cos it's true" humor?), but - and maybe I'm not giving Ballmer enough credit here[0] - I really can't see Ballmer keeping Microsoft afloat in the long-term. Call it a gut feeling. The man is but an ogre really.

Considering your gut probably told you this was the year of Teh Lunix on Teh Desktop every year for the past 15 years... something tells me your gut doesn't have that great of a track record.

MS's greatest asset has been in the enemies they have selected. MS enters a market, focuses on improving their product, and just wait around for their competition to self-destruct.

And that's bearing out right now in the search market- Yahoo is imploding, and Google is in bed with them now. So all MS has to do is wait around for Google's highly paid and under worked PHDs to drive the company under. Ballmer understands- Google is a one-trick pony. What do they make money on besides search? Then, they paid insane amounts of money for stuff which does nothing but increase the amount of money they squander every year. Like YouTube.

One of two things is going to happen with GOOG. Either the shareholders will start wondering why so much of the company's profit is being spent on stupid shit, and begin firing all the top management and replacing them with advertising execs... or else the company will simply wither on the vine, like a Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, AskJeeves, etc etc etc. My bet is on the latter.

Want to see a recent example of this in action? How about the XBox? Sony just imploded, and their PS3 failure almost destroyed the company. The only thing that saved Sony from becoming a MS acquisition was that Sony managed to pay off enough people to guarantee a Blu-Ray success. Without that... Sony was screwed. And hey, they may still be screwed. They certainly lost the lucrative console market. And all it took was MS being there and waiting for them to screw up.

MS understands that when you pick the right enemies, your success is assured. And Ballmer understands this too, as his masterful destruction of Yahoo demonstrates.

A handshake.

[b4dc0d3r]

Without him, I am not sure that personal technology would have taken off, and it would only be at work that I could do things like waste time on the internet and argue with strangers.

Re:A handshake.

[_Sprocket_]

Gates helped provide one of the keys to commodity microcomputer platforms. That key was DOS. And while Microsoft didn't code it, they did make the deal that allowed them to license it to more than one hardware manufacturer. This helped give other players such as Compaq the compatibility target they needed once they were able to reverse engineer IBM's BIOS and develop their own machines. And thus the IBM clone and the beginnings of commodity hardware.

The point here is that Bill Gates WAS an important figure. He did some key things - and should get credit. But there's a limit to how much credit is due.

Re:A handshake.

[intx13]

How does this myth stay alive? There were personal computers before Bill Gates: Macs. There were personal computers during the early rise of Microsoft: Macs, OS/2, Suns. There were personal computers throughout the Bill Gates glory days: Macs, Linux, (and Suns, kinda). And there are personal computers today. And there would have been personal computers without Bill Gates.

That's not to say his contributions are worthless, but let's not start patting him too hard on the back just because he's retiring. He used questionably ethical business practices to produce and sell products of questionable quality.

On the plus side, he's going to spend the rest of his life giving away enormous sums of money to charity - there's not much to dislike about that!

Re:A handshake.

[ComputerSlicer23]

All of which were very much proprietary. The key to the low cost PC as the competition among hardware makers. Go look at Sun, Macs, and PS/2 machines (Commodore, Amiga, and Atari should probably be added to that list of yours). From that era Suns and Macs were proprietary. The moment, Macs tried to license the hardware, the company very nearly went out of business. Sun sold great, solid equipment, and could never get it even close to the price point to compete (I also am not sure they wanted to). PS/2's? That whole line died a horrible death due to the proprietary bus (Micro Channel). The PC world thrived and took when the ISA bus was king, and IBM published all of the hardware specs for 3rd party cards (and thus the hardware that specs for the bus). The PC world thrived and took off when Compaq won the landmark case allowing them to reverse engineer the IBM Bios. The PC world thrived and took off when the Microsoft negotiated the deal with IBM to sell MS-DOS that was licensed to IBM as PC-DOS. The PC world thrived and took off when Intel got competitors in Cyrix, AMD, and other hardware makers creating x86 clone chips.

It was the fact that there was stiff competition for virtually every part in a machine. It was the nasty world evil consumer that bought, cheap crappy hardware, that got the economies of scale going. If you look at the PC world, the PC used to cost $3,000 (probably $10,000, but $3K is what I paid for my first machine in '95). The competition in an open market place (read, not Mac's, not Sun, not IBM's PS/2), are what created and won virtually all of the market place. The competition eventually drove the price of a PC to under $500, all the while getting, better and better hardware. Eventually the price got low enough, that it started to add more and more features that used to be the sole purview of high end "Workstation", or "Server" class machines. There's a reason that Sun sells what is effectively, nothing more then a jumped up version of the modern day desktop machine as their entry level server. I'm here to tell you that, Bill and Co. have a place at that table of folks who were there and part of what made it happen.

Does that make Bill a good person? No (but just because that doesn't make him good, doesn't imply that he's bad). Does that mean, Bill intended this move to accomplish that? Probably not. I think Bill Gates figured out fairly early on that hardware was rapidly becoming a commodity market, and that software was the thing that people had a true affinity for. If they could run the same software on different hardware, what did they care? In the end, he was correct. Just ask Apple. There's a reason Apple nearly went out of business when somebody else undercut their hardware (both because the model was setup all wrong, and that people didn't really care about Mac the hardware, they cared about Mac the interface). Most folks couldn't care less about the iMac, the Mac Mini, the iPod, or the iPhone in the hardware. What most of them really care about is how useful and easy the software is for them to use. I have a Mac and I hate the interface. I find it counter-intuitive, but only because I don't think "if I want this and that to work together, I should drag one to the other".

Windows in all its incarnations, and all of it's vile issues. It filled in the gap that allowed the PC computers to be usable by folks who couldn't have otherwise. For that alone, Bill and Co. deserve a place in history and helping to drive the PC revolution. Would something else have filled that need? Sure, but Bill was there. Would somebody else have discovered gravity? Sure, but we give Newton credit, because he was there and did what he did. If the PC market had been left to Sun, Apple, and IBM, they'd be carving huge chunks of a smaller pie, at much higher profit margins. None of them got that if they sold crappy stuff that was just above the crappy line.

Kirby

The ability to seperate himself truely from..

[gQuigs]

Microsoft and proprietary software. What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.

Giving any poor organization the first copy of Microsoft software for no cost isn't going to help them in the long term.

To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.

Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from..

[Applekid]

What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.

True. Although...

When I was a kid I used to dream of being rich and famous. As I get older the famous part gets more and more obvious as being a hassle, and the rich part gets more and more "evil"... money scraped off the backs of others and hoarded for a life of excess (well, also as I get older, mostly for hookers, blackjack, and blow).

Let's face it. There are no people who had amassed Gates' level of wealth by writing a bunch of checks and being nice people.

He did have a vision, and did contribute to some massively impressive things in computing, and got swept up in his business. A lifetime of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Setting in motion the wheels of a kind of proprietary software golem. Point being, maybe he saw that bit of The Simpsons:

"How do you sleep at night?"
"On a pile of money surrounded by beautiful women."

Thing is, if you had that much wealth and power and you grew a conscience (or at the very least it got a hand free and escaped its bindings), how would you fix it? How would you stand to the side of your parents' graves and say, "I've made you proud, and the world is a better place for you having birthed me"?

He can't tear down Microsoft. It's a beast onto it's own. All that's left is to try and compensate for some of that evil elsewhere. Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.

Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from..

[corbettw]

Bill Murray once observed, if you want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that's enough.

Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from..

[spatley]

You obviously have no idea how big giving works in the world. If you don't like Bill that is fine, but the Gates Foundation is doing significant good work in many areas of poverty, disease and global development. It has never been a standard for a charity to make its investments align with its mission, its investments are to fund its mission. Even joe sixpack with an IRA has investments that do not perfectly align with his morality; and a single article from one sensationalist from the LA Times is not the bar against which to measure.

Possible Retirement Gifts

[Eberlin]

1. A gaming rig so he can keep pwning n00bs.
2. an iPhone, a mac, and an iTunes account.
3. some GOOG stock 'cause you gotta take care of that 401K SPECIALLY after retirement.
4. A seat in the OLPC project's board of dudes that make decisions...it's only a matter of time.
5. Ubuntu...and by that I mean "humanity to others" -- actually, a wish of good luck as he concentrates more in philantrophy. As much as I (and c'mon, I can't be alone here) enjoy Microsoft bashing, I think the Gates foundation could (continue to) actually do a lot of good.

Re:A Mac

[gyrogeerloose]

Actually, it's not a Mac he wants--it's Apple.

Credit where credit is due

[Crane Style]

I would get him a big hug. Without Gates, my parents and grandparents wouldn't be using computers for email today. It'd be a lot harder to live across the country where the fun jobs are without that...... I guess they might be using computers, but at least now they have an OS with built in sound drivers that work ;)

Re:A card

[choseph]

A card begging him to not listen to advice given from people who use 'then' when they should use 'than'

Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know!

[stretch0611]

What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"

Nothing. I have already given him enough money by paying for his OS when I want to run linux.

Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know!

[bloodninja]

The man should be given a Nobel Peace Prize. Windows has done more to make technology available to non-tech experts than anyone else.

The man should be given a Nobel Peace Prize. Windows has done more to make money for techies due to the unnecessary complexities imposed on non-tech experts than anyone else.

There. I corrected it for you. No you dolt. Press control X. Everyone knows that. Pay up.

I credit Windows for bringing the price of consumer hardware down, especially Vista. Just think, if Vista were not so HW-heavy would we have today Dual- and Quad- core processors and _Gigabytes_ of RAM for so cheap? People who use an OS that does not need all that (Ubuntu, for instance) can literally have a system that is four times as powerful as they need, for the same adjusted cost of what a regular system would have cost only three years ago.

Its funny how..

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny how gates probably devoted an entire millisecond thinking about slashdot and the fossie zealots that live here, but to any lay person, the commenters on this otherwise benign looking news aggregator seem to be excessively obsessed with gates and his little company.

So while gates continued making shrewd business decisions and generating billions of dollars for several decades, all the people here continued to do is bitch and moan, whilst keeping up with the newest 'net memes, ofcource. I wonder if thats a sign of true helplessness or stupidity.

I guess I'll just hang around while the charming people here mod me down. Well in a couple of years, when the last of the moderates who didn't drink the koolaid on either side of the windows/linux pissing contest, leave this place, it will truly be a joy to read.

Re:Its funny how..

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for including a citation for that. Making allegations of phone calls is one thing, proving what was talked about is another.

In any case, like it or not, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations are already industry standards. Whats ironic is that products such as openoffice are riding on the success of microsoft's own office formats. Can you realistically imagine anyone using openoffice if it only worked with OSS formats? Sure some people would, but the vast majority would ignore it.

Goodbye Bill. Do good things with your money.

[GuNgA-DiN]

I'll admit to my share of Microsoft bashing over the years. Bill has always been a great boogey man! My hats off to Bill Gates for being the arch-nemesis master . He's kind of like the guy who played Darth Vader. You hated him but,.... you cared about his character. He was meaningful. It's going to be sad to see Bill fading away. Ballmer is kind of like a laughable sidekick. You can imagine him dancing around like monkey-boy while Bill is plotting --like Mojo Jojo-- to take over the world. I think that the "Gates of Borg" icon from Slashdot will live forever. So, goodbye Bill. Go do good things with the remaining time you have and help make the world a better place.

We should put out an ad for a new Arch Nemesis. Who's going to be the next big, bad, evil symbol of corporate greed now that Bill is gone?

GuNgA-DiN