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

Re:Retirement Gift

[rishistar]

Linux also benefited greatly from the fact that MS became de facto on the cloned PC market. All the other major vendors an the time had an apple like hardware and OS that were sold together. As IBM never got an exclusivity deal on MS-DOS, clones could run it, and thanks to this 'standardisation' the price dropped on the hardware thanks to the benefits of competition on the same hardware. Without that low cost of hardware Linux would not have taken off, and its extremely unlikely that as many people would have computers, internet access and slashdot accounts with which to slag off Microsoft.

Re:Maybe a commodore amiga

[tekrat]

Irving Gould is as responsible for the death of the Amiga as Bill Gates, maybe more so. As much as I adore my C=64, 128, Amiga 1000 and 2000 w/Toaster, Commodore never had the slightest clue as to how to market the Amiga.

In 20/20 hindsight, it was the first true multimedia machine, and could playback video at decent framerates (the DCTV add-on was truely amazing for its time), however Commodore tried to market it as a business machine. As if they had a chance of competing with IBM for that marketshare.

Only too little, too late did they make an inspired version, the CDTV (and later the CD32), which made the Amiga a component of a home entertainment system, (which only now are Microsoft and Apple trying to do), but, typical Commodore, they cheap'ed it to death, and then never threw any money at actually marketing it. As such, almost no one has ever heard of the thing.

Newtek sold more Amigas than Commodore did, by rebranding it as a 'Video Toaster System', and many of those toasters are still in use today (although to be fair, many are also being offloaded on eBay).

But to say that Bill Gates killed the Amiga is to distort history as badly as most people do when they think that Bill invented the computer. Or think that Windows is the only 'PC' there is.

(God, to think that I'm actually defending Bill Gates, a person I'd like to have shot out of a canon more than any other individual in history....) Look what you've done to me, damn you!!!

Re:So...

[Gewalt]

Bill Gates has been bullied around by Steve Ballmer ever since Windows 1.0. The reason Gates' work is never realized is because he's never been in charge. He has done precisely what Steve has told him for years. And Steve ruined his entire image and turned Microsoft from a beloved entity into a corrupted and one of the most hated companies.

I would LOVE to see Ballmer on the way out instead of Bill. Most of what people really dislike about Microsoft is Ballmer's doing, Gates just didn't have the spine to stand up to him and reel him in.