Bill Gates: how a geek changed the world

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Bill Gates ends his full-time job at Microsoft on a Friday afternoon and the company opens for business after the weekend as if nothing has changed.

At least, that is how Gates' successors want to play it.

The 'transition', as it is called inside the company, was announced two years ago.

On the face of it, the only difference after 27 June will be that Gates will be non-executive chairman rather than executive chairman, spending just one day a week on Microsoft business.

Link

Fri 20 Jun 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm on BBC 2

If you miss the programme, you can watch it later using BBC iPlayer.

For those outside the UK, you may find it on youtube later.

 

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I'll have a watch of that.

 

Gates is a visionary, and I hope he continues to have substantial input to the direction of the companies core product line

 

I agree, he needs to have a big input or things could go dodgy.

Who will take over?

 

Ray Ozzie is the Chief Software Architect and Steve Ballmer is the CEO
its been that way for a good while
I don't expect the running of the company to change too much from Friday
Gates is said to be spending a lot more time on his pet projects, and as he is big fans of alternate input, tablets, surface etc, it could make some nice developments

Not sure who will become the Exec Chair

 

:hhhmmm
I don't know... I will agree the computing world (and IT itself) has arguably flourished because of MS software (i.e WIN OS).

Microsoft was a key driving force to make PC's easy to use, and most people benefited because of it.

 

They're already dodgy, or haven't you had the misfortune of using Vista yet?

PTOOEY.

 

Bull! The best thing that works for Microsoft is its commercial centre. Most products are enhanced versions of exsisting products.
Nice example: when MS released Word 2, they had an enormous advert screaming:
NEW: Word 2.0. Now you can (feature 1).
You also can (feature 2). You even can (feature 3).
Two weeks later WordPerfect had a similar advert in the same paper on the same page stating:
OLD: WordPerfect 5.1. You allready could for 5 years (same feature 1).
You also could for 5 years (same feature 2). You even could for 6 years (same feature 3).
Guess which text-processor is leader...

 

Love him or loathe him I wouldn't mind being him (how much a second is it he gets ?? )

Can't think of any alternative that runs on such a wide variety of equipment worldwide

 

Linux

 

I would! Have you heard his voice?

 

Really good show, watched it this morning at 2am on iPlayer
shame Cringley was as usual, full of excrement, but It was good to see some of the various viewpoints and opinions

Lets hope MS don't lose focus without fearless leader, I doubt ballmer has the same capability to rally the troops, but as bill will still be around, perhaps it wont be a big deal

 

Try running Windows on this entire list of hardware and see how far you get....

 

Bill Gates didn't affect society because he was a geek. He affected society because he is an utterly ruthless and corrupt businessman that stopped at nothing to destroy his competitors.

 

He deserves every penny he's got/stole/earned IMO

 

He was both.

I'm not sure we can justify 'corrupt' though.

Hey, it's business! It's competition.

Like it or not, the rich guys in the world have their money at the expense of others in some way.

 

Not really had enough of a go of Vista, I have no need XP works for me

 

Its what being in business is about, I agree that its not fair to say he was corrupt he was just quicker and better than the other guy.

 

Oh, and I was filling in some survey recently, and one question was:

'If you met Bill Gates, what would you say to him?'

My answer was:

'Bill, you've shaped the World we live in.'

The point being that he can make up his own mind about if that's a good thing or not...