We're a long way from the Bill Gates obituary...

Matthew Ingram has written a thoughtful analysis about what the Bill Gates announcement really means and comes to the conclusion: not very much! I can see his point; nothing is going to really change for the next two years, the announcement has had zero effect on the share price and the one really interesting signal was the strengthening of the positions of Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. The implication is that this lessens the grip of Steve Ballmer.

The story even made Newsnight here in the UK and you catch still catch the transmission over the weekend at the Newsnight website, click the "watch the latest programme" graphic. The BBC introduction took a few swipes at Gates (monopolist and Netscape murderer) and sums up the challenges that Microsoft faces today as; mobile computing, new devices that don't run Windows (i.e. Linux) and the free software movement.

In the discussion Microsoft were represented by my favourite geek blogger, Robert Scoble, which must have given the Microsft PR department heartburn, given that Robert recently announced he was moving on. Robert, in a comment on his own blog, suggests that he was chosen because 1) he was available, 2) the BBC don’t trust anyone that PR shoves in front of them and 3) they figured he'd tell the truth cause he's leaving anyway. Newsnight also fielded the economist Irwin Stelzer from the Hudson Institute to provide an "independant" viewpoint.

The discussion opened with the point that Gates used monopoly power to stifle innovation and competition. Robert countered that the rise of Google and Apple didn't suggest that Bill gets it all his own way. Stelzer made the point that Gates did stop some innovation and you can't escape the fact that the courts had upheld this view.

There was general agreement that Gates is a better man than some of the great capitalists of the past, that he did change the world, and that he is undoubtedly a very smart man.

Joel Spolsky remarks on meeting with Bill Gates some fourteen years ago:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Joel does go on to critique why he thinks things have gone wrong since those early days but he gives a sense of why Gates did succeed in the first place.


Tags: Bill Gates, Robert Scoble, Newsnight, Joel Spolsky