Bill Gates

BBC presented a documentary titled ‘How a Geek Changed the World’, the Geek epitomized here is Bill Gates, who needs little introduction. He co-founded Microsoft Co. the biggest economic revolution of the modern times. The age of technology boomed by his vision of personal computing which has become inevitable now. However, as he retires now and hangs his boots from Microsoft, a new era has had already begun in technology, the rise of the Open Enterprise, with movements like the Free Software Foundation radicalizing the way technology is to be consumed. As much as Bill Gates and co were ridiculed by the likes of IBM for favoring desktop computing, Bill Gates has been throughout his career been an anti-open source and anti-FSF advocate and with the muscle of technology lock-in on nearly the entire world, he tried all he could to carry out controversies most famous of which being with Netscape.

Although one has to give credit to Bill Gates for revolutionizing technology to the masses, to non-techies and geeks no matter how he did it. His business savvy is admirable reflected by his ability to solve various business challenges using his technologies.

Although as his retirement approached, several changes took place, the cathedral and the bazaar foresighted it, the emergence of Google also boosted the open source movement and Microsoft in all the gone by years opposing it, finally shows the white flag. Microsoft’s own open source repository can be found out at their recently launched www.codeplex.com website.

He presents his retirement to the world with a light comedy but the jokes has been on him, Yahoo! venture being a near disaster, Microsoft embarrassed by the stubbornness and ego to give in, the failure of their flagship product (Windows Vista) might not show an opportune moment for him to leave but the end has finally come.

A new era has begun in computing. But with all due respect (with a lot of reservations), to a man who showed that achievement is more important that paper degrees, Bill Gates finally at the mercy of historians now…