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Bill Gates Goodbye to Microsoft
By Find2k | June 30, 2008
It was a Friday. Gates Says Emotional Goodbye To Microsoft full of emotions when Bill Gates delivered his final speech to the Microsoft employees in an auditorium at Microsoft’s headquarters campus.
Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft 33 years ago, decided to devote his full-time attention to philanthropy. “My life’s work really is about software and working with incredible and smart people,” Gates said with tears in his eyes.
Bill Gates was overwhelmed by the news that Microsoft’s software-development-tools business has passed $1 billion in sales for the year. He said he still remembers the day when he along with Steve Ballmer used to wonder if any software company would be able to achieve such a figure. Microsoft is expected to have total sales of more than $60 billion in the fiscal year that ends Monday.
According to Gates, Microsoft is still way behind from its competitors in Internet search and Advertising, but they are up with new innovative formulas and a dedicated team of smart people so that they can deliver a better product.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had once dreamed of a computer on every desk and this dream has led them to worldwide employee strength of 91,192 employees.
“But if anybody’s wondering when we’re going to have 1,80,000 people, stop wondering,” Ballmer said.
Gates felt proud of being able to provide internet accessibility to blind people which is a result of groundbreaking improvements made by Microsoft over the years. In the end Bill Gates said that the most cherished memories that he’ll take from his time in Microsoft is the fun he had coming to work every day.
Microsoft’s billionaire founder Bill Gates will relinquish control of day-to-day operations at the software giant on Friday.
Some moments…..
In Bill Gates’ send-off from full-time work at Microsoft on Friday, Steve Ballmer and Gates reminisced about their friendship, careers and the development of the software industry.
If the earliest part of their friendship was any indication, you might have guessed they would have turned into a decent tag team in a wrestling ring instead of geeky software moguls.
You see, 34 years ago, a mutual friend said the two energetic Harvard undergraduates, traveling in very different circles, had to meet. They hooked up for a man date of sorts — taking in a double feature: “Singing in the Rain,” still Ballmer’s favorite movie, and “A Clockwork Orange.”
Then came the physical altercation.
As Ballmer recounted Friday, the two were living at Radcliffe, in Currier House, which Ballmer described as a “weird place.”
“Bill and I were as weird as you got in this weird place in many ways,” he said.
“We come back from the movie and we’re both kind of dancing and playing Gene Kelly, and some guy just wrestles me to the ground … and Bill’s trying to like beat him off,” Ballmer said to roaring laughter at the send-off (because wouldn’t you expect it to be the other way around?). “It was really quite a weird place.”
Some more views from the Online space…..
Why people call Bill Gates a PC Genius and a Internet Fool?
Bill Gates, who for years was the richest man in the world, is also one of the smartest. But even he couldn’t figure out how to beat the Internet-how to transition his grand old monopoly software company, Microsoft, into a business that thrives on the Net. And so he begins his retirement today from Microsoft as the PC era’s biggest winner, and the Web era’s most spectacular casualty.
It’s pretty well known by now that the Internet, for all its world-flattening glory, is a destroyer of businesses without parallel. How many companies roared along for decades, minting money, only to see the Internet eat their business plans? We live in a media age and the media industry is Exhibit 1 in the murder trial. Newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies — all of the traditional models are dead or dying as bloodied moguls everywhere scramble to survive. But the Net has brutalized old-line business across most industries-retail, tele-com, financial services and the technology industry itself, is, ironically, no exception.
Few companies not born on the Web have figured out how to thrive there. (Apple, with its post-PC iPhone could be the shining exception.) As Gates turns his attention full time to philanthropy, I wonder what will be left of the great company he founded, Microsoft, by the time Gates picks up a Nobel Prize for Peace. Clearly, a business with $26 billion in cash reserves isn’t exactly at death’s door. And Microsoft continues to be enormously profitable, thanks to its operating system monopoly. Thanks, that is, to Gates’s genius.
But big, complicated operating systems such as Microsoft’s latest, Vista, aren’t necessary in the Web Age, where applications are delivered for free and on demand — often without users even being aware of it. The Net is where the money is, and it’s the one place that Gates-like so many others-hasn’t left his mark.
He saw the Internet missile coming of course. But by the time he sounded the alarm, it may have been too late. (Read his famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo, sent to the troops May 26, 1995, over a year after the browser company known as Netscape launched.
Gates was always more accustomed to being a disruptor than being disrupted. At the age of 25, he licensed a primitive operating system, PC-DOS, to IBM for $80,000 rather than sell it outright, a move that’s usually ranked as one of the Greatest Business Moves of All Time. Gates figured that many PC makers would copy IBM’s open architecture, and make their own PCs; they’d need to license an operating system, too. PC-DOS soon became MS-DOS, an operating system for all IBM clones, and Microsoft was on its way to becoming the one thing that billions of PCs around the world would have in common.
From 1980 until 1994, when Mosaic/Netscape emerged, Gates played a scratch game, parlaying his little “Micro- Soft” company into an empire that defined the PC Era. By opening up Windows to third-party developers, he created a platform that made many developers rich, and built out an eco-system that put a desktop in almost every home.
But there is no greater blinder than success, even for a visionary like Bill Gates. By the time he realized the tech world was quickly shifting from PCs to the Network that connected them, his moves were limited. A fiercely competitive man, he reached for the obvious lever, and attempted to tie the late-starter Internet Explorer browser to the monopoly he created, the Windows operating system. The move was mercilessly effective and beat back rival Netscape, which immediately saw its commanding share of the browser market disappear.
It was also illegal. With Netscape crying foul, the Feds successfully pressed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft. The PR damage-Gates acting insolent on the witness stand, showing a convenient a lack of memory about key business decisions-turned out to be short lived and is all but forgotten as Gates remakes himself as a philanthropist. But the court’s decree forced the great general to march cautiously into the future. He may have won the Battle of the Browser but he would start to see major casualties in the Internet War.
Gates built or bought all manner of things to conquer the Net, but few managed to be anything more than also-rans in the innovation game. In 1995, he launched a gated online service, MSN; a Web-based email client, Hotmail was purchased in 1997; a search engine, MSN Search, launched in 1998 using a third-party product as its core; a chat client, Messenger was released in 1999; and last year it bought an online advertising platform, aQuantive and became a significant, though minority investor, in social network Facebook.
While Microsoft is exponentially larger than Google — number 44 on the Fortune 500 list versus Google at 150 — Google’s web business (advertising mostly) is growing so fast, it’s poised to rival Redmond’s operating system revenues by 2010. And that’s the problem. As more and more of what Windows does moves up into the cloud-into Google’s always-on, give-’em-whatever-they-want-for-free servers-what becomes of the company that Gates built?
The smartest move Gates could make right now is to get out of the way. (Steve Ballmer should, too; pursuing Yahoo is a pretty good hint that his master plan for the Web is, like Gates’s was, to try to buy Microsoft’s way into the game.) There are many smart and talented people inside Microsoft who know what to do. (Blow up Vista and abandon its next iteration, Windows 7, and start from scratch, is but one excellent idea.
That will probably work. And if not? Maybe we’ll see Gates return, a Nobel in his pocket, ready to wrestle with the Web once again.
Topics: Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing and MSN, Search Marketing |