At the end of June,Bill
Gateswill finallystop doing the job he lovesin order
to concentrate on his philanthropic foundation. It is the end of an
era that started with Microsoft Basic in 1975, continued with MS
DOS in 1981, and exploded after Windows 3.0 was launched in 1990.
Not everyone believed inMicrosoft's visionof "a computer on
every desk and in every home", but nowadays, lots of people have
more than one.
During Gates's 33-year stretch, Microsoft built three big
businesses:
Windows,
Microsoft Office and its suite of
server operating systems and applications. It has been less
successful in other areas including games, mobile phones and MP3
players, but it does not give in easily.
Persistence has paid off. A company that used to consist of a
handful of hippies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has become a global
powerhouse with almost 80,000 employees and annual revenues of
almost £30bn. The corresponding growth in Microsoft's share price
made Gates the world's richest man, and its most
prominent geek.
Who would have predicted that a college dropout writing a Basic
for hobbyists would end up being interviewed by everyone from Terry
Wogan to Playboy, rubbing shoulders with world statesmen, and
collecting an honorary knighthood. Who would ever have expected
more than 10,000 people to queue round the block in Las Vegas to
see a man with an annoying voice and a bad haircut talk about
"information at your fingertips" using PowerPoint slides?
Nobody predicted that the
corporate server rooms that used to be, literally, "IBM shops"
would now be packed with racks of servers running Windows,
Exchange,
SQL Server and other
Microsoft software. And I doubt that IBM seriously expected
"server farms" - which are basically barns full of commodity PC
parts - taking over from their all-encompassing mainframes.
Reminiscing during his last keynote speech at Microsoft's TechEd
conference on 3 June, Gates reminded us that Microsoft started
writing code for the MITS Altair with just 8Kbytes of memory, not
8Mbytes, let alone 8Gbytes. "And the presentation layer in those
days was taking characters in from the paper tape and printing them
out on the teletype, and the big breakthrough was when we got
lowercase," he said. "It was very exciting. So we have come a long
way."
Continuous visible progress in computer software and hardware
plus his great wealth made Gates what mainstream reporters call "a
story". And unlike
Steve Jobs,
who uses his fame to flog Apple geegaws, Gates preached that IT
could make the world a better place.
Obviously, Gates had an ulterior motive: he wanted the world run
on Microsoft software. But "Windows everywhere" was a business
strategy, not personal aggrandisement. Although Gates could seem
overbearing in small meetings, he was never a natural when faced
with a large audience or TV cameras. Billy Gates would never be
confused with Billy Graham, but at least he got positive computer
stories into the papers.
In a mixture of defence and defiance, Gates took to making fun
of himself in videos that became one of the main attractions of his
regular gigs, opening the Comdex and CES trade shows. The latest,
based on
his last day at Microsoft, shows him phoning famous people who
are not always sure who he is, and who are definitely not
interested in giving him a job. Bono, for example, tells him a high
score on
Guitar
Hero
is not going to get him into U2.
The video ends with Gates packing the stuff from his desk in a
small cardboard box, putting that on top of his old car and then
driving away. It falls off. He is not
Buster
Keaton
, obviously, but nor is he the devil
incarnate.
Perhaps Gates could have done something to perk up his nerdy
image, but he genuinely lacks the taste for really expensive toys:
the huge yachts, the private jets, the football and baseball clubs.
He plays golf, and loves playing bridge with his great friend
Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire "Sage of Omaha". They have
played together at the Omaha Bridge Club and online at OK Bridge.
Gates has even competed in the World Bridge Championships.
When Gates did splash out on something absurdly expensive, in
1994, he bought one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks for £15m. And
whereas Armand Hammer, who owned it, had changed its name to Codex
Hammer, Gates modestly renamed it back to Codex Leicester, after
the Earl of Leicester who bought it in 1717. After that, Gates put
Microsoft's resources into developing the British Library's Turning
The Pages 2.0 project so that now everybody can enjoy it online in
stunning detail - well, as long as they use
Windows XP or
Vista 9 (a Silverlight version will follow).
Against all that, of course, Gates personally and Microsoft
corporately carry the huge stain of
monopoly abuse. A long string of
anti-trust cases and lawsuits
in the US and
Europe have
obliged the company to pay
vast sums in fines. On
the web, where stupidity rules, Microsoft has taken over the
role of
the Evil Empire, a position that had previously been held by
IBM for about 50 years.
This is somewhat amusing because Microsoft liked to see itself
as the small scrappy underdog, fighting for its life against IBM's
much bigger, richer monopoly. It was, after all, pure luck that
Microsoft was asked to provide IBM's new PC, launched in 1981, with
a disc operating system as well as Basic - Digital Research had
been expected to supply IBM with CP/M, and eventually did.
Microsoft did not so much create a monopoly as steal one.
Microsoft was well aware of who was boss. Its strategy for
coping with visits to IBM was known internally as Bogu, for Bend
Over, Grease Up. Well, IBM was a £27bn giant and Microsoft a
£0.17bn tiddler.
Although the two companies publicly worked together for more
than a decade, there was plenty of tension behind the scenes. In
the popular imagination, and in Microsoft's own mythology, personal
computing was about personal liberation. The PC let you do your own
thing: your terminal was no longer a slave controlled by the data
processing department. IBM, by contrast, saw the PC as just another
device that needed to be centrally purchased and controlled.
Ultimately this is why the two companies went through a widely
publicised divorce. Ordinary users bought PCs running Windows - It
is fun! It plays videos and games! - while IT departments failed to
buy IBM's replacement for the PC. This was the Personal System/2
running IBM's Operating System/2 Enterprise Edition, all tied to
proprietary IBM minis and mainframes under the umbrella of its
Systems Application Architecture.
IT managers used to say that nobody got fired for buying IBM,
but they soon meant that nobody got fired for buying IBM-compatible
PCs. The problem was that IBM had stopped making them. That left
Microsoft and Intel to set the standard: one that could be followed
by thousands of PC manufacturers. You could build your own. When
Microsoft and Intel levelled the playing field, it felt like, and
was, a liberation.
The separation of IBM and Microsoft led to their divorce in
1992, and that led to Gates's greatest victories. Microsoft could
no longer "ride the bear", it had to fight the bear. And although
IBM was bigger, richer and stronger, it was also slow-moving and
bureaucratic. It had thousands of programmers using a "masses of
asses" approach, whereas Microsoft tried to have small teams of
really smart people writing clever code - Gates was himself a
really smart self-taught programmer.
"Fighting the bear" also meant Microsoft could get into the real
data-processing business and attack the server side, where in 1995
it had zero market share.
People laughed - literally - when I said Windows NT4 could work
as a cheap server, but it was not just about code. Microsoft was
heading in the right direction for the IT industry. Intel chips
were becoming powerful enough to do serious jobs, and PC economies
of scale meant they were much cheaper than minicomputers. In-house
programming was becoming increasingly expensive, so many IT
departments were becoming more receptive to PC-style packaged
software, which was far cheaper than the mini and mainframe stuff.
Also, as the number of computing tasks continued to grow,
integration was becoming increasingly difficult, so Microsoft's
Office-suite approach to server software had a strong appeal.
Corporate IT also benefited from
Windows' mass-market popularity. Microsoft was consciously
creating a platform with a vast supporting infrastructure of
compatible hardware manufacturers, programmers, education
courses, books and magazines. There was an expanding pool of
people who were familiar with how Windows worked. This
"virtuous circle", where success reinforced success, helped
Microsoft to achieve Gates's stated ambition - according to
Robert X Cringely's book, Accidental
Empires - of becoming "the IBM of
software".
But as is clear from Windows Vista, Microsoft succeeded only too
well. It had also become big, slow and bureaucratic. The small
groups of smart people seemed to have been replaced with "masses of
asses". Yes, there was a PC revolution, but having won, the rebels
had become the new status quo, and much like the old status quo.
Naturally they are now being attacked by a new generation of
rebels. It goes with the territory.
Gates must find this tiresome. After all, he has played a large
part in building the entire PC industry out of what most people
thought was a generally harmless hobby. And although
anti-monopolists might worry about Microsoft becoming "the IBM of
software," it is also true that Intel has become the IBM of
processors, Cisco has become the IBM of networking, HP has become
the IBM of printers and so on. The situation is far better than it
was when IBM was the IBM of everything.
It seems that Microsoft would now like to become "the IBM of the
web," but
Google already has that job. The world is moving on. And
although we will miss him, it seems like a good time for Gates to
move on too.
See also:
Bill Gates' spoof retirement video
Related links:
Bill Gates: looking back on the road ahead>>
Goodbye, Bill Gates: Essential Guide and Video
Round-up>>