by Rami Grunbaum, Deputy Business Editor, Seattle Times
Bill Gates once typed a declaration, sideways, inside the front cover of a paperback book: “Introduction to Programming,” a 1969 manual for Digital Equipment Corp.’s PDP-8 mini-computer. “Bill Gates owns this book. He wants it. Give it back to him! He will tell you.” Why I ignored this cryptic but unambiguous directive is lost in the fuzzy memories of our high-school years at Lakeside. I packed the manual away with other books after graduating in 1974, a year after Gates.
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday…
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Who should be Bill Gates’s technical successor at Microsoft? It’s not CEO Steve Ballmer, who at last month’s D6 Conference admitted, “I am not an engineer.” I’ll say. Steve is a marketing guy who has put other marketing guys in charge of Microsoft. Should it be Bill’s handpicked successors, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie or Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer?
by George F. Colony, Chairman and CEO, Forrester Research
Even though Bill Gates has been slowly backing out of Microsoft for the last five years, his actual July 1 departure from the company is a milestone worth reflecting on. What is his single most important legacy? The ability, through monopolistic business practices, to make Microsoft’s products global, de facto standards for business and consumers.
It didn’t quite have the sentimental feeling of the Steve Jobs & Bill Gates talk from last year, but it was interesting to see the dynamic of Steve Ballmer & Bill Gates. I think it was great to see Bill step back and let Steve enjoy the limelight, and not take himself too seriously. I think instead of writing about the whole conversation, I am going to share this tiny bit I captured on video that shows how relaxed Gates is feeling these days, now that he has shifted all responsibilities to Ballmer
“Hey! Ho! Time for Ballmer to Go,” a Wired.com headline proclaimed on Tuesday. My rejoinder: “Hell, no. There are no Softies ready for a promo.” Wired’s story attempts to make a case for CEO Steve Ballmer taking the hits for Vista’s less-than-stellar market reception, as well as the so-far-unconsummated Yahoo-Microsoft merger. “Other CEOs have gotten canned for lesser crimes,” Wired concludes. There’s just one problem, as Wired notes in an aside. No one’s ready to step up within the company and fill Ballmer’s big shoes.
Bill Gates has been an incredibly successful businessman, but that doesn’t mean he’s particularly good at predicting the future of technology. Remember his claim that spam would be gone within two years … which he made in 2004? However, if there’s one prognostication that Gates just can’t let go of, it’s his belief that speech recognition will replace keyboards as the preferred input device for computers. He’s been saying it for years and years and years, without much to show for it.
by Ben Worthen, Blogger, Business Technology, The Wall Street Journal
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has stopped using the Web site Facebook, the most damning indictment in a week full of bad press for social-networking technology. Social-networking Web sites, which help people share and find information about one another, were supposed to change the way people use the Internet and the way we work. But lately, all we’re hearing about are the problems.
Yesterday marked Facebook’s four year anniversary, or to look at it from the college perspective to which the site owes its success: Facebook graduated. Washington Post assistant editor Rachel Dry, who was a senior at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his college dorm room on February 4, 2004, wrote a commencement address for The New Republic. In it, Dry wonders if Facebook is taking “on the big inequities,” as Bill Gates — like Zuckerberg, a famous Harvard dropout — urged in his commencement speech at the university last year. We wondered the same thing.
In what I consider surprising timing, Microsoft announced on Jan. 10 that one of its three corporate presidents, Jeff Raikes, is retiring in September 2008. … Why do I consider the announcement about Raikes surprising? If I were Microsoft, I wouldn’t want a lot of churn during the year that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is discontinuing his day-to-day duties at the company.
by Peter Kafka, Managing Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
The most compelling image we’ve seen out of CES to date: Bill Gates sitting down for a one-on-one interview with Engadget editor Ryan Block. What’s compelling? The fact that Bill Gates granted an interview with a blog–and that it’s not considered news.
OMG, I can hear the fanboys battling already. Here’s a video from last night’s CES 2008 keynote, Bill Gates’s last for the foreseeable future. And I know it’s scripted, edited and contrived, but I’m sold: The man is a cool geek.
by Staci D. Kramer, Executive Editor, paidContent.org
I’m about 20 rows back in the Palazzo Ballroom waiting for Bill Gates to deliver his eighth consecutive pre-CES keynote, but Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has a front-row seat. He’s next to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, sitting roughly where he was this time last year with MTVN’s Judy McGrath. The keynote–the last for Gates before he moves away from heading Microsoft full-time later this year–has just started…
by Fred Gibbons, Founder, Software Publishing Corporation
Over dinner the other night, Federico Faggin was talking about the development history of the microprocessor. He put up an old Bill Gates and Paul Allen photo, with Bill around 19. I followed by finding an old Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs photo, with Jobs around 19 or 20. I guess we all looked like that at one time!
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