Posted 5:27 PM by Gene

There is no doubt that history will judge Bill Gates' contribution as among the most significant of his era—as a technologist, a businessman, and a philanthropist. As of the summer of 2006 approaches, more than 61,000 people in 102 countries draw a paycheck from Microsoft. The company's software is used on somewhere between 900 million and a billion personal computers worldwide. Its success has tracked closely with the huge upsurge in computer use in the U.S. and around the world and in which more than a billion people now use the Internet. For better or worse, the role that Microsoft and Bill Gates played in such a vast societal change cannot be understated.

I can understate it. Bill Gates had nothing to do with BASIC, the core of every PC program until XP. He had nothing to do with Apple, which made the computer small; Steve was on magazine covers long before the Bugmeister. He had nothing to do with the increasing miniaturization that made 1TB hard drives and 8GB flash drives possible. He had nothing to do with the Internet in its early stage; Compuserve and Netscape were first; even the much-maligned AOL did more. He had nothing to do with the huge growth of bandwidth that put it in every home. He had nothing to do with bringing the PC into business; IBM and others got there first. He had nothing to do with search engines until he played a furious game of catch-up. No, Bill was bright, he was ruthless, he got lucky and drove that luck for all it was worth. A comparison with Edison is obvious: he invented the light bulb, the phonograph and the motion picture, three devices that lived on because of their simplicity. The Bugmeister created buggy bloated software only a vast team of Dilberts could tame, that will only live on in bigger, more bloated software; Vista is not a fait accompli, especially with the GOOG's quest for simplicity. Had Steve freed up his software as Bill Paley did the LP, perhaps we'd speak of that God in the same derisive tones. But complexity is why Bill's "legacy" will be subsumed in others', rendered obsolete by time and (one hopes) better technology.