Bill Gates has stepped down from his last management position at Microsoft. One of the great achievements of Microsoft during his time at the helm has been to offer a standard platform on which enterprise applications can be developed. Bill’s greatest legacy to the corporate world is interoperability.
Microsoft’s success in the past three decades under Bill Gates was undoubtedly based on creating a lingua franca for enterprise computing, via application interfaces, that positively shaped technology management and provided a much-needed platform for skills.
For sure the ongoing Linux/ Open Source versus Windows debate could be seen as a re-run of the Betamax vs VHS battle – a clear instance where technical superiority lost out to an inferior product, not that I regard Windows as inferior BTW.
Nevertheless in the land of corporate IT, as well as the consumer market, Windows has brought us a major benefit – the interface standard.
I am old enough and ugly enough to remember the software configuration/ conflict resolution nightmares prior to Windows’ predominance and would not wish that on anybody again.
