(CNN) - To ask what impact Bill Gates has had on computing is, in a way, too small a question. For millions of people in the nearly four decades since he co-founded Microsoft, Gates has defined the entire field. Whether browsing the Web on Internet Explorer on a PC running Windows or working up a PowerPoint presentation with Microsoft Office before taking a break to game on the Xbox, there are many among us whose entire digital experience have been filtered through products Gates helped create. On Tuesday, Gates took what may be his final step away from leadership of Microsoft. With the announcement that Satya Nadella, a 22-year veteran of the company, will take over as CEO, the company also said Gates is stepping down as chairman of its board of directors. Gates co-founded the company with Paul Allen in 1975 but stepped down as CEO in 2000. He then spent eight years as Microsoft's chairman before stepping away from full-time work there in 2008 to focus on his charitable work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Rather than exiting the stage at the world's largest computer software company, Gates may actually be getting more active. He'll take on a new role as an adviser to Nadella, putting him back on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus more often. It will also put him nearer to the heart of innovation the company will need to keep up with rivals like Apple and Google at the top of the consumer-tech industry. If he succeeds in helping Microsoft get back its swagger, particularly in a fast-growing mobile world dominated by Apple and Google and in the increasingly important field of cloud computing, it would be a final contribution to a career that has virtually defined an industry. "Bill Gates is one of the pioneering giants of the information age," said Merv Adrian, a software and hardware analyst at Gartner Research. "Driven by the belief in a computer in every home, on every desktop, he helped to build one of the largest firms in the world to achieve that goal -- and arguably succeeded." For starters, Microsoft was the world's first real software company. Although there are hours of bare-knuckle geek brawling to be done over whether Gates and Microsoft or rival Steve Jobs and Apple were the true innovators on early computer interfaces, there's no question as to who succeeded in making software for the masses. The result was something approximating that computer-on-every-desk dream. By making software a money-maker for itself and third-party developers, Microsoft helped retailers sell computers for less, making them accessible to more of the public. Whether it was MS-DOS for early IBM machines or the more seismic release of Windows in 1985, Gates was behind them all.
Source : cnn.com
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar