Bill Gates: End of an Era?

June 27, 2008 will go down the history books, as one visionary woke up from his dream to lead an ordinary life and cherish a new dream of “Helping the World”. I say a dream because being worth $58 billion, 13 consecutive years topping “The World Richest List”, touching the lives of almost 90% of Computing Professionals with his technology in his lifetime of 52 years of his existence and then bowing out at the peak of his career, Mr. Willam (Bill). H. Gates wakes up from his dream run to be a Philanthropist!!

I am not here to write a biography of Mr. Gates, as there are many available, and a space too little to write about his achievements. Honestly he has been an inspiration, and a challenge in my life.

Mr Bill Gates & his Microsoft entered my life as early as my first computing days in school. The very first thing I learnt about a computer that it needs to be booted with MS-DOS to start working on it. At school, we used to get 30 min a week to have computer practices, and we spent almost 10 min booting the machine, and then flipping pages to recollect the right MSDOS prompts to start any program, or do the simplest of things like finding out my last saved basic program which I wrote or do a copy paste.

I was never the wiz-kid computer guy in my class, but my enthusiasm in learning computers and trying new technology has still been my passion. I guess I had my first email id (that too a hotmail) in my friend circle; I was one of the first to promote computer and the power of software to my friends, most eager to do a final year engineering project using computer program, introduce my friends to the internet, most of the time the good part of it, but unlike young teenagers, there were friends who loved the “porn” part of it!!! And today some of those guys are some of best programmers I know and doing great for themselves!!

That’s beside the point, but intrusion of this man Mr. Bill Gates, into my life has been very early, and continues till date and I guess rest of my life. But all this could have changed, when one day a bunch of young grads from BSchool, wanted to take Mr. Gates Head On!!! I was one amongst them.

Paying for Licenses to use Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet explorer and that too for a product, which was not free from virus and hanged every now and then made us think! We were a bunch of techies, loved the open source, and worked on Linux and Unix platforms. One amongst us was a visionary and he came up with the revolutionary idea of creating a multilingual operating system based on Linux and dreamt of taking computer to every house of an Indian family.

The dream remained a dream, but I would not say that we kept our vision till drawing boards; some of us took some bold decisions and started on the project, and made quite a bit of progress in build the system. But with the dot com burst, and may be the idea of taking Mr Gates by his horns, did not get us venture capitalist, to fund the projects.

Thanks to Mr. Gates and his Windows revolution, which made us think otherwise and gave me some of the best learning of my life during this ad-venture. His high profile launch of “Project Bhash”, a multilingual windows OS, was the last nail in our coffin of language computing!! With No money and Only Gyan, we were even smaller than the David to challenge the mighty Goliath named Microsoft!!

Disheartened, I packed my bags to get back to my full time job, and then one day, I joined the world largest enterprise database company!!! I was happy there to find there were liked minded people at the top, who hated Microsoft and even found some posters of Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Kill Bill”!! I didnot get the message, but later did and smiled to myself. I even heard stories that we did not upgrade Windows Licenses to 99 or 2000 for a long time, as we did not want Microsoft to be richer!! Unfortunately, I had to go back to Windows and Office, but used Mozilla & Firefox as my browser and email client!! May be a small way of Kill Bill!!

Here, I learnt the power of 16 digits. Yes the power of licensing. The power of being compliant to those 16 or 20 digits which are exchanged with dollar$!! All licensed software we used had some digits to prove its originality and that was same for our product as well. I saw people chase deals; bring in million dollars, in return of those 16 digits, which we shipped with some CD’s. That was the power of being a product company!!

Bill Gates and his Microsoft, today rules my world of computing. Starting from MS DOS and writing “Hello World” using BASIC at school I almost live on Microsoft, from OS to Office to Mails even to my mobile phone, and that’s same for so many of us in this world, and that so many is as many as 90 % of computing population of the world. Bill always said, “Never doubt the power of software” and he has shown us the power and vision that today operating system and windows are synonymous.

I guess Bill has been thinking of picking up the tag of “Been There Done That”, for a long time and he has been in search of a right work life balance, but I guess he failed to find one and decided to move on!! He made an effort, and you can watch it on You Tube.

Today, this historic day, Mr. Bill Gates, moves on as a full time employee of Microsoft, which he has been since the age of 17, to follow his dreams at Bill & Melinda foundation, to be a philanthropist, to touch our lives with another “soft” hand to make it a better place. I wish him all the best and thank him for touching my life as an inspiration and competition in whatever degree it may be!!