June 27 is Bill Gates last day at Microsoft and has been declared by Engadget as Bill Gates Day. I won't go that far as he did not bring only pleasure to the IT world. In fact I don't know how often I was entirely annoyed when once more Windows crashed my PC and I had to restart. Microsoft certainly taught you to save work regularly. I remember that back in the old days where IBM's OS/2 was still used by banks in Germany and they did the math how much cheaper it is to have a more stable OS on all your clients saving downtime. Of course you can also be sarcastic and say that Bill gave you not only trouble but also nice breaks whenever Windows hung again. From a sales and marketing strategy point of view he is admired of course as he was able to build a monopoly in a highly competitive and fast moving market. And if you ask me why I still use Windows and MS Office then because it is mainly laziness I assume. Of course some of our guys use Apple, Linux and Office.org now and we have group calendars, web collaboration and CRM tools all online and not with Microsoft.

I think the post Bill Gates days will be less successful for Microsoft and being able to always predict the future right he chose a good time to leave and make use of the money he made (off all of us tolerating the many PC crashes) to do some good things. So in a way we will all finance the philanthropic part of his new life. Now I feel much better having hung in there for so long.