Alistair Thomas

Worcs, UK

Bill Fan

Lots of people love to knock Bill Gates and Microsoft but the brutal reality is that without them, we'd still be running at 486 speeds, with poorer graphics, and incompatible peripherals and systems, and probably paying 3x what we pay today for it all.

The Mac, Linux et al world criticise Microsoft as lacking innovation and being anti-competitive; where would their world be without the CPUs, graphics, memory, hard drives, monitors, batteries etc., etc. that have been honed, refined, reduced in size and price, etc. etc.

To my mind, the single most important thing that Microsoft/Gates realised from the outset, is that technology is just a tool for people to do something with. In the medium to long-term, people’s investment in applications and content will far outweigh even cumulative investment in technology. Technology comes and goes, intellectual investment lasts for ages. Their commitment to backward compatibility protects this soft investment, albeit at a cost to innovation. Admire them for sticking to this principle.

Regardless of whether they created them or just copied / adopted them, four milestones stand out for me:
1. DOS gave us a common platform for clone manufacturers
2. Windows 3.0 made a GUI accessible to most at a reasonable price.
3. Windows 95 Plug and Play gave us peripherals that just worked, more or less.
4. Right click providing context-specific help enables anyone with basic Windows knowledge to explore completely new applications.

Well done Bill, I hope you can bang a few heads together in the philanthropy world to drive common levels of decency and purpose as you have driven standards in the PC world.