Yesterday, Friday June 27, marked Bill Gates’ last day as a full time employee of Microsoft, the hugely successful and influential software company he co-founded in 1975.
Gates will remain as Microsoft’s single largest shareholder and chairman, but will no longer work at the company. He has chosen, instead, to spend more time on the philanthropic organization he and his wife founded a few years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Since he guided Microsoft from startup… to upstart IBM partner… to the company that dominated many software markets – including the operating system, office software and Internet browser markets – for at least two decades, Bill Gates has been a giant in the computer industry. And, in the process, he managed to become, for many years, the world’s richest individual.
Much can be said about Gates’ achievements, but a key question for now is: what does the future hold for Microsoft? Its Live platform holds just 10 percent of the search market, and open source software – notably the Mozilla Firefox browser and the OpenOffice suite of applications – poses formidable challenges to Microsoft’s office software business. Meanwhile, its latest operating system release, Vista, has been widely criticized based on privacy, security, performance, and product activation concerns.
Interestingly, however, Microsoft is showing no signs of being fazed by any of this. If its $47.5 billion bid to buy rival Yahoo ended in tears, it’s Yahoo that’s crying, with senior executives leaving and angry shareholders and analysts asking what exactly Yahoo plans to do to address its share price decline and lack of clear strategy.
As Internet marketers, we owe much to Bill Gates for contributing to the opportunities we have before us – after all, have we not reaped the rewards of Gates’ vision to have a computer on every desk and in every home? Having said that, my own computer use has probably mirrored the rise and gradual decline of Microsoft as the default choice in computer technology.
I started with a Mac in the late 1980s and early 1990s, moved to Windows 95 in… you guessed it, 1995… and became a heavy user of Microsoft Office and, yes, Internet Explorer for the next decade or so. But as Google emerged from 2000 onwards, and the open source revolution gained momentum over the last few years, I now find myself using a PC running Vista… but Open Office and Mozilla for my office and Internet browsing activities respectively. As a marketer I have little inclination to recommend or buy ads on Microsoft Live, and Live is almost an afterthought when it comes to search engine optimization.
And yet, perhaps there are little known opportunities to capitalize on the market that does choose Live as its search engine of choice – older, less tech-savvy Internet users, but potentially customers, depending on your market. Moreover, I wouldn’t rule out Microsoft just yet. One of the company’s key strengths (perhaps its chief strength) has been to buy companies with promising technologies and then commercialize and market those technologies – if Microsoft can do this into the future it may still be a formidable force.
Sources: Steve Lohr, “Microsoft Seeks Path Beyond Gates’s Legacy”, The New York Times, June 27, 2008, Wikipedia, “Criticism of Windows Vista”, Kikabink News, “Yahoo Loses More Senior Staff”, Kikabink News, June 25, 2008
