Author: Dave January 7, 2008

Anyone know? Apparently, July 2008 is the start of the transition for Microsoft. So will the man be retiring or just swapping titles to Great and Powerful Oz, and sending his army of GatesBots, made out of lesser parts of Gates himself, to overrun the circuit boards of the world with new and more powerful buffer overflows? According to the article on Microsoft, he’s now going to

transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work

Global Health and Education work?
I’m not sure I want to know more about what that entails, but no doubt it’ll end up bringing MS more money in the long run. I have but one major gripe with Bill though, before you turn over your immense power to the rest of the company, could you squeeze in the “Setup Project” functionality Visual C# 2005 Express? It’s cool to be able to build applications for free, but I might one day want to actually pass them along to folks to install on their machines. In the meantime, I’ve been using the Inno Setup (great program) but it would be nice to actually be able to build what one creates and be able to deploy it in the same development environment. Just a thought.

Looking back over the years though, I’d say it’s been fun. The world will miss Bill, and when he comes to town spreading his message on health and education, neither of which I can afford any longer, I’m sure it’ll be a more meaningful experience for him and the rest of us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that Microsoft somehow rules the digital world and they’re prone to less than adequate software mishaps, there have been great accomplishments in the Microsoft arena over the years. Among my favorites were the seemingly random comedy sketches Bill had staged with his great power and wealth for our benefit, to show that he’s a regular shmoe like the rest of us, and can laugh at himself just as well as the next guy.

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Who can forget that one? But seriously, I’ve been using Microsoft products, and development tools through the years and I’m hoping that whatever this transition will hold, there may be more giving back to the community. Perhaps in ways as mentioned before, don’t give away VS for free without a viable option for a developer to deploy his app. Seems like kind of a gotcha! The old bait and switch, build what you want, any day all day, but when you want to deploy it…..you’re screwed >:)

I know I’ll miss Bill being in charge though. It won’t feel the same. I would suggest though that MS goes more so the open source route. Something about free Microsoft products makes me feel guilty. We’ve put up with holey operating systems long enough, how about some FREE dev products (real free, not half free) as your parting gift? Then we can call it even.

I suppose it’s easy to pick on the top guy as the target, but I have to say Microsoft in general has teed me off over the years with the costs and holeyness of their products. With this new transition, I can only hope some real change takes place and they give back to the community that helped them reach the top over the years. I don’t want to hold Bill personal for the oopses of Microsoft, but cmon man, shake them up a bit before you split!