Full Office at Gates’ Departure

Exclusive – Lucian Mandruta was present when the IT magnate retired

A retirement party where the people waited for three hours to get in without even knowing the pensioner personally. I was one of those who waited for Bill Gates on the floor of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. He was to talk for one last time at CES – the greatest electronics fair in the world.

When Bill arrived, half of us, the Europeans, were half asleep. He managed to wake us up with a movie which described the next day after his departure from Microsoft while looking for a new job. Goerge Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Hillary Clinton politely refuse him. Bill doesn’t manage to find a new job and leaves home with the box with his things on the roof of the car. The movie is a joke of course, but the fact that half of America’s stars appear in it shows the current Bill Gates’ public status.

A DREAM

The kid that left school when he was 17 to create a small software company retires with approximately 60 billion US dollars in his bank accounts. He is not the richest man on Earth, but the second richest isn’t bad either. However, Bill didn’t talk about money on his way out. He talked about the importance of computers in the last decade and about their importance in the following decade. He was modest. The truth is that in the moment in which he started Microsoft, the computers could only help for multiplying or dividing. Three decades later, the computers were able to tell us whether we suffered from disc hernia, whether we had received a new mail or whether a newly downloaded movie waited for us to see it.

The strange thing is that Microsoft wasn’t quite liked for the so common computer performances: gigantism isn’t always loved. No such manifestation happened yesterday. Gates and the public were like a team and each of them was aware of the fact that they took part in a unique moment in history. Wouldn’t you have liked to take part in Isaac Newton’s final course?

INHERITANCE

The Microsoft type of communication refers to the migration of technologies from the offices to the homes: we’ll have servers in the living rooms, and grandma will have her own calendar application that will tell her that she would have to baby-sit the children on Sunday. Or she might even leave us a vocal message with the help of the mobile phone with win mobile 6… Entertainment seems to be the motor of Microsoft at present. This is probably why Bill will be replaced by the Head of the XBOX department in the summer. It is a normal thing. A company has to raise its clients and the little children know Microsoft because of Halo 3, not because of office…!

There are still a few questions that Bill leaves behind unanswered. First of all, who will take hold of that part of the market formed by the people that are yet to own a computer? Where do personal computers go: are they destined to disappear in a pile of intelligent devices?

There is no person to tell the answer for this question. His colleagues fought twice as hard to get his name on the software on which the following computers will be based. However, I have never seen a more relaxed pensioner even though he has a house with a total surface of thousands of square meters. I don’t want to think about the bills!

•  by Lucian Mandruta – Las Vegas

• Translated by Sorin Bălan