Well, there are number of personal attributes I really appreciate. Precision, focus, commitment and self-motivation are some of them. But there is another one, no matter for what type of business you are working for: A good sense of humor.

The next video features a very important person who had an impact on all our IT-life and the direction of IT development of two decades. It is Bill Gates; the video shows his last day in the office “very seriously”. (The video was presented at the CES, Las Vegas).

What is my personal opinion about Bill Gates and his company? The PC on my desk runs Windows Vista and Office 2007; my back up-system (for accounting) runs Windows 2000 SP4 and Office 2003. I think that the high standardization level in terms of software was one major driver to push PCs into the mass market and to transfer a commercial good into a consumer product. I am not writing about the aspect that OS like Linux or Mac OS X offer better security or better handling. I am talking about the benefits of the mass market. All my colleagues use Excel and when we talk about a specific problem and how to calculate it we use the same tool. It is not a religion, but it is a huge advantage when everyone uses the same tool. Our first regular PC was a Pentium 90 MHz, 750 MB hard drive and 32 MB Ram. It was 1995 and we had to pay a fortune. Its OS was IBM OS 2 Warp something. Do you remember? It was a quite good OS, but IBM did not manage to convince enough software suppliers to develop software for it. Our office application was Lotus Suite for OS2 and it was full of bugs. 6 months later we shifted to Windows 95….And today: My new PC (2007) is a Pentium Quad, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive and and and….Its price was one third of the 1995 PC!

I would like to end this post with a quote from “slimshady7150” on the video website: “The world wouldn’t be what it is today without Gates….” You hit the mark.

Enjoy the video!

 

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

 

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