Who Will Fill Bill Gates’ Shoes?
Who Will Fill Bill Gates’ Shoes?
Erick Schonfeld
Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the PC era. His products touch nearly every computer user on the planet. And he created what is still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. But now that he is leaving, who will fill his shoes?I don’t mean who will fill his shoes at Microsoft. Gates stepped back from day-to-day management years ago, handing his business responsibilities to CEO Steve Ballmer and technology responsibilities to chief software architect Ray Ozzie. What I mean is: Who will carry on his legacy and define the current Web era of computing?
It is unlikely there will ever be another Bill Gates if for the only reason that Gates’ influence stemmed from his control of the computing platform of choice (the PC, through Windows). The computing platform of choice today is the Web, and no single person or company can control that. But there are plenty of Web company founders out there—from large companies to small startups—that are turning the Web into a platform for applications and creating new kinds of software as a result.
In fact, there are many application platforms emerging on the Web. There is Facebook and Open Social for social networking apps. Salesforce.com AppExchange for enterprise apps. And more generic cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Web Services and Google’s App Engine for any kind of app. And soon these will be extended to mobile devices as well with the iPhone and Google’s Android.
The resulting software being built on top of these and other Web platforms is qualitatively different than PC software. It is connected to other software and other people. That makes it inherently social and driven by communications rather than productivity. It can also be taken apart and spread to other Websites, or even put back on the desktop, in the form of widgets.
So who is filling Gates’ shoes? Lots of people are collectively, starting with Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Slide’s Max Levchin, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. These are some of the names we came up with for Reuters, who asked us to put together a list of “Entrepreneurs to watch” box, which you can read on Reuters as part of its Bill Gates coverage (it’s the interactive box at the bottom of the page).
Below after the break are the people we chose, along with why we chose them. This is just a representative sample, and was written for a general audience. Add your own candidates in comments along with why you think they deserve to be recognized.
Labels: Bill Gate
posted by Cambodian Information Center at 1:26 PM
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