As everyone in the world surely knows by now, June 27th was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft. 

With 100s of books and 100,000s of blog posts detailing every known second of his controversial career, I won’t waste words saying what has already been said over and over again.  Surely, Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman.  He did not become the world’s richest man by befriending the competition.  Surely, Bill Gates was arrogant.  He didn’t withstand the most relentless antitrust litigation in US history (with his company virtually unscathed) by yielding to the prosecution. 

But, whatever you choose to think or say about Bill Gates, it is hard not to admire him for what he has already accomplished, what he continues to accomplish, and what he has contibuted to the world.  There aren’t many people who can make a legitimate claim to have had the impact on society that Bill Gates has had.  Whether the ideas were his own or stolen doesn’t really matter in the end.  Great leaders act on behalf of their advisors, their consituencies, and even their competition.  In national politics, “leaning over the isle” is considered a positive trait.  Whether Gates ran Microsoft ethically or not is largely irrelevant, and I challenge anyone to show me a large corporation that doesn’t do whatever it can to make more money for its leaders and shareholders.

Like him or not, Bill Gates wielded a tremendous amount of power at the helm of Microsoft, at least up until the last years.  At the end of his reign, I think we are all in a better place than we were when he started.  We have the internet.  We have cheap desktop computers.  Regardless of his ruthless business practices, his brutal treatment of the competition, or his arrogance against congress, he leaves the techno-world in a better place than he found it.  Few US presidents can say the same thing of their terms in office. 

Whatever your opinion of the man might be, we were all fortunate to have had Bill Gates to hold the reigns of the world of technology for a while.