Bill is actually gone. What does that mean for us?

I still think that Bill Gates has been the single most influential person in the computer market for the last 30 years. Without him things would have happened in a very different way. We would still have many of the technologies that we have today but there would be so many different standards that the computer wouldn’t be the same convenience it is today.

Bill Gates technically spent his last day at Microsoft and while I sometimes get angry at Microsoft’s monopoly, I still think that we were better off with one company taking us all in a clear direction. So now we move into the Steve Ballmer era. What does that mean for us? I think this is an uncertain time in the technology world. I don’t think that our lives will change to an extreme, but I think that with a new captain in the ship we could end up taking a different route from now on.

I think the next version of Windows will tell us a lot. Windows Vista was still Bill’s project really. Even though he had given the CEO position to Steve quite some time ago, just having Bill at the office means that he was still making decisions.

Windows 7 as it is being called right now, will be headed up by the same execs but I wonder if they have had some ideas in their heads that they just didn’t push because it didn’t follow Bill’s vision. Now that Bill has left it might be their opportunity to try those ideas out.

My feeling is that it’s scary that we might lose some of that direction we have come to trust and on the other side there might be an opportunity for things to change and improve.

Only time will tell.