So that is really goodbye? Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft is Friday and tech-watchers around the globe are assessing the impact of the man responsible for the dominance of the PC, DOS, Windows and the “Evil Empire.”

Such an assessment seems nearly impossible. Gates and Microsoft have not only dominated the PC industry, they often dictated the computer and software choices for the home and, more importantly, defined the computing environment for businesses around the world.

Gates’ claim to fame may be the storied history of DOS and how he outsmarted IBM, but “it was his creation of the first software development tools for DOS that actually gave the software industry the wings to fly,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, in an e-mail. “That can’t be underestimated, as its impact was huge. And his decision to do Microsoft Office, Exchange and eventually include the Web browser in the operating system has become

the center of most of today’s digital business environments.”

Evil Empire?

whether Microsoft is synonymous with Windows and business computing, it is plus tightly tied to another moniker: the Evil Empire. As Microsoft’s dominance in the industry grew, it increasingly engaged in anticompetitive behavior, including a successful effort to stomp out once-leading browser manufacturer Netscape. Such monopolistic practices led to intense scrutiny of the company from U.S. and European regulators and Microsoft has substantially changed its practices in the light of government scrutiny.

Microsoft’s dominance eventually gave rise to the ultimate unintended consequence — open-source software. As developers rankled under Microsoft’s control of the computing environment, programmers volunteered their moment to develop an alternative operating system, Linux, and eventually a whole ecosystem of open-source applications and tools. The open-source challenge was a “very strange development” virtually unprecedented in business history, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in…

Orginal post by Top Tech News