Microsoft paul

Personal computing would not have existed without him. In a statement confirming his death on Monday afternoon, his sister Jody described the businessman as a "remarkable individual on every level". For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends," the statement said. The businessman made his fortune alongside school friend Bill Gates, after they co-founded technology giant Microsoft in I will miss him tremendously.

He left the company in following his first diagnosis of the blood cancer Hodgkin's disease, but recovered to become a successful venture capitalist with his media and communications investment firm, Vulcan that he set up in I've spent Monday at the 25th anniversary of technology magazine Wired, an event celebrating the history of not just the magazine, but technology itself.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August , but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search. Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop.

Even Microsoft sees that now. Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page.

Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones. The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser.

Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now.

Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway. And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way. I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you.

Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. He owned the Portland Trailblazers, the Seattle Seahawks, one of the biggest yachts in the world, and much more.

Plus, he was a major philanthropist, giving away billions to charitable causes. Bob O'Rear was one of the oldest employees at Microsoft. He left the company in , moved back to his home state of Texas, and got into cattle ranching.

Bob Greenberg was the guy who won a radio call-in contest to get the photo. He went on to help his family's company, Coleco, develop the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, which became a huge hit. As of , he's said to have been working on golf course software. Marc McDonald was the first salaried employee. He left in because he didn't like how big the company was getting. After leaving Microsoft, he went to another Paul Allen-led company, Asymetrix.

He then went to the Seattle software company Design Intelligence, which was acquired by Microsoft in — so he ended up back at Microsoft.

In , he left Microsoft for the second time, and worked at advertising startup PaperG until Gordon Letwin was with the company until , the second-longest run of all the employees pictured. Gates is first. He was a programmer at Microsoft, and he quit when he wanted a break from the grind of the company. He was a millionaire by the time he left Microsoft. Now Letwin has a ranch in Arizona and runs the environmental charity Wilburforce Foundation with his wife, Rose. Steve Wood is the husband of Maria Wood, also in this photo, who eventually left Microsoft and sued it over sex discrimination.

Steve left in , but worked with Paul Allen on a few companies afterward — including web development company Starwave, which was ultimately sold to Disney. It seems Bob Wallace was one of the most far-out early Microsoft employees. He spent time and money researching psychedelic drugs after leaving the company. He also founded a software company called Quicksoft. He died in from pneumonia. Jim Lane was a project manager who left in Legend has it that he announced his departure by saying that Microsoft "beat the enthusiasm out of me.

At Microsoft, he helped create the company's crucial partnership with Intel, which played a huge role in the company's ability to dominate the PC industry. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.