Geek Goliath: Gates Says G'Bye to Microsoft

Despite any criticism about Vista or the company's strategies, the Microsoft founder is still something of a rock star among computer programmers — one of their own who made it big, became a millionaire and got the girl.

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"Gates is to the IT industry what Henry Ford was to the auto industry," said Nik Cubrilovic, co-editor of Silicon Valley blog Tech Crunch and a longtime software developer. "No single person has even come close to reaching the level of influence that he has achieved. Even if you look at the next generation of companies — even Google will never achieve the level of influence that Gates has because he was there at the beginning of the PC industry."

That influence, according to Dan Evans, a senior editor at PC Mag, is an operating system standard that made it easier for developers to bring programs to the masses.

"What he's leaving in his wake is more of a unified software industry. It used to be before Microsoft, there were different OS's. It was hard to write a software that would be on all these different [platforms]," Evans said. "This evolved from Basic to DOS from Windows to dot.net to cloud computing, but it all started with a software industry with a platform that anyone can write to."

But, like many others, Evans thinks that Gates' next move — the management of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a $37.3 billion endowment — could outweigh any of his achievements in the tech world.

"I'm sure if you asked the man on the street what Andrew Carnegie did, how he made his money, they probably wouldn't know. The effects of Carnegie's money are all around us," Evans said. "There will be … bigger and better technology, but the effects of the [Bill & Melinda Gates] foundation will definitely be around."