Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the PC era. His products touch nearly every computer user on the planet. And he created what is still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. But now that he is leaving, who will fill his shoes?
I don’t mean who will fill his shoes at Microsoft. Gates stepped back from day-to-day management years ago, handing his business responsibilities to CEO Steve Ballmer and technology responsibilities to chief software architect Ray Ozzie. What I mean is: Who will carry on his legacy and define the current Web era of computing?
It is unlikely there will ever be another Bill Gates if for the only reason that Gates’ influence stemmed from his control of the computing platform of choice (the PC, through Windows). The computing platform of choice today is the Web, and no single person or company can control that. But there are plenty of Web company founders out there—from large companies to small startups—that are turning the Web into a platform for applications and creating new kinds of software as a result.
In fact, there are many application platforms emerging on the Web. There is Facebook and Open Social for social networking apps. Salesforce.com AppExchange for enterprise apps. And more generic cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Web Services and Google’s App Engine for any kind of app. And soon these will be extended to mobile devices as well with the iPhone and Google’s Android.
The resulting software being built on top of these and other Web platforms is qualitatively different than PC software. It is connected to other software and other people. That makes it inherently social and driven by communications rather than productivity. It can also be taken apart and spread to other Websites, or even put back on the desktop, in the form of widgets.
So who is filling Gates’ shoes? Lots of people are collectively, starting with Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Slide’s Max Levchin, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. These are some of the names we came up with for Reuters, who asked us to put together a list of “Entrepreneurs to watch” box, which you can read on Reuters as part of its Bill Gates coverage (it’s the interactive box at the bottom of the page).
Below after the break are the people we chose, along with why we chose them. This is just a representative sample, and was written for a general audience. Add your own candidates in comments along with why you think they deserve to be recognized.
Sergey Brin/Larry Page (Google founders)
The two people most likely to carry on Bill Gates’ legacy also happen to be his biggest nemeses. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already nerdy, brainy billionaires and are taking on Microsoft on multiple fronts—from search to online applications. And, in fact, when it comes to making money on the Web, it is Microsoft that is trying to catch up to Google.
Just like Windows is the starting point for everything people do on their PCs, for many people Google’s search engine is the starting point for everything they do on the Web. Brin and Page are building on top of that with online applications and other products aimed directly at Microsoft’s other businesses such as Gmail (Outlook), Google Docs (Office), and Android (Windows Mobile).
Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and CEO)
Jeff Bezos, one of Seattle’s other billionaires, is best known for bringing shopping online with Amazon.com. But over the past few years, Bezos has started selling something besides books and digital cameras. In his eyes Amazon.com is just a massive Web application that sits in the cloud.
He is now offering Amazon’s “cloud computing” infrastructure to other companies that don’t want to have to build their own data centers to store data or run a Web applications. Through a series of “Web services,” companies can buy data storage, compute cycles, and database access from Amazon, and pay only for what they use. In this way, Bezos is helping to define the next era of Web-scale computing.
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO)
If there is one person who reminds people the most of the young Bill Gates, it is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The 24-year old is a Harvard drop-out (like Gates) and is building his company with the focus and singular vision of making it the operating system for social applications.
The rise and success of Facebook is largely due to the fact that it is a platform for Web applications created by other developers (just as Windows is a platform for PC applications). And Zuckerberg has created a mini-economy around Facebook. Maybe these similarities are what convinced Microsoft to invest $240 million in Facebook last fall.
Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder and CEO)
Just like consumer applications, enterprise software is moving to the Web as well. One of the first entrepreneurs to capitalize on this shift is Marc Benioff. His company, Salesforce.com, began by selling browser-based customer relationship management (CRM) software as a subscription service over the Web.Taking a page from the Bill Gates playbook, he’s extended his pay-by-the-drink concept to other areas of enterprise software and opened up Salesforce.com as platform for other companies to build and distribute their own Web-based software.
Max Levchin (Slide founder and CEO)
A Ukrainian-born programmer, Max Levchin started his career as the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Two years later he founded Slide, which pioneered a new type of software known as a widget. Slide’s widgets typically draw data from the Web and are geared towards self-expression. They can appear on your desktop or added to other Websites such as Facebook.
Slide’s Facebook applications, which include FunWall and SuperPoke, boast more active users than any other company’s. In January, Levchin raised $50 million for Slide, giving the company a valuation of half a billion dollars.
Kevin Rose (Digg founder)
If software is becoming social, there is no better example than Digg. The popular news site attracts 15 million visitors a month, according to comScore. Digg relies entirely on its readers to submit headlines and links to articles, and vote them to the homepage.
Digg is the brainchild of founder Kevin Rose, who has mastered the art of teasing wisdom from the crowd. It is not so much about the underlying algorithms that power Digg as it is about setting the right conditions to give people the incentive to contribute.
Evan Williams (Twitter)
The Web at its core is a communications medium, and Evan Williams keeps coming up with new ways to for people to communicate over it. He founded Blogger, one of the original and largest Web-based blogging services, which he sold to Google in 2003. More recently he co-founded Twitter, a micro-blogging service that lets people broadcast short text messages of no more than 140 characters.
By limiting the length of the messages, Twitter effectively lowers the barriers to communicating. After all, it is much easier to send a Tweet than to write an entire blog post.
The service is growing so fast that it is hitting serious scaling issues and if often down. But the company raised $15 million to help solve those issues. One of the investors: Jeff Bezos
Stewart Butterfield/Caterina Fake (Flickr founders)
Husband-and-wife team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created the most successful photo-sharing site on the Web with Flickr. By default, every photo uploaded to the site is public to encourage sharing and can easily be displayed on other sites as well. Flickr shows what can happen when you take personal media and put it online. Instead of being forgotten in a shoebox, a photo you took two years ago can be discovered and enjoyed by someone halfway around the world.
After it was purchased by Yahoo in 2005 for an estimated $35 million, Butterfield and Fake stayed on. The service kept growing and eventually replaced Yahoo Photos. It now attracts 54 million visitors a month worldwide, according to comScore. Both recently departed Yahoo, which is undergoing management turmoil, but keep an eye on them to see what they do next.
Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor (FriendFeed founders)
On the Web, it can be hard to keep track all the information and services that are available. FriendFeed, a startup that launched publicly earlier this year, helps you manage the information overload by pulling together the online activities of all your friends in one place. You can see all of your friends’ blog posts, Twitters, Flickr photos, stories they vote up on Digg, and YouTube videos they like, among other things, all in one feed. This turns out to be an effective, and addictive, information filter.
Two of FriendFeed’s co-founders are ex-Googlers Paul Buchheit and BretTaylor. Buchheit was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto. Taylor led the development of Google Maps and Google Local.
Killing the web: FAIL!
Killing iPod: FAIL!
Killing iTunes: FAIL!
Killing Firefox: FAIL!
Killing Apache: FAIL!
Killing Linux: FAIL!
Fucking Killing Google:UTMOST FAILURE!
Eric – To compare a technology legend like Bill Gates to the Web 2.0 entreprenuers is stupid. Here is a description that fits your profile – http://en.wikip...28psychology%29 – get a job spamming myspace – you would fit in well.
That A.D.D. kid on House M.D.
I can’t quite understand why you would leave out Steve Jobs and include people other names like Facebook! Flickr and Friendfeed? If you were in any case taking that path, why leave out the guy who founded Wikipedia?!
how about “Other” (don’t agree with the list choices….)
You have got to be kidding me. Max Levchin?!?!?! Slide?! Are you fucking serious?!?! Holy Shit. This list is completely ridiculous. The only people that even deserve to get a mention are Larry and Sergey, maybe Bezos, but the others are completely ridiculous to even mention in this link bait of a post.
Wow. Reuters is going to look like an ass if they publish this list. Nice work, TC.
“I can’t quite understand why you would leave out Steve Jobs and include people other names like Facebook!”
They’re too old. It’s obvious he wants to fit it based on stereotype(Ivy league wizkid with wealthy friends) rather than accomplishments.
Erik,
Bill Gates would have said, “this is the stupidest article, I have ever seen” and he would have been so right.
Have some shame putting Twitter, Slide and Amazon in the same league as Gates. Get out of valley for a while and see what real people in real world do.
I voted for the Twitter CEO…he is obviously the person that’s going to fill Bill Gates role in the technology industry.
There is simply no other company other than Twitter that has the potential to be as ubiquituous as Microsoft. Microsoft controlled the desktop…Twitter controls time and friendships, that’s powerful.
Everytime I go for bike ride or get a haircut or wash my car or take a nap, Twitter is profiting hand over fist.
im curious what your video traffic is michael a. all i do is scroll down through the comments – ‘blah blah blah’ and look for video comments. im assuming that its not quit panning out? im curious.
ZuckerBorg is already Gates’ little bitch. I think he’ll carry on the long legacy of ruthlessly fucking over the little guy.
Eric: Would you respond to the general question in comments? How did you come up with such a moronic list?
What criteria/parameters did you use to come up with these names? Or is it a fancy list that contains the first few names that came to your head when you woke up today?
There are no criteria or parameters… that’s the problem with the list… the criteria should be as follows (not reflecting the list in the article necessarily)
- Customer reach (how many customers does their company serve)
- Gross revenues
- Expansiveness of demographic served (e.g. microsoft served all demographics and types of people)
- Geographic reach
- How much have they given back to the community thus far, philanthropic initiatives?
- What type of problem did they solve? How important was in in the spectrum of everyday life?
- Have others been able to profit (build businesses) based off their services?
….. http://www.read...ex.php?RTA=web2
Where is Redhat, Linus ?
Oh you are talking for Web, but to run the web you require OS !
-Raxit
Gates is an OG.
He has people around him more powerful than your list to run errands for him!
Salute to the master! My daily bread and butter comes from working on Microsoft products.
As a tribute to this great man I am not using any Google product for today!
Surprisingly, since morning I am able to do all my job with ease without using Google.
I don’t know, but those are some pretty big shoes to fill. Hopefully they don’t let the biggest computer company fail.
Bill Gates was an icon, I hope someone can even come “close” to filling his shoes.
-http://easysummermoney.blogspot.com/
Looks like my guess was pretty good according to the poll results. The mob has spoken for Page and Brin.
http://www.tech...ll-gates-shoes/
Do you think Bill will be seen as the great innovator and leader of Microsoft, or more on the evil-side? Makes you wonder…
http://webpoet....7/bye-bye-bill/
At least, he shared some of our frustration with the Microsoft products.
WTF.
Twitter?!
Stop writing forever. Do something else because you are clueless.
Looks like you were sha**ing off and wanted to share you fantasies with us..nice try!
omg..twtr ttlly rcks…ceo fill shoes of billg…lol…omg
SALESFORCE.com ?? list with gooogles and amazon…
what are u smoking?
After all the B.S. this Valley has seen over the last year, I think we all need a break. Take a look, book a trip and get ready for the next round that’s coming.
http://hogantra...elandtours.com/
Gates will be remembered as perhaps the most intelligent man of the 20th centurary, along with Albert Einstein. The other’s in the list are not really in the same leauge as him.
However, if i had to pick one individual to be the “next Bill Gates”, it would have to be Kevin Rose. He has pretty much redefined the media industry, in a way not witnessed since the invention of the printing press.
Wonder what his real legacy will be….
http://tinyurl.com/6q7b8z
That has to be Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie.
Only Sergy, Larry, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs can come close. Forget about the rest, they just have popular web applications that have no business models and can easily be replicated and bettered. But just as Microsoft built the Desktop O/S, Steve and Ray must look at ways of creating the major Web O/S.
Microsoft can wipe out Salesforce.com, Zoho, Google Docs and other Web Office Companies by releasing future versions of their Office Software Apps in a premium rate Desktop/Web Bundle.(Office Cloud?) By releasing Desktop/Web Bundles of Microsoft Office and integrating the Web version with other Microsoft Web Services like Hotmail, Messenger and Live Search, Microsoft would eventually control the Enterprise Cloud and key areas of a Web O/S.
Unlike Windows for Desktop PC’s, Microsoft does not have a dominant hold of entering the Web domain. Along with Internet Explorer and other Web Browsers, Web Users are free to go anyway they like over the internet, no matter where their journey begins.
But maybe if Microsoft can look at ways of integrating Windows Desktop Services into future versions of Internet Explorer, then maybe Microsoft can release future editions of Windows in special Desktop/Web Bundles. A possible Windows Explorer?, could become the perfect Start Page Web O/S.
Everyone that uses Windows or Office Software on their Desktop P/C, would greatly buy into Web Versions of these two major brands, if both versions could seamlessly integrate together on both the Desktop and the Web.
Google fails to understand that whilst some business folks enjoy the freedom of Google Docs over the Web, the vast majority of businesses still prefer using Office Applications on the Desktop. This is why I believe that Microsoft has a big say in this arena, as they can release bundled versions of Windows Office that can seamlessly integrate and work on both the Desktop and the Web.
So just as Steve Ballmer helped Bill Gates build the Desktop O/S, so can Steve, with a little help from Ray Ozzie, build a futureWeb O/S.
Maybe in 10 years time we could be saying, Who Will Fit Steve Ballmers Shoes’.
When i looked at those pictures and the fact that i definitely agree that Microsoft is not the same without Bill…I wondered if Microsoft is still the most powerful company in the world? (as, in my opinion, they used to be) And i took a look at what companies dominate the world and i wondered, who is the most powerful company nowadays? So i took a ride on google and came across this website which might give me an answer in a month, check it out: http://www.them...rfulcompany.com
In my opinion… have you all taken stupid pills????
Ask anyone in the tech industry in the early 90’s what they thing of Gates? (or all the love coming from 20-25 yr olds?) Insiders that I knew talked at length NUMEROUS TIMES that if team MS felt that there was a tech being developed that could impact the industry, a memo would be “leaked” stating that they were going to look into possibly venturing into the “____(any new tech)_____” application. And overnight all the existing start-ups would lose there VC money and swim in the deadpool. (again my opinion) Gates’ team did more to hurt the industry in the 90’s than anyone could imagine. And the the love that is going on up here in Seattle is pathetic.
Erick Schonfeld – “The computing platform of choice today is the Web, …”
Unless I missed something the last time I used my PC I was accessing the Web VIA my PC with computer operating system software, network connectivity software and a broadband router!
TechCruch ‘everything is the cloud / Web2.0′ junkies can’t seem to see the forest for the trees.
TechCrunch continue to make ridiculous comparisons of Microsoft to Google, Yahoo and Apple. They are not even remotely close to being similar companies.
@19 : Right on, Sandeep. It’s heights of stupidity to throw in those names. Have some sense, TC guyz….
You left off “none of the above” in your poll. And that is the answer.
Many of these people would have a hard time finding a job at Microsoft that Bill would entrust them with, nevermind “filling his shoes”
My guess is the person you are wanting to identify is probably in 4th or 5th grade at the moment. All the people on your list are one-trick ponies, which Gates was not.
I think these people are all very capable and I have a great deal of respect – if not some healthy envy – for all of them; but the only one that from an influence point of view can come close if not surpass Gates in some respects is Jobs. Am I a fan of Jobs? not. Not a fan, but I have respect for him as much as I do for Gates.
We are yet to see an influencer such as Gates, Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee , Jerry Young, and a handful more. None of the guys you listed above come close to any of these guys I just listed; and I mean no disrespect to any of them either. But really, put things in perspective.
Hey,
“No one” would have being an options.
¿Do you rally think that his place can be occupied?
I don´t think so.
The correct answer is no one and to include the following people is just absurd
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
Slide’s Max Levchin
Digg’s Kevin Rose
Twitter’s Evan Williams
Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake
FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor
haha your smoking something Eric
What a ridicolous article that is once again American focused.
The only people who have half a chance are the Google Founders – oh and you forget to mention that fact that Eric Schmidt is defining the Google strategy
Your comparing Kevin Rose to Bill Gates ? Are you crazy ? He’s produced a bloody website that revolves around voting up articles and a video company that sits on a couch talking about useless crap. How in any fking way is this a comparison to bill gates?
This article is a joke. As all the other posters have commented – none of the people you have included are even close in comparison to Bill Gates.
How naive to assume that the future of computing lies on the West Coast of the USA. I suggest you take some time off and get out of the bubble.
Erik,
Do you even know with whom are you comparing BILL GATES. Bill Gates is a BIGGGG name world over.
One may be forgiven for comapring Bill with Google and Amazon founders but definitely not with the ones of Slide/Twitter/Digg/Salesforce…etc. They dont even sound like companies, rather just another weebsite
Talking about Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg and FriendFeed founders to fill the shoes of Big Bill is so laughable it hurts. How about we make the comparison when any of these sites even turn $1 in profit compared to, oh say, $40bn+ for the house that Bill built? Your only credible and worthy comparisons here are Brin/Page, Bezos and possibly Benioff. Levchin is out there somewhere in the middle, but definitely not on the level of Gates.
Slide? Really? Compared to Microsoft?
Do you even know anything about MS?
Looks like you don’t care about what you are writing anyway, so why don’t you add Techcrunch and Micheal Arrington to that list?
Talking about Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg and FriendFeed founders to fill the shoes of Big Bill is so laughable it hurts. How about we make the comparison when any of these sites even turn $1 in profit compared to, oh say, $40bn+ for the house that Bill built? Your only credible and worthy comparisons here are Brin/Page, Bezos and possibly Benioff. Levchin is out there somewhere in the middle, but definitely not on the level of Gates.
There are only a handful of ‘true’ innovators out there on the web/tech: Gates, Jobs, Yang, Bezos and Brin/Page. None of the others on your list are even close to touching this group, and Gates & Jobs are so far ahead of the others it actually isn’t funny.
Look guys, if you want to replied this with your own blog post. Please consider yourself to join the league on: “Bill Gates; after the sunrise …..”
http://blogleag...eagues/view/136
Disclaimer: I run SmugMug.
Stewart and Caterina deserve all the accolades, press, and adoration they’ve received. Flickr is an amazing service, it’s incredibly popular, and it has an extremely passionate and loyal following. I’m a fan of the service, and even more, a fan of the duo personally.
However… “the most successful photo-sharing site on the Web”? On none of the metrics one should probably define “most successful”, whether it’s financial (~$30M exit? Likely a loss-leader at Yahoo?) or adoption (Facebook, Kodak, WebShots and Photobucket, among others, have billions more photos than Flickr – and Facebook did it in less time and serves more photos) or anything else I can think of.
That’s not to say they don’t deserve to be on this particular list – they deserve to be at least as much as many of the others, if not more. But that’s some pretty extreme hyperbole.
On the real subject at hand, I think only Larry, Sergey, and Jeff belong on this list to begin with, and even they have a massive amount of catching up to do before they’re even in the same league as Bill Gates in almost any metric, perhaps the biggest of which is time.
Microsoft suck! although i happen to use little few services of it..
I think it’s going to be Ballmer.. Incase if he turn it down, i’m around!
Jack Ma (Alibaba)
Jack Ma, the founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Alibaba Group. He founded Alibaba.com in 1999, which is a China-based business marketplace site that serves international businesses. Alibaba Group then founded TaoBao.com, which is an online auction website that is pretty much similar to eBay and instead of paying through PayPal, TaoBao’s currency is AliPay. Yahoo Inc. then acquires a staggering 40% stakes worth over $1 billion dollars.
It’s just like saying who will be the net Micheal Jordan or who will fill Jordan’s shoes in the NBA? there were many who tried and some say Kobe is the nearest they’ve seen in years, so in the Tech World Bill Gates cannot be replace even if somebody comes and try to earn billions and billions, nothing can come close to Bill
Guys I just revisted this post and I got to say. We are all the puppets and the poster of this story was the puppet master
Nothing but link bait and retarded comparisons to get us to jump
whoever is this century’s tech visionary is probably someone we haven’t heard of yet. Gates changed the world overnight and in one try. MS got a user base of over 90% on core products like operating system and internet browsers, effectively putting their product in the heart of the digital experience of hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
google is big, but never got a market share remotely as big as MS. And google is very western-centric.
That being said, thanks to this article I read the early coverage of twitter by Arington. http://www.tech...tr-interesting/
“I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.”
“But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?”
In my eyes it´s clear that nobody can fill Bills´ shoes. He is just a unique genius and improved the world so much. I think during his era he developed also people and met some other unique heads, who are all good. I think he´d planned and created everything before he knew he can declare the he´ll retire. but seriously, I don´t believe that he won´t have the last word for making important decissions.