June 27 is Bill Gates last day at Microsoft and has been declared by Engadget as Bill Gates Day. I won't go that far as he did not bring only pleasure to the IT world. In fact I don't know how often I was entirely annoyed when once more Windows crashed my PC and I had to restart. Microsoft certainly taught you to save work regularly. I remember that back in the old days where IBM's OS/2 was still used by banks in Germany and they did the math how much cheaper it is to have a more stable OS on all your clients saving downtime. Of course you can also be sarcastic and say that Bill gave you not only trouble but also nice breaks whenever Windows hung again. From a sales and marketing strategy point of view he is admired of course as he was able to build a monopoly in a highly competitive and fast moving market. And if you ask me why I still use Windows and MS Office then because it is mainly laziness I assume. Of course some of our guys use Apple, Linux and Office.org now and we have group calendars, web collaboration and CRM tools all online and not with Microsoft.

I think the post Bill Gates days will be less successful for Microsoft and being able to always predict the future right he chose a good time to leave and make use of the money he made (off all of us tolerating the many PC crashes) to do some good things. So in a way we will all finance the philanthropic part of his new life. Now I feel much better having hung in there for so long.

The magazine Forbes attracts readers with their list of top people in the world. They have a list of the richest people, a list of the top venture capitalists, most generous philanthropists, the most influential business books, the best paid CEOs, outperforming CEOs, world's most powerful women, the most influential celebrities and many many more. In a highly creative strategic move trying to win over readers Fortune Magazine now has a list too: the 25 most powerful business people. In this list we have a few (pure) ICT company leaders as well. They are:

1. Steve Jobs, Apple

4. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Google

6. Bill Gates, Microsoft

11. John Chambers, Cisco Networks

16. Mark Hurd, Hewlett Packard

Most notable difference to other lists is that Bill Gates is only on place 6.
Forbes would certainly win as the magazine with the most top people lists. But Fortune would win the title for the publication with the most influential list of influential people. I am now wondering what list we should come up with today in order to market ourselves?

In its nearly lost battle for the search engine market, Microsoft yesterday started a 3D mapping service (for some US cities first, and only available with the US live.com site, using Internet Explorer).
Three-dimensional models are built for 15 U.S. cities, with more to
come. The cities are San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; Seattle;
Boston; Philadelphia; Los Angeles; Las Vegas; Detroit; Phoenix;
Houston; Baltimore; Atlanta; Denver; Dallas; and Fort Worth, Texas.

I tried it but it did not work. Not sure if the servers were overloaded or if the fact that I am in Europe makes it more difficult right now.

Microsoft live is clearly just copying Google in every way and is now trying to add new differentiating functions. When Bill Gates was asked on the German TV news last night if he also uses Google when doing search on the web he of course recommended people "to use Microsoft live where they do truly amazing things and not just display awkward search results" (he meant Google of course). So as with Netscape in the browser war some time ago, Google is now right in the middle of Microsoft's radar screen. I have the gut feeling that the battle has by no means already been won by Google and that a few years down the road we might find Microsoft more on eye level with them. Maybe Gates last big "victory" before he "retires" to do more anthropological PR work for them.

It is a bit later than afternoon - very late afternoon in fact. But while the blogosphere - at least from my selected list - seems to be falling into a "Sommerloch" (summer break) or maybe is having a Soccer World Cup hangover, there were still a few noteworthy things to be found today:

• Nortel and Huawei split, this is just 4 months after their joint venture started - rumors are out now that maybe Nortel might become an acquisition target itself.
• Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital talks on his blog about the things that can happen when employees decide to give up salary for an equity stake after they had already obtained funding. Nice insight that shows that VC investment and startup business is often like playing poker with highest stakes.
• "Good Morning Silicon Valley" is the place to go to read sarcastic things and rumors about high-tech celebrities. Of course they comment on Bill Gates's announcement that he is to step down from its day-to-day operations job in July 2007: This chief software architect has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down, or Damn shame Ballmer doesn’t have a foundation too, eh?
• Thanks to Guy Kawasaki's Top Ten Father's Day Gift List I was able to remind my wife and kids that there is - well - Father's Day this weekend. Thanks indeed, Guy! I will point out to them the Breitling Aerospace watch which is number 9 on the list because it is a Swiss high-quality product and I don't have to pay for it.
• Golem.de (in German) comments on the new release of Serendipity 1.0; one might think this is a brand new product now but that is untrue. Many releases have been out before and also we have been using this blogging software for our blog site and are pretty happy with it.
• Rumors of a Microsoft iPod/iTunes rival product/service could be read about in some gadget sites before, but now it is getting very concrete as Reuters reports.