Bill said his last word

On Tuesday, June 3, attendees at the TechEd Developers 2008 conference in Orlando, Florida witnessed a historic event. A modest man in glasses and a familiar, slightly wrinkled shirt spoke to them with his last public speech as the head of the largest IT company in the world, which he had been building for 33 years. On July 1, Bill Gates will start working at Microsoft only “for the fifth part of the bet,” and he will devote the rest of his time to a charity foundation with his wife.

Of course, the moment was somewhat blurred by the fact that the "last speech" of Bill Gates was already as if delivered at CES in January, but no one began to attach great importance to this.

Speaking to the 5000th audience, Bill once again said that his success was due to the company only in close cooperation with developers, whose representatives made up the majority of those present in the hall. In addition, he shared some of the details of Microsoft's future strategy.

For example, Gates talked about the so-called Project Oslo - a whole direction in software development that focuses on the easy creation of applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Those who wish can experience Microsoft's achievements in this area in October at the PDC 2008 conference .

It was also said about MS plans to build data centers for hosting web applications, not inferior in level to analogues from Google and Amazon.com. After that, Gates talked a little about the next version of Internet Explorer, the second beta of which will be released as


early as in August, and about Windows 7. Bill called a graduate student from MIT to stage the audience with the “Ballmer bot” he created, a robot that imitates the behavior of Steve Ballmer. The robot rode around the stage screaming “Developers! Developers! " and showed how he can throw eggs (by the way, you can too ).

The full TechEd intro video can be viewed here .