Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates "retired" at 52 Friday from the company he cofounded to spend more time with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest.
He is known in the PC industry as the person who pushed it to a thriving industry with a goal of a PC in every home. But in 33 years of building Microsoft, Gates has also been reviled as a merciless competitor and a monopolist, and accused of appropriating other people's ideas.
An Empire from MS-DOS
Starting in 1980, Gates turned an obscure operating system called QDOS into MS-DOS, which some techies have derided as the "retarded little brother" of open-source UNIX, since it basically consisted of flopped slash marks and similar commands with slightly different names.
IBM paid for the development but didn't retain the rights to MS-DOS because it was certain its bread-and-butter big mainframe computers would always be dominant and PCs were just a passing fad. Big mistake. Gates supplied MS-DOS and later Windows to thousands of entrepreneurs who assembled PCs with off-the-shelf parts and sold them for much less than IBM.
Along the way, Gates added other software, sometimes buying out competitors or adding their features as Microsoft Office and other software programs grew to dominate the industry. Some claimed the Windows code was manipulated to cripple competitors, and that became an issue in the company's antitrust battles along with Microsoft taking over the Internet browser market by making Internet Explorer free.
The European Union has also objected to Microsoft's tactics, leading to some changes in the company's behavior toward competitors.
A Tearful Farewell
Add that behavior to Microsoft products that often didn't work well on the first release, notably Windows Vista, and the critics have been hard on Gates and Microsoft. Some in the industry accused the company of releasing "betaware." On the other hand,...

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