On Bill Gates and Microsoft

On Bill Gates someone just commented on Facebook; 

“One of the greatest minds of our time”

Business and marketing minds yes maybe, but he bought not built almost everything Microsoft had in the early days, from MS-DOS onwards.

I would say that in retrospect the Microsoft monoculture we had on the desktop for years actually held up the development of modern software systems and it took others (Apple, Linux etc) to shake things up and improve things to the point we are at today.