 Forget Metro and Windows 8. Retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's legacy will be how he changed the business tech landscape. Anyone involved in business technology in the early 90's will remember one significant event: When business networks left Novell Netware in droves as the business networking platform of choice and converted their infrastructure to Microsoft Windows clients and servers. The computing world by then was familiar with Windows 3.1 on the desktop. With Bill Gates, Microsoft made its foray into networking; PCs with native network capabilities—specifically peer-to-peer networking with Windows for Workgroups. Eventually Windows NT was developed, and that was when in the IT community, certified Novell systems engineers—highly coveted and well-paid at the time—started to take notice of the new Windows Server platform. However, it was not until Bill Gates named Steve Ballmer CEO in 2000 that Microsoft's real push to woo businesses to Windows commenced, and it's been a love affair ever since. The Windows 2000 client/server platform was introduced the same year and Novell network administrators were quickly turning into Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers — lest they find themselves out of work. Microsoft destroyed Novell, and Ballmer had a lot to do with that. When he was first assigned to head up Microsoft, one of Ballmer's first orders of business was addressing corporate customers and asking what they needed from Microsoft. As Business Week noted back in 1998, Ballmer "earned his stripes by building Microsoft's sales operation into a major-league force in corporate computing." And look what that focus yielded: five generations of Windows servers and clients, SQL Server, Dynamics, Exchange, Office, Azure and more. These are all Microsoft products to which very likely every single person who has worked in an office environment in the last 20 years has been exposed. There is so much attention right now on Microsoft's failings with mobile computing, and Ballmer is getting heaps of blame. Yet Microsoft, as we all know, still dominates the enterprise. Microsoft may have been slack on the consumer side, but with its cloud platform Azure taking on Amazon and its latest release of Windows Server 2012 offering businesses accessible and affordable virtualization and cloud integration (as well as the easiness of fitting those new products in with legacy Microsoft tech those businesses may already be using), Microsoft will thrive for years to come. Ballmer should get much credit for that. Having a dominant position worldwide in the tech enterprise space is no small feat despite any criticisms about Windows Phone and Metro. For more, check out Microsoft: The Steve Ballmer Years.  via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHa0vVh8lbj8SUFPlvbKX9f5e0sXw&url=http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2423551,00.asp | |||
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