Learning from Gates

As much as I dislike Microsoft, I do like the quote

School...?

Today heralded the beginning of the end for my college days, as I start my final year in UCD I could not be more excited about what I am going to learn and experience over the next few months.

However as great as college has been for me, I still despair at the numbers of people who go to college and stay there because you are “supposed to”, and to not go or to leave would be against the norm so they just go through the motions and stay enrolled so they don’t look stupid.

I think that career councillors in schools need switch their approach from “What college course will you be doing” to telling students to think long and hard about whether college is right for them, and remind them that college is not the be all and end all of life.

Consider the following people:

the chances are that if you are reading my blog, you are using either a product made by one of the companies founded by the fine gentlemen below, all of them DROP OUTS from college... just thought I'd say.

A book and its cover

Above we can see the founding members of Microsoft in 1978, before the name Bill Gates (bottom left) was known to every man, woman and child. Looking at them then...would you have invested?

When Steve met Bill

For those of you interested in computing in anyway shape or form, the recent joint interview at the "D: All things digital" between Mr. Apple, Steve Jobs and Mr. Microsoft, Bill Gates provides interesting viewing. Below is a compilation of the highlights form the interview, but the rest can be found on youtube.

I find the differences in personalities between the pioneers to be vast, Gates is a quiet and reserved well...nerd, and Jobs is a great speaker and storyteller, at one stage taking over a story being told by Gates half way, because he wasnt doing it justice.

Quizzed about the relationship between himself and Gates, Jobs recalls the line from a Beatles song

"You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead"