Today in history: Bill Gates begins to abdicate; Google acquires Nest; the father of ml language is born;

Organize | Wang Qilong

Through "the present in history", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can be changed from the present.

Today is January 13, 2022, and on this day in 1906, Zhou Youguang, the father of Hanyu Pinyin, was born. Born in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, Zhou Youguang is a famous Chinese linguist, philologist and economist who is fluent in Chinese, English, French and Japanese; he is one of the few Chinese who has interviewed Einstein, participated in and presided over the formulation of the "Hanyu Pinyin Scheme", and is known as one of the founders of Hanyu Pinyin. Looking back at January 13 in the history of technology, what other key events occurred on this day?

January 13, 1934: Robin Milner, pioneer of the Turing Prize for proof of the automatic theorem, is born

Source: Wikipedia

Robin Gorell Milner was born on January 13, 1934, a British computer scientist who won the 1991 Turing Prize for his contributions to the three directions of ccs, namely, the general theory of automated theorem LCF, ML language, and communication concurrency systems. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow of the ACM; the Milner Prize of the Royal Society is named after him. In 2008, he was elected a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering for "fundamental contributions to computer science, including the development of LCF, ML, CCS, and calculus."

Milner was born into a military family and attended Eton College in his early years. He later joined the Royal Corps of Engineers and earned the rank of second lieutenant. In 1952, he enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, graduated in 1957, earned his first gold as a teacher, and then worked as a programmer at Ferranti. He then entered academia and held positions at City University London, Swansea University, and Stanford University. Milner returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1973, where he developed the functional programming language, ML, and completed the development of the LCF with his colleagues. ML (Meta Language) is a functional programming language that supports imperative programming and is designed to help find proof strategies in LCF theorem proof machines. The two main dialects of the ML family today are Standard ML and Caml, which influenced later languages such as Haskell.

Before leaving Edinburgh, Robin Milner made a donation to the current School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and founded the annual Robin Milner Lecture, which bears his name at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the invited speakers are scholars who have made significant contributions to theoretical computer science. In 1995, Robin Milner returned to his alma mater, Cambridge, to teach and became director of the Computer Lab at cambridge. Since 2009, Milner has returned to the University of Edinburgh as Chair of Computer Science. Milner died of a heart attack in Cambridge, England, on March 20, 2010, at the age of 76; his wife, Lucy, died shortly before him.

Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia

January 13, 2000: Microsoft Bill Gates cedes his CEO title to Steve Ballmer

In January 2000, Bill Gates resigned as CEO of Microsoft and was succeeded by Steve Ballmer; he remained chairman and created a new position for himself, Chief Software Architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would shift his responsibilities from full-time to part-time at Microsoft. Gates resigned as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 while still serving as a technical advisor to newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.

Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC

Steve Ballmer, a college classmate of Gates, became Microsoft's 24th employee on June 11, 1980, the first business manager Gates hired. At first, he was able to get an annual salary of $50,000, which was exactly 1% of the company's capital at that time. When Microsoft was founded in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the shares. Ballmer was the first billionaire in the world to become a billionaire through an equity ration only to Microsoft, and he was neither the founder of the company nor his relative (but a college classmate).

Ballmer's tenure and legacy as Microsoft's CEO have been met with mixed reviews; after he stepped down in 2014, Microsoft tripled sales and doubled profits, but lost market dominance and missed out on 21st-century technology trends, such as the rise of smartphones in the form of iPhones and Android. Ballmer also opposes open source communities and open source software, fiercely speaking against rival companies and products, creating a bias.

It is often pointed out that during Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft missed many business opportunities, including touch smartphones and tablets. As of the fourth quarter of 2016, the global market share of Windows Phone was only 0.3%. The Microsoft Surface tablet series launched in 2012 sold dismal; Ballmer also admitted that developing Windows Vista was his most regrettable thing, but Microsoft did not seem to learn from Vista, and Windows 8 launched in 2012 still received a lot of negative reviews. In August 2013, Ballmer disclosed that he was about to retire within a year, when Microsoft's stock price rose by 8%, and there was talk of Ballmer being a bad CEO, and Ballmer said that during his tenure at Microsoft, the company's profitability has been quite good, except for Apple, Microsoft is the most profitable company. What do you think of Microsoft's results between 2000 and 2014? Did Ballmer do it well enough? Feel free to share your insights in the comments section.

January 13, 2014: Google acquires Nest

Nest Labs was founded in 2010 by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. The company's first flagship product was Nest Learning Thermostat, launched in 2011. The product features programmable, self-learning, and Wi-Fi support, followed by smoke and carbon monoxide detectors introduced in October 2013. By the end of 2012, the company had rapidly expanded to more than 130 employees. On January 13, 2014, Google announced plans to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash, which google completed the next day, January 14, 2014. The company has since operated independently of Google's other businesses.

In August 2015, Google announced that it would reorganize its business under the new parent company Alphabet, and Nest would secede from Google as a subsidiary of the new holding company. The restructuring led Nest CEO Tony Fadell to announce in a June 2016 blog post that he would leave the company he co-founded with Matt Rogers and take on an "advisory" role. Much of Nest's problems in 2016 stemmed from a limited market. According to Frank Gillet of Forrester Research, only 6% of U.S. households have a connected device, such as an appliance, home surveillance system, speakers or lighting. He also predicts that by 2021, this proportion will only grow to 15%. In addition, in a survey conducted by PwC in 2016, 72% of respondents did not expect to adopt smart home technology in the next two to five years. By June 2016, the acquisition of Nest was described by some media as a "disaster" for Google.

On February 7, 2018, Hardware Head Rick Osterloh announced that Nest had merged directly with Google Home and Chromecast and other departments into Google's hardware division. It will retain its separate Palo Alto headquarters, but Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz will report to Osterloh from now on and plans to integrate more closely with Google platforms and software such as Google Assistant in future products. Shortly after the announcement, co-founder and chief product officer Matt Rogers announced plans to leave the company. In July, Nest officially merged with the Google Home Devices team led by Rishi Chandra, and later in the 2019 Google I/O keynote, Google announced that Google Nest will now serve as an integrated brand for all of Google's home products.

Once upon a time, Amazon had not yet entered the smart home market, and Xiaomi on the other side of the ocean had not yet laid out the Mijia ecology, nest was the industry vane at that time; after being acquired by Google, Nest once fell from an independent business to almost being sold by Alphabet, and because of the advent of the era of artificial intelligence, it was pulled as the main carrier of Google's smart home. The ill-fated Nest is almost a microcosm of Google's pursuit of the hardware market in recent years, with powerful algorithms and AI, but it seems that it can never grasp the needs of users; Google has reflected in the pain again and again, so that it is now lagging behind Amazon in the smart home market. What will Google do next? Let time witness the answer to this question.

January 13, 2019: The TV series "Valley of the Boom" begins airing

Valley of the Boom is an American documentary television miniseries created by Matthew Kanahan that premiered on National Geographic on January 13, 2019. Silicon Valley Boom takes a closer look at the culture of opportunism, innovation, and indulgence that led to the rapid expansion and bursting of the tech bubble of the 1990s; it combines historical facts with interviews to tell the true story of silicon valley's early drama. And in addition to other internet celebrities such as Mark Cuban and Arianna Huffington, the series also interviews many of the people depicted in the episode section. Marc Andreessen, co-founder and former vice president of technology at Netscape, declined to be interviewed.

STXtelevision released the series in China. While the series focused primarily on the rapid rise and fall of the three influential tech companies of Netscape, theGlobe.com and Pixelon, the show also highlighted smaller companies of the era, such as sfGirl.com. There are many people who use technology products, and there are many people who know the famous things such as Jobs and Gates, but the hard-working programmers and technology history behind these technological events are rarely depicted. The TV series "Silicon Valley Boom" proves that the theme of online history is as large and crumbling and elusive as documentaries; countless heroes have emerged from the tech boom and survived the economic bubble, which is the story that the "Today in History" column has been stating.

【Welcome to contribute】Taking history as a mirror, you can know the rise and fall. Computer science development so far, there are many crucial events, people, welcome all friends to build together to build "today in history", submission email: [email protected].

New Programmer 003 is officially launched, co-created by more than 50 technical experts, and a technical selection book for cloud-native and digital developers. The content has both development trends and methodological structures, and more than 30 well-known companies such as Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance, NetEase, Kuaishou, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Siemens, Schneider and other 30 well-known companies have first-hand experience in cloud native and digital!