Gallery

Farewell Bill Gates

Posted on 12 May 2008 at 12:38

Either way, it looks as though Gates decided he'd had enough, and Steve Ballmer became Microsoft's chief executive officer in January 2000. Gates took on a lower-profile role as chief software architect, a made-up job title that reflected his preference for the programming side of the business. That year, he also changed his philanthropic Gates Foundation into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In spite of Microsoft being under the constant close supervision of the US Justice Department, and attacks by the European Commission's Neelie Kroes, the business hasn't done badly under Ballmer. Microsoft's turnover for the financial year ending in 2000 was $23 billion, and in 2007 it was $51 billion. With that track record, Ballmer looks virtually invincible.

Life without Bill

But it's Gates who deserves the lion's share of the credit for turning a 4K BASIC and an accidental deal for DOS into a sustainable global corporation. And it's high time he left that corporation to plough on without him, according to Gartner analyst Brian Gammage. "Microsoft stood at the centre of the move to [software] integration," he says. "Now we're kind of unbundling software and turning it into something more modular: it's all about componentisation instead of integration. The business rules are changing, and perhaps we need different kinds of general for different kinds of battle."

Kevin Werbach from the Wharton Business School agrees. "Microsoft needs Bill Gates to move on as much as Gates needs to move on from Microsoft. It's not that Gates doesn't appreciate the move from PC software to network-based services - he gets it as well as anyone. It's that Microsoft needs an infusion of new leadership to break out of its old patterns and embrace the new environment. That's why it brought in Ray Ozzie."

Even Ballmer admitted, at the Mix08 conference, that he didn't know how it was going to pan out. But he did say that, as smart as Bill is, "the notion of having one all-knowing, all-seeing" leader had gone. "We need a different way to get harmony and synergy and for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts," he said. That will come from Ozzie, Craig Mundie, Ballmer and "five or six" others working together.

Yet, not everyone agrees they will find it easy to replace Gates. "I don't see Ozzie as being as good as Bill was on the technical side, nor do I see Ballmer as being as effective as Bill was on the business side," says analyst Robin Bloor. It's certainly hard to imagine Gates gambling Microsoft's cash to acquire a struggling company like Yahoo.

And at least one important thing will be missing: the famously scary BillG Review. Although Gates could no longer keep an eye on most of the company's software, he could still delve deeply - and critically - into parts, as Fog Creek Software's Joel Spolsky described in his entertaining story, My First BillG Review (www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html).

As "Mini-Microsoft", a Microsoft employee who tells the inside stories on his blog, argues: "What is life at Microsoft going to be without upcoming BillG Reviews to get all stressed out about? Nothing helped teams calibrate down to what mattered more than a BillG Review. It's as if a high standard is being removed and replaced by... what? Nothing. Emptiness. Some organisations might have a moral compass; BillG has served as our IQ compass. No offence to Mr Ozzie, but there's just no way to fill those shoes."