Submitted by Bill Gates is transitioning out of his full-time role at Microsoft, the software giant that’s been under pressure due to a sagging stock price, competition from Google and nagging delays in the Vista operating system. In a press conference held Thursday after the stock markets had closed for regular trading, Gates announced that over the next two years he will gradually step away from his daily responsibilities at the company he co-founded some 30 years ago.
The Master Rat leaving the sinking Vista ship.
I heard about this on the radio, before i even saw it here. Last time i was here was around 5 min ago.
Edited 2006-06-15 22:27
The future aint what it used to be
Poor Bill. 30 year career, dominant player on the desktop, world’s richest man, and you sum him up by his company’s most recent crisis.
Not to mention the extraordinary work the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” is doing. He’s taken the same cut-throat business sense he displayed at Microsoft to charity work, and he’s got some impressive plans and some impressive results. There is more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
It’s also worth noticing that the sagging stock-price was in part due to the extra money Microsoft spent getting the X-Box 360 and Vista out the door: both of which are moves that are going to pay off in the future, particularly with the X-Box. While it’s got more competition in the past, Microsoft is by no means on the way out just yet.
That’s the the business for you, rules of the road state you’re only as good as your last program. Same brush we all get tarred with.
I think Bill made a good decision. It’s not all about Vista and market shares. This guy is uber rich but have been working non-stop for the past 30 years. You need a break dude!
I love Bill. He’s really smart, cool, ect. Unlike some people (read: Steve Jobs), he’s not some egocentric fool. Yes, he claims that his company is the best out there but this is just normal.
I can’t wait to see what will happen next with him. Thanks Bill for making the best development platform ever (.NET), for all the cool FREE events from Microsoft/MSDN and finally, for all the fun we had using/fixing the most used OS ever: Windows.
Of course, Bill had little or nothing to do with either .NET or Windows. Especially .NET, which was purchased from an outside company.
//Especially .NET, which was purchased from an outside company.//
Which company was that? Can you post some links?
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is_1998_Nov_24/ai_5…
The current incarnation of .NET likely contains little to no code from the original OmniVM. IIRC, most of the code was rewritten quite early in its history. And C# was indeed created in-house. However, the technology and design for the .NET CLR came directly from OmniVM, as did the idea of a basing the VM on a language-neutral IL.
Of course, the history of popular software programs often gets forgotten when they become famous. Did you know that Apple didn’t originally write iTunes?
Microsoft bought Colusa Software in 1996. The design of the IL differs from that of OmniVM, with the CLR being a stack machine. The reason the CLR is inspired by the ideas of Colusa is that Steven Lucco works for Microsoft Research, and to the best of my knowledge was part of the development of the CLR. The entire .NET platform is quite large these days, wasn’t purchased from Colusa Software, and is largely the work of in-house development at Microsoft. You might as well have said that Sun bought Java because they acquired the technology that would become HotSpot.
Lucco was the co-founder of Colusa software. Much of the intellectual foundation for what became the CLR was laid while he was at Colusa. By the time Microsoft bought OmniVM, much of the hard theoretical work had already been done. Colusa didn’t just provide inspiration for the CLR, it provided personell, design, and concrete technologies. The rest of .NET (the class library), is relatively unoriginal, being “inspired” by Java.
That’s a bit different from your original statement.
“Especially .NET, which was purchased from an outside company.”
Nice job making a poor claim then poorly backing it up and back pedaling.
I know who Steven Lucco is with relation to Colusa Software, which is why I mentioned him by name. Much of the “hard theoretical work” was done in academia. Colusa Software existed to commercialize those ideas for the purposes of providing a high-performance portable code runtime. The CLR is not OmniVM. Its design is not identical. .NET was developed by Microsoft, on Microsoft’s dime, by Microsoft employees. It’s an entire platform, not just a virtual machine. Microsoft did not buy .NET, and since you made such a point of discussing lost history, you should be more interested in not misleading people.
Speaking of recently MS bough up Giant Anti Spyware and rebranded it Windows Defender.
“If in doubt, buy them out”
.NET was not purchased from another company, lots of other technologies in Windows has been, but not .NET MS has always wrote developer tools and languages, they got thier start writing Basic for Altiars.
Do you remember Altair Basic?
It was garbage… that is why it was rewritten by someone else and was more popular.
Do you remember Altair Basic?
It was garbage… that is why it was rewritten by someone else and was more popular.
And remember Amiga Basic?
It´s the only program that Microsoft made for Amiga and is the worst application ever made for Amiga
I’m sad to see Bill leave. But its not because of competition to Google, stock prices, or any of that. He’s leaving to help mankind. Probably one of the best things a human can do for the world. I hope he gets the respect and credit he deserves for his past accomplishments and his future endeavors.
give me a break.
Whatever.. BG is not a demigod, despite what certain people in here believe.
He’s not getting any younger, so he has to step down sooner or later. He’s got a family, you know.
2008?
Hey hey should have waited until AFTER vista is released.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a force to be reckoned with, and has done more good than Microsoft ever will. Let’s hope that this transition will allow him to work more for the good of all.
Edit: The article states that shifting his priorities more towards the Foundation is the reason for this move. Good for him, and good for all of us.
Edited 2006-06-15 23:10
Gates explained that he has been working part time for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and full time for a company that has made him the richest man in the world, and he wished to reverse those priorities.
Go Bill Go. Life’s not just about computers. I like the part where he says that as promised, he will give back alot of his money to the community and I believe he will. Bill is a good boy!
I’d rather have seen Steve Ballmer leave Microsoft but alas…
Bill Gates unlike 99% of all rich people is quiet about his wealth. He poors vast sums of it into things he truely does care about. We may despise what he’s done with the market and with his software but that doesn’t change the fact that’s honestly trying to make a difference in the world with his wealth.
For anyone to sit there and mock him for wanting to further these goals is just plain stupid. He’s trying to make a difference unlike most other rich people that just climb up on their soap boxes periodically and preach fire and brimstone to the corrupt masses just to make themselves feel a a bit better.
I may disagree with the way he’s made his billions and the way he’s manipulated the market to do so, but he’s one of the few that have given this much money and this percentage of his money to some really great causes. Now he’s moving on to do that even further. Good on him for doing so.
On a side note, some are saying he’s leaving MS: not true. He’ll still be chairman, he just won’t be Software Architect and will have very few duties.
Contrast Gates with Donald Trump — and the differences are stark. Trump is completely ego-driven-on-steroids. He wants people to recognize him for his wealth, and you usually see him stepping onto or off of a helicopter, lounging in one of his mansions with his supermodel wife, or walking around town with his goon squad entourage with comb-over aflutter. Meanwhile, you hear practically nothing about Gates’s personal life (he’s understandably private), and he doesn’t trumpet the many good works of the Gates Foundation; although it touches many lives in many nations.
“On a side note, some are saying he’s leaving MS: not true. He’ll still be chairman, he just won’t be Software Architect and will have very few duties.”
This is what I think most people are missing as well. I’m sure he’ll still be very active in the business end of Microsoft, probably until he croaks…he built up a 100 billion dollar empire pretty much single-handedly (in the beginning at least), there’s no walking away from that. Ever.
Bill Gates steeping down ?
Well he certainly has the money to retire … .
Who will replace him at MS ?
But yeah .. their charity work is massive .. so way to go
EDIT : AFAIK a lot of other rich business based charitiy people also dont brag about their money .
Edited 2006-06-15 23:49
He should take Ballmer with him. How a moron like Ballmer ever got to the position he is in is beyond me. Bill is definitely a pioneer and I hope he continues the tremendous amount of work he has done through his charitable foundation.
Say what you will about Ballmer. He’s been part of one of the most successful business management teams in history — and the man has tremendous charisma (monkey boy dance, aside). He could sell hot water in Hell.
Ballmer is a pretty smart guy. He might act the clown for addresses, but I have to agree that pretending that he’s incompetent is a mistake.
Sorry, on what premise are you basing your claim? Are you his official biographer? A friend of the family? You know next time Ballmer is discussing his plans and strategies, could you please ask him the substance he was abusing that fateful evening of the dance monkey boy video?
On Bill Gates leaving MS, maybe the leaving schedule might get delayed, technical difficulties might force the resignation to be postponed to the next quarter… Sarcasm aside, if Gates wants to try out something else, I think he has earned his stripes. Something he helped build is now, by hook or by crook, a leading player in the industry. Not a bad way to end up starting from a garage
I am not a friend of Steve Ballmer’s family. I seriously doubt my abilities as a writer, so I would be reticent to be anyone’s biographer. I’ve met with and talked to him personally on three separate occasions, and I have a few friends who work for Microsoft. I’m from the area originally, and that’s where my family lives.
Why are you so simple-minded as to judge people by theatrics? Why don’t you ask Paul Otellini what he was on. They’re showmen. It’s what they do. They sell things. It’s certainly nothing I could do with a straight face.
Have you ever made any attempt to know anything about the people that are banded about like celebrities on the Internet? It’s not as if Steve Ballmer’s life is shrouded in mystery.
Hey guys, take it easy. Hate him or love him – he made us proud. He represented person having combo of tech and obviously superb biz brain.
He created more wealth for not just himself but for many ordinary MS folks (Just to tell you I am no MS employee and use OS X and Suse).
MS would never be same without him. It requires another hell of a fighter, passionate tech guy, inspirational and extremely business savvy person to replace him (Balmer + “Lotus” Ozzie + xyz ne Bill) – God bless him !
Work at Microsoft or make a direct impact on helping people? This is a good thing. Full time on helping kids in Africa is a much more worthy cause then working at MS. I love MS products, but if you where that rich what would you choose?
I don’t see that doing both is in opposition. When you’re overly wealthy you can afford to pay people that are especially adept at tasks to manage them on your behalf while you focus on those things that you are good at. You’re still helping by providing the wealth that bankrolls the charity and placing its administration under the most capable hands you can find. If you happen to be the best candidate for the job then it certainly doesn’t hurt to do it yourself, though.
He deserves to take a rest and have an enjoyable life now, to do anything he likes with his virtually unlimited amount of money
because, although the leverage-the-OS-platform playbook has served him well … in a lot of ways, Bill has outlived his time of dominance, and it will fall to nimbler (and possibly younger) minds to tackle the Googles and other future competitors of MSFT. That won’t be Ballmer. He’s a marketing guy. In all likelihood, the technical brilliance will come from Ray Ozzie and other geniuses.
Maybe the fat lady will sing and the curtain will fall! With Ballamer in charge, its sure to get worse. I hope Bill does some good in this world with his new “priority” Instead of ripping folks off, maybe he will be helping people this time. Good for him.
Who said Ballmer is going to be put in charge? He’s a salesman, not a tech guy whatsoever (and he’s admitted as much on numerous occasions). The 2 compliment each other quite nicely actually.
That all being said it’ll be interesting to see who gets to step into the Chief Software Architect role once Bill does finally step down. And I can guarantee you this, even after Bill leaves I’m sure he’ll have considerable sway over Microsoft’s business decisions. He just won’t have his “daily” responsibilities. Nowhere have I seen it mentioned that he’s “retiring.” He would never completely turn over the keys to the castle 100%.
New CSA — Ray Ozzie:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ozzie/default.mspx
He’ll probably be better than BillG himself and could mean good things for MSFT.
Ballmer’s been in charge since he was made CEO.
Ok badly worded. I meant in charge of the technical aspect of Microsoft. Search this thread for my link to the channel 9 video where Ballmer admits (for the umpteenth time) that he’s not a tech. Yes he’s the CEO, but it’s still Gates’ company, and will be until the day he dies.
Bill Gates “left” Microsoft the day he stepped down into his current role as “Chief Architect”. He has merely been pragmatic enough to arrange for an orderly transition, first away from running the company, and now away from setting product direction.
Ballmer not being technical makes him no less in charge. Microsoft isn’t a company driven by its techical staff, but rather one where market factors drive its technical direction.
It has been that way since Bill and Paul delivered a “just good enough” Basic interpretter.
I agree with the last post in this chain. Bill Gates has always been first and foremost a marketing/sales guy, but one with the product smarts to pick which way to go most of the time. Very few companies that have true technical people running them achieve great success. Companies become large and successful based on how good they are at selling what they make, although having products that are in demand helps a lot. That means sales people are the best choice for running most companies, but they need to be sales people that understand the business they are in.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jun06/06-15CorpNewsPR….
So that answers the gazillion dollar question as to who’s taking over, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. Wow, 2 people to do one person’s job :-). That being said, like him or not he did work his ass off to get to where’s he’s at today…that kind of devotion/passion/dedication is rare.
I agree with most of the sentiments. BG is past his prime I think in terms of what he can offer to Microsoft. Best thing to do in a position like that is step back, remain in a figure-head role for continuity reasons but hand the serious control and leadership over to the younger punks.
Windows defined Microsoft for the last decade. Unfortunately it will continue to define Microsoft through the next one. Yes, Microsoft’s aggressive tactics secured Windows into a position to literally steer many segments of the industry; depending on your POV it was either brilliant business acumen or wholly unethical racketeering, but regardless there was also a very healthy dose of right place-right time involved.
Windows time is passing by, and rather than adapting, Microsoft is intent on fighting time and reversing the clock. Billions upon billions are poured into money losing divisions offering little innovation and simply more Windows-Everywhere lockin. Sure, they’ve got the money to keep it up for some time to come, Windows certainly isn’t going to disappear or fall from grace in the near future, but old school thinking will eventually fail them. They’re simply fighting too many battles on too many fronts, governments… competitors… paradigm shifts in business (ie. OSS) Something will inevitably have to give.
I believe Microsoft would be better served in funneling those billions into serious efforts to stretch the envelope and break new ground rather than re-inforcing the status quo. As to what they should do, well, I have no idea. If I did I I’d be running my own global conglomerate instead of sitting on the couch armchair quarterbacking.
But I do suspect that neither BG nor Ballmer are up to it. I get a kick out of reading some of those Microsoft employee blogs, and while they are clearly biased, it’s evident there’s a bit of rift between the younger, aggressive, tech savvy divisions in Microsoft and the older, all or nothing former-IBM mentality. You can crap on Windows all you want, I know I often do, but Microsoft has a ton of talent, a ton of resources and more capital than your average country. I’d really like to see what they could do with new leadership.
And yes, with Bill stepping back I think the writing is on the wall for Ballmer as well. Whether it’s his fault or not, his reign has seen the disastrous delays with Vista, crippling security woes costing their customers billions in lost productivity, the explosive growth of linux and it’s legitimization, the OpenDoc battle finding chinks in Office’s armor, the iPod and iTunes… the list goes on, but the buck stops there.
Having semi-ranted to this point, I will say that I do have respect for Bill Gates. I don’t really condone the actions they’ve used, but he did a vision for Windows and he did deliver and has certainly earned one of the top spots in IT history. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I also find him considerably less irritating than Steve Jobs, but then I feel that way about most people anyways.
Will be interesting to see where MS will be 5 or 10 years from now.
“Windows time is passing by, and rather than adapting, Microsoft is intent on fighting time and reversing the clock. Billions upon billions are poured into money losing divisions offering little innovation and simply more Windows-Everywhere lockin”
Excellent entry. This might be why Ballmer is showing Bill the door– though I may be crediting the dumber Steve with more intelligence than he deserves. I think it would take nothing short of an evil miracle to rescue the steaming pile known as Vista. In the meantime, Bill can go off and pretend to be a philanthropist some more.
Bill speaks about it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=205005
The title of this post was Bill Gates’ vision and Microsoft’s motto for the first 20 years. I think most of the problems we’re seeing with MSFT right now is because this goal was largely met and the motto was changed to something wishy-washy. It’s like owning the market for the steam engine when you can just see glimmers of gas-powered automobiles on the horizon. Microsoft is a bit afraid and needs to reach out in this new direction.
Unfortunately, I see the future of the computing industry to be something relatively lame from the perspective of an OS enthusiast. I don’t care about the next big web-service or browser-based word processor or google-provided search. I do care about the structure and design of a PC kernel. I think Linux, NT, Singularity, XNU, and others are really cool engineering feats, but these are the steam-powered dinosaurs of the next computing age. Interesting OSs will be largely relegated to running huge server farms and computing will become even more magical and opaque to the masses (to continue the metaphor: exactly how steam is still used in power-plant turbines though no one pays attention to the technology). I hope MS giving away their good (and really easy) Express Edition dev tools will get high school kids programming again.
wise decisision
I lost track of Bill during the 100 dollar laptop debate. His plan was to have every person have a 500 dollar setup apparently. With his foundation you would think he would have something similar to that but just Windows Starter Edition. He also seems to be a compulsive liar.
The only major thing I remember about Microsoft was how it took them until Windows 3.1 for it to be usable and how they dropped support for MS-DOS with Windows 95 and the infamous boot disk garbage. How Windows always slowed down games allot until Windows 98SE. Oh and the bugs that crushed it until Win98SE. And today, the loopy worms and viruses that threatened to destroy the Internet until Open Source and UNIXlike security took a hold again, like in the early days.
I use Windows today and I admit it is a very user friendly experience and I like the polish it gives. It always seemed like a better OS then Mac to me. Their usefulness always seemed to outstrip their severe consumeristic limitations..Also think about the mainstream didn’t really start buying computers until Win2000 because of it’s stability.
But I duel boot Linux and Windows now and find Linux to be more for the hardcore programmer.
Also I didn’t own an OS since OS/2 and now own XP and Linux.
Oh well, he is giving allot of money to good non-profits, mainly drug makers, that’s pretty good.
I think the people he is putting in to replace him are a little more friendlier to open source though; which I think is a good step to keep things more balanced.
Bill Gates claiming to have invented the environment for Open Source through an open BIOS:
How Microsoft invented Open Source by BillG:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/11/09/how_microsoft_invented_open…
he is at a place where he can make some good change. good for Bill Gates
Go Bill Gates
This is a sign hes not near as greedy, avravacious, and driven by power as we all think he is. Perhaps this is a sign hes getting away from a giant obelisk which very clearly if not careful is going to topple over and crush everyone involved nearby. Perhaps this is a sign hes trying to get in touch with his inner self and refute hi evil ways.
Perhaps I dont care, because Gates or not, MS exists in one form or another, and it doesnt affect my daily life any.
Perhaps he’s just taking a page out of Andrew Carnegie’s playbook.