Bill Gates says goodbye to Microsoft in 2 years...

[cosplay]

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As Bill Gates prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft, he tells the BBC in an interview that it wasn't just what Microsoft did, but what his rivals didn't do that let Microsoft get ahead.

Some History...






1950s
October 28, 1955
William Henry Gates III is born in Seattle. His grandmother Adelle nicknames him "Trey," the cardplayer's term for a three. He later becomes an avid poker player.

1960s

1967
Gates, a difficult sixth grader, asks his mother, "Have you ever tried thinking?"

Fall 1967
Gates' parents enroll him in Lakeside School, an exclusive boys school in Seattle. He is the smallest kid in the class, yet has size 13 feet.

1968
Gates and Lakeside classmate Paul Allen learn Basic from a manual. Within a few weeks, the pair exhaust the school's $3,000 annual budget for time on a PDP-10 computer. The boys soon land a contract with the Computer Center Corporation to report PDP-10 software bugs in exchange for computer time.
1970s

1971
Gates writes programs for Lakeside, including one that creates class schedules; he manages to put himself in classes with the "right" girls.

September 1973
Gates enrolls at Harvard University. Academically, his record is spotty — having a near-photographic memory helps him cram, but he often misses class, neglecting showers and living on pizza and soda while programming and playing poker. He befriends Steve Ballmer, who lives down the hall in the same dormitory.

January 1975
Paul Allen sees the cover of Popular Electronics — a picture of the Altair 8800 computer and the headline "World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models". He buys the issue and rushes to Gates' room. A few days later, Gates calls MITS, maker of the Altair, and tells the company he and Allen could develop a version of Basic for the 8800.

February 1, 1975
Gates and Allen finish the code and sell it to MITS for $3,000 plus a percentage of royalties up to $180,000.


November 26, 1976
Gates and Allen register the trade name Microsoft. They had considered the name Allen & Gates Inc., then Micro-Soft, but decided to drop the hyphen. Allen is 23, Gates 21.

January 1977
Gates takes a leave of absence from Harvard and establishes Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS is headquartered.


1977
On several occasions, Gates' secretary enters the Microsoft building to find him crumpled on the floor, asleep. He continues to live on pizza and is a demanding boss, often fighting with colleagues. Among his favorite responses: "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

Late 1977
Gates is arrested several times for speeding in his Porsche 911 — once sans driver's license. Allen bails him out on at least one occasion.


December 1978
Microsoft's year-end sales exceed $1 million.

January 1, 1979
Microsoft moves its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington.


1980s

August 28, 1980
Gates signs a contract with IBM, agreeing to develop software for the PC. Later he buys an operating system called QDOS for $50,000, improves it, renames it DOS, and licenses it to IBM.

August 12, 1981
IBM starts shipping the personal computer with MS-DOS 1.0.


1982
In its first year on the market, MS-DOS is licensed to 50 hardware manufacturers.

February 18, 1983
Paul Allen resigns as Microsoft's executive vice president during a bout with Hodgkin's disease. He goes on to buy a basketball team, found a music museum, and own the third-largest yacht in the world.

November 10, 1983
Windows debuts. The product is an extension of MS-DOS that provides a graphical user interface.


January 24, 1984
Gates attends an event to introduce the Macintosh — MS is one of the first software developers for Apple's machine.

1985
Gates reportedly abuses a female executive so badly that she asks to be transferred. 1

August 12, 1985
After 10 years, Microsoft sales reach $140 million.


March 13, 1986
Microsoft goes public at $21 per share. MSFT ends the day at $28, raising $61 million for the company.

1987
Gates meets Melinda French at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan.

August 1, 1989
Microsoft Office debuts.


1990s

May 13, 1990
Gates schedules a retreat for Microsoft company executives — on Mother's Day.

June 1990
The Federal Trade Commission launches a probe into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM in the PC software market.

April 11, 1993
On a chartered flight from Florida to Seattle, Gates proposes to Melinda. He has the plane make a stop in Omaha so the couple can go ring shopping with Warren Buffett.


August 20, 1993
The Justice Department takes over the Microsoft investigation from the FTC.

January 1, 1994
Bill and Melinda are married in a small ceremony on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. As a surprise, Gates hires Willie Nelson — one of Melinda's favorite singers — to perform.

April 1994
The good news? Gates scores his first Wired cover story. The bad? It's about the government's antitrust case against Microsoft.


July 1994
Microsoft agrees to a federal consent decree, pledging to abandon particularly egregious anticompetitive business practices (such as requiring hardware manufacturers to pay for MS-DOS for every machine they produce with a particular microprocessor, even if the operating system isn't on it).



November 11, 1994
Gates buys da Vinci's Codex Hammer — a 72-page collection of scientific writings — for $30.8 million. He agrees to put the Codex on public display.

1995
Gates appears in a commercial for Coke (he's reportedly a Diet Coke fan): The billionaire searches his pockets for change to buy a drink.

July 17, 1995
Gates becomes the richest man in the world at 39, with a fortune of $12.9 billion. Microsoft's revenue for 1995 is $5.9 billion; the company has 17,801 employees.

August 24, 1995
Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer.


June 1996
Wired puts Gates on its cover for the second time, this time with a Photoshopped picture of the geek-mogul in a bathing suit. How else do you depict Microsoft's entry into the media business?

December 1996
Microsoft stock hits a high — up 88 percent from the previous December. On paper, Gates made $30 million per day that year.


October 20, 1997
Microsoft is slapped with a $1 million-a-day fine for allegedly violating the 1994 consent decree. The Justice Department accuses the company of breaking the agreement by requiring manufacturers to add Internet Explorer to their hardware products if they want a Windows 95 license.


February 4, 1998
Gates is hit in the face with a cream pie while walking to meet with Belgian government officials and businessmen. He responds by saying the pie just wasn't that tasty.

May 18, 1998
The Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general sue Microsoft for violating the consent decree by bundling a Web browser into its OS.


November 9, 1998
In a videotaped deposition, Gates gently rocks as he testifies that he never intended to keep other companies out of the software business. Armchair doctors speculate that he has Asperger's syndrome.

1999
Gates and his wife rename the William H. Gates foundation the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and set out to reduce inequities around the world.


2000s

January 13, 2000
Gates steps down as Microsoft's CEO to become chief software architect, handing over the reins to Steve Ballmer.

June 7, 2000 US federal district judge Thomas Penfield Jackson orders that Microsoft be split in two.

November 2000
Gates scores another Wired cover, this one for the untold story of the Microsoft antitrust case.

June 28, 2001
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturns Jackson's decision.


2002
According to a poll of teenagers in Hong Kong and China, Gates is more idolized than Chinese Communist icon Mao Tse-tung.

March 2, 2005
Gates receives an honorary knighthood at Buckingham Palace, joining the ranks of Rudy Giuliani and Steven Spielberg and entitling him to put the letters "KBE" after his name.

September 14, 2005
Gates makes a Napoleon Dynamite spoof video for a software developers conference. In it, he goes back to college and wears a shirt that reads "Vote for Steveo".

December 2005
Bill and Melinda Gates join Bono as Time's Persons of the Year.

June 15, 2006
Gates announces his retirement from day-to-day activities at Microsoft, his role to be phased out over the course of two years.

June 26, 2006
With the addition of over $30 billion from Buffett, the Gates Foundation doubles in size to become the largest transparently operated charitable organization in the world.


March 2008
After 13 years atop Forbes' list of the world's richest, Gates slips to the third position with a mere $58 billion. His old card-playing buddy Buffett replaces him at number one.


Microsoft chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced in a press conference Thursday afternoon that he would be shifting priorities, leaving his full-time position at Microsoft in two years to focus his efforts on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie will take over Gates' role as Chief Software Architect starting immediately. "Over the next two years, Ray and I will work side by side to ensure a smooth transition," Gates said. "Over time, he'll take on the central role for architectual leadership at Microsoft.'


Gates reitered that he is not retiring from the software business, calling the change a re-ordering of priorities. "With greath wealth comes great responsibility," he said. "A responsibility to give back to society."

Gates will retain his position as company chairman, and plans to spend some of his time at Microsoft.


"I want to spend more time on foundation efforts in the future," Gates explained. "After careful consideration, Steve and I have agreed to announce a two year transition plan...We have a great team of people and I believe we can make this transition."


Microsoft's Craig Mundie will become Chief Research and Strategy Officer, and will assume Gates' role with Microsoft Research. "Craig will also manage Microsoft's intellectual property and policy issues," Gates said.


"Obviously this decision was very hard for me to make....Even as I prepare to shift my focus in July 2008, I know Microsoft is well positioned for success in the years ahead." Gates said that he will "miss working for Steve every day as I have over the past 26 years."


"Bill may reduce his time here but his imprint on the company will never diminish," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "We will continue his tradition of thinking big and executing even bigger."


In the near term, Gates will be taking a 7 week vacation -- the longest he says he has been away from Microsoft -- in Africa and "enjoying the Seattle summer." Ballmer noted the vacation was earned long ago, and is unrelated to the career transition announcement.

[cosplay]

"Most of our competitors were very poorly run," he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme.
"They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."



Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain's computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft's global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s.



Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman - or "mid-Atlantic smoothie" as Sir Alan describes him - who came to sell Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system.



Sir Alan declined, telling the salesman he was quite happy with the rival DR-DOS system from Digital Research for his new computer, explaining that "we're a consumer electronics manufacturer here, we're not a bunch of geeks, we don't give a sh**".



But the Microsoft man wouldn't take no for an answer, and "was constantly coming back each day" to the Amstrad offices, Sir Alan says, until a deal was done.



Long game

Sir Alan believes he got the better of it, buying MS-DOS for a pittance, a figure he's legally unable to disclose to this day according to the contract he signed with Microsoft.



From Mr Gates' point of view, it was all part of the long game.



Getting MS-DOS out there was more important than the price of any particular deal.



Debates about Microsoft's tactics to win dominance of the software industry have been stuck in entrenched positions for years.



On the one side are Microsoft's competitors, along with some government regulators and courts, arguing that the company has benefited from strong-arm, even illegal practices.



On the other, Mr Gates and his colleagues insist their only purpose in life is to make "great software" and that if customers don't like it, they wouldn't choose it.



The interview with Mr Gates' interview adds a new dimension to the debate.



"Most of our competitors were one-product wonders," he says.



"They would do their one product, but never get their engineering sorted out.



"They did not think about software in this broad way. They did not think about tools or efficiency.

They would therefore do one product, but would not renew it to get it to the next generation."



Self-serving claims?

Doug Klunder, a former Microsoft staffer, and the lead programmer for Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet agrees.



"People forget that what really launched Microsoft was [the programming language] Basic," he says.
"And then they made the transition to DOS, and then to applications and then to Windows, and managed to do all of those successfully."



Klunder says it was Mr Gates' ability to understand the business as well as the technical side that gave Microsoft the edge.



On the other side of the argument is Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation.



Lotus was at one time bigger than Microsoft, thanks to the success of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet software.



Mr Kapor pulls no punches in his criticisms of Microsoft.



"Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving," he says.



"I'd like to smoke what he was smoking."



Intermediary

Mr Kapor claims that Microsoft "took advantage" of its position in controlling the operating system to make life hard for independent software developers like Lotus.



When these criticisms are put to Gates, he says he finds it "ironic" that he could be accused of such a thing when Microsoft had "evangelised" its software to other companies, begging them "please write software for our platform".



And when the criticism is attributed to Mr Kapor, Gates says that he had personally visited Lotus "so many times" to plead with the company to adapt 1-2-3 to work on Windows.



In a sense, it is possible for both sides of the argument to be right.



On the one hand, Microsoft did hold the fate of other software companies in its hands.



When it decided to develop Windows, smaller companies had to fall in line with Microsoft's plans, or risk disaster.



But it is also true that because of the success of Microsoft software, its operating system became the intermediary between one industry, of application developers, and another, the computer manufacturers.



Slow response?

Heidi Roizen is a software entrepreneur who became a friend of Mr Gates.



She says of Microsoft that "because they were the operating system, everyone else in the industry had to deal with them".



Microsoft's clout was, by this argument, unavoidable.



Mr Gates himself attributes the success of Microsoft's own applications in 1995 - providing a second great profit centre alongside the operating systems business - to the tardiness of other companies in shipping products ready for Windows.



"We tried to get everyone who did productivity software to come along and support Windows," he says.



"But they were quite slow, so our own Windows applications, Word, Excel, were doing incredibly well."



'Conservative approach'

Others will say it wasn't as simple as that.



But there is a final essential element in the Microsoft formula, which is indisputable: its use of massive cash mountains to insulate itself against the vagaries of the market or the failure of a particular product.



Mr Gates describes this as his "conservative balance sheet approach".



In the early days, Mr Gates explains, he needed money in the bank to provide security for the families of his first dozen employees, most of whom had shown enough faith in him to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the location of Microsoft's first office.



But as the company expanded he wanted "great financial strength so we would have the flexibility to do software in the new way, or whatever we wanted to do".



Mr Gates is proud to claim "we are very conservative", and points out that "even today, if you look at the Microsoft balance sheet, you will see that we keep quite a bit of cash on hand".



Well, yes, more than $25bn should be enough for a good few rainy days.



The Money Programme special Bill Gates: How a geek changed the World, Friday, 20 June, 2008.


Some video links from here:

YouTube - Bill Gates leaves Microsoft

BBC NEWS | Business | The secret of Bill Gates' success