From the Fortune profile on her earlier this year (the first ever):

Moreover, they say, she has helped Bill become more open, patient, and compassionate. "Bullshit!" he bellows. Nicer, perhaps? "No way!" he shouts, grinning because he knows it's true. One thing he admits readily: Thanks to Melinda, he is easing comfortably into his new role. About the philanthropic work he says, "I don't think it would be fun to do on my own, and I don't think I'd do as much of it."

An all-rounder, Melinda is the girl you remember from school who was top of her class, good at games, popular, and a volunteer. She rose through the ranks at Microsoft, ending up as general manager of information products, before marriage to Bill, and their three children. And now it's all systems go for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the one-time backroom girl has had to step into the spotlight—not a position she relishes, but where she knows she needs to be in order for the charity fund to realise its full potential.

Would the couple's foundation, expected to dish out around $100 billion of goodness in its lifetime, have been created without her influence? Perhaps Bill would still be flogging software to the world and beyond, with Ballmer, his Sancho Panza, riding alongside him. Misunderstood, he might claim, just plain weird, we might whisper as his wealth took him further and further away from reality. Melinda had the foresight to see what an aggressive, capitalist lifestyle would do to their family life and steered him away from it. He, in his wisdom, did not fight it.

The way I see it, most rich, workaholic men tend to marry someone who fits into their lifestyle. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has married a woman who has made him fit into hers. When I read about how she handled him in the parking lot at Microsoft after he asked her out on a date, her ballsiness made me weep with laughter. ("That's not nearly spontaneous enough for me. I don't know. Call me up closer to the day." He called her that night.)

Plans for a trampoline room and nonsense-strosity high-tech in his new-build Seattle home were coolly dismantled without even a squeak from her other half. Melinda is credited for making him more open, patient and compassionate. Last week I watched a BBC documentary about him as he prepared to step down from the day-to-day stuff of Microsoft. "As he has grown older, the ratio of shouting to non-shouting has decreased," one of his employees said about him. "That'll be the Melinda effect," I thought.

She is credited for having brought in a whole host of powerful partners to the couple's eponymous foundation—not for nothing is she known as a great team-builder. Rockefeller, Hewlett and the Dells are on board, as well as a couple of big pharma companies. Joel Klein, the man who took the government's anti-trust fight to Microsoft a decade ago, is batting for them on the education front in New York. And then there's the current world's richest man, Warren Buffett, who has pledged all his billions to the cause. "I'm not sure," he said, when asked if he would have done it without Melinda.

Personally, I hope that the Nobel committee does make Gates Nobel Laureate, because that will mean that he did manage to make a difference to the world. And all because she made a difference to him.

Joel Johnson at CES 2005:

I didn't quite know what to think of it, but I wasn't going to turn it down. I would ask the hard questions: Does Ballmer really eat children? Can I swim in your Money Bin? I didn't quite muster the balls to ask those, though, and instead acted like I had real questions or something.

[CES 2005]

Blam at CES 2007:

I'd asked him about the mug shot [from his Albuquerque arrest] and at first he looked a bit apprehensive, but answered. Apparently, Bill loves fast cars. In 1978, he told us, he'd gotten 3 speeding tickets on his drive to move up to Seattle. Two from the same cop. It was a Porsche 911 from that era.

[CES 2007]

Wilson at CES 2008:

When it came to be my turn, I had the warnings and admonitions of Blam to guide me. And sure enough, he didn't look me in the eye at first, and though he was accommodating with my nervous stuttering, I could tell he was judging the substance of my questions. Mercifully, he little by little began looking more directly at me, and he lit up with answers, even letting his guard down enough to comment frankly about Windows, and the difference between Apple and Microsoft.

Here's the vid itself, plus various excerpts, shot and digitally mastered by our own Chris Mascari:

Excerpts:

Part 1 - On the difference between Microsoft and Apple



Part 2 - On his changing public image



Part 3 - What he worries about most



Part 4 - On Windows Vista maybe, just maybe, sucking

Let's start with the goals of each program. The Global Health program is, no surprise, all about fighting disease, in two ways. One, making vaccines and medicine more readily available. Two, good ol' R&D to develop new vaccines—vaccine development and access takes up half of the Global Health program's money—plus treatments and other higher-tech solutions, the stuff that actually gets Bill excited now.

Global Development has three prongs, with the overarching mission of attacking poverty and hunger: Providing financial aid, spreading internet access as wide as possible, and helping small farmers with crop production and getting food to market.

The U.S. program is all about education, like its $1.37 billion grant to the United Negro College Fund via the Gates Millennium Scholars Program.

The foundation's goals don't sound so much different from anyone else's—they're big, lofty and impossible. What's so brilliant? They're not charging at the world's problems scattering its massive war chest around willy-nilly. They invest in solutions. Take access to clean water (or the lack thereof). The Seattle PI notes in a piece today that the foundation has spent years looking at the problem, but has yet to pump money into a major water project, because simply building pipes won't really crack at the root problem. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, director of the Global Development Program, says in the article that "what we look for is the project has to be scalable, sustainable and catalytic." (Its hardcore focus on vaccines makes total sense from this angle.)

In other words, it plants tons of little techno-seeds and showers them with love and money until they grow to be totally independent and self-sustaining, and doesn't waste its largesse on stuff that's a temporary fix. To keep up the plant metaphor, rather than hoping to grow a single, giant tree of awesome that stretches over all the problems they're trying to fix, they're planting a ton of little, carefully planned and managed trees to make a, um, forest of awesome. It's an approach borrowed from drug companies, which invest in lotsa different drugs simultaneously, not just one miracle drug at a time.

Not that they're cheap—in his person of the year story, Time says that the Gates spent 2005 "giving more money away faster than anyone ever has," It's just that every penny of it is invested with the same sharpness Bill applied to Microsoft in its golden days, so each one works as hard as possible, like the $1.5 billion grant for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.

Above and beyond all of that, Bill's philanthropy is nudging other people to chip in. Most famously, Warren Buffet is giving most of his fortune to the Foundation because he believes in its goals and smart, practicable approach to charity. As long as Bill's got the passion—like he did for Microsoft in his past life—then yeah, he just might save the world.

Be on the lookout for some loopy posts, some thought-provoking essays, some retro vids and galleries, plus some analysis of a Microsoft sans Bill. It's been a great run, Bill, and in the end we wish you well. So you'll forgive us if we roast you a bit during your final week on the job. [Bill Gates Retirement Party]

For fun: Fun? Fun is for losers. I like to make money. And white things that go "bleep" silently. You think I'm kidding? Well, fuck you, you virgin.

My job: In the words of one of my many imitators, "Dude, I invented the iPhone. And the iPod, the iMac, the MacBook, the Lisa... *continues ad infinitum*

Favorite hot spots: Hawaii, California, NYC, my meditation cushion.

Favorite things: Money, White things, iTunes, calligraphy, the kids, jeans, black turtleneck, Windows Vista (just kidding), Dylan, the Beatles, Coldplay, beards.

Last read: WSJ, FSJ, Gizmodo, The Art of War by Sun Tzu

About me and who I'm looking for: I'm the best. So if you want to be with me, you'd better be the best (although that place is already taken. By me). But the best in your class—as long as that class is Alpha. Impatient, I don't suffer fools gladly. I fight to win, so that means I'm aggressive. I love blondes—like I said, there's only room for one brunette in my life, and that's me. And did I tell you I'm a genius?

For fun: Giving stuff away. Swim night with the kids, driving fast, Africa, oiled-up Graeco-Roman wrestling with Ballmer, oiled-up wrestling with anyone, actually.

My job: I am currently retired

My ethnicity: Binary

Favorite hot spots: Washington State, Harvard, Yale, my beautiful, throbbing brain.

Favorite things: Hoodies, money, research labs, books, science, long romantic walks on the beach discussing phosphates and malaria vaccines

Last read: "Steve Ballmer's Day, 06.20.08", a pamphlet by some guy I've got spying on my replacement, 1001 of the Best Binary Jokes Ever; balance sheets, The Bridges of Madison County.

About me and who I'm looking for: According to Brian Williams, I'm a "brilliant, powerful, let's face it, sexy and good-looking leader of men and women." As for what I'm looking for, well, basically, anyone who's free five weeks from Tuesday, because I've got a window at 7.30pm.

Going back a quarter-century, Jobs was always sexy—as you can see from the hilarious clip below. It is Gates, however, who has come a long way. This vid proves that the Seattle-born brainbox was the '80s equivalent to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, that is, not a natural-born sex bomb:

Let me leave you with an anecdote. About a year and a half ago, just after I'd started working here, I had a strange dream. In it, Blam was scheduled to interview Steve Jobs for Giz but, as the appointed hour approached, there was a change. "He wants you to do it," Blam said, coming over to my imaginary desk in the open-plan office of my dream. "Me?" "Yeah," said Blam, the hurt evident in his voice. "But I don't know anything about him," I bleated.
"I know that," said my boss. You've got 30 minutes to prepare."

In the event, though, the interview was an absolute disaster. There was me, a bunch of questions scrawled on my reporters' pad, in the kitchen, making him a mug of tea, and Jobs, chasing me between kettle and cupboard, brushing off all attempts to give him a hard ride, instead asking me how I liked my men (answer: scrambled.) It was not the most successful of interviews—I was far too earnest and uptight, while he behaved like that randy old goat from the speeded-up bit of The Benny Hill Show. I woke up feeling both attracted to him, yet at the same time repelled.

I have yet to dream about Bill Gates.

With apologies to Melinda Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs.