Despite my best efforts to distract the world's media from Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft yesterday, the software genius-turned philanthropist held his own. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an audio file of the great man's two-minute speech to his employees in Redmond. His voice cracks when he mentions Steve…

Microsoft gets more crap than any other company in tech. That's partly because it's given us garbage like Clippy, Microsoft BOB and Windows Vista. And it's partly because it's arguably the most important company in personal computing. Sure, Apple gets all the fawning press for designing pretty, easy-to-use gadgets. But …

What would you wear every day if you could wear anything? We're talking no limits, not from bank accounts or corporate wardrobe requirements, not those snarky writers from US Weekly or the sexy lady judging the size of your 401k by the validity of your Rolex.

Bill Gates puts up with us, having granted us three interviews in the past three and a half years. It's an intense experience: Bill isn't always fond of making eye contact, and is known to snap at reporters who ask dumb questions. After all, he's not just the Andrew Carnegie-or Emperor Palpatine-of his time. He's also…

What does someone who's been covering Microsoft for 25 years think about Bill Gates' retirement? Ask Mary Jo Foley, or consider her book, Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post Gates Era. I read and I found it to be somewhat encyclopedic in its breadth and knowledge of the inner workings of…

Joel Spolsky has a very interesting account of what it was like working as a program manager for Microsoft in 1992. We don't want to ruin the story, because it's a really good one that you should check out for yourself, but the gist of it is that Bill Gates used to be extremely hands-on with his software developers.

Of all the ware Microsoft churns out from its sweatshop of "lightning bolt, lightning bolt" nerds, Windows is the one most inexorably tied to the public image of the company. As Bill Gates leaves the building, we look back on the last baby birthed-if not fully gestated-under his watch, the swan song operating system that …

Creating an organization bent on world domination takes more than just a maniacal leader with a high, cackling voice. It takes underlings. Henchmen, if you will. But these are no Bond villains. Bill Gates rewarded his geniuses with stock, just as they rewarded him with their hard work and ingenuity—and they wound up…