[Current]

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.

1. Windows is on the vast majority of the world's computers, creating a virtually ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for. That actually breeds innovation and development. Yes, Microsoft fosters innovation. While it's much easier for griefers to be mean if everyone's on the same platform, that ubiquity gives us a common ground to drive forward on.

Stan Seiler, senior docent at the Computer History Museum, credits Microsoft for creating the common UI concept—"a common look and feel across multiple applications,” something that "couldn’t be pioneered until somebody had a whole suite of applications,” which Microsoft was among the first to do. They dragged third-party developers into following it as well, and voila, now most stuff works and looks the same across an OS.

2. Microsoft is basically responsible for the two-button mouse. Will Smith from Maximum PC (but not quite Hancock) gives the Gates machine props for really bringing the mouse to business computing with "the one-two punch of Windows 3.0 and Office." More than that, it created a simple standard for two-button mousing: left-click equals action, right-click equals choices. Love your scroll wheel? (I do.) Microsoft, baby. Apple's mouse philosophy is just silly.

3. Microsoft popularized the concept that software has value and is worth paying for it. Seiler says "it might sound obvious... but it was an important change in the mindset of people.” No one had done it on the scale Microsoft did. Today this leads to some weirdness: There's a different price for each version of Windows. But this theoretically based on how much value Microsoft think is packed into each version of Windows (you can debate this, of course). But unless you're a freetard, you probably don't think the idea itself of paying for software is insane.

4. Microsoft's intimidation leads to innovation. The flipside of Microsoft's scale and success is that everyone hates them. (Duh.) While this sometimes results in unproductive pissing and moaning, it often drives companies to try to outdo the behemoth, after which Microsoft strives to catch up before getting leapfrogged again. This process benefits everyone.

The most famous example is the Browser Wars. Netscape Navigator pushed Internet Exploder forward (not only feature-wise, but leading Microsoft to bundle it with the OS, a big step in and of itself) before IE killed it and achieved a virtual browser monopoly. Years later, Firefox rose from Navigator's ashes to strike back at IE, which resulted in Browser War II and drove us to the point of internet awesomeness (and Web standardization) we're at today. (Not to mention, as Smith points out, mainstreaming TCP/IP in Windows 95 made it much easer and cheaper to get on the internet in the first place.)

So, while Microsoft is now a super-bureaucratic organization that may well be in need of soul, innovation and originality, the truth is, its very unsexiness is why tech and computing are as exciting as they are today. Microsoft's early years provided the foundation and tools, and today it provides technology's version of The Man to outsmart and outdo, which will make tomorrow as good as it's gonna be.

What else should we give credit to Msft under Bill's watch?

One man in particular has had that choice over the years. He's Bill Gates.

In the past several decades, Bill Gates has been seen in jeans, ties and suits, but at the end of the day, there's been one look he's come home to. It's the sweater. With a buttoned shirt under it. For over 20 years, this has been the signature calling card of one of world's most powerful men. (That, and those $7 haircuts.)

And you know what's crazy? Men's Vogue tells us that it's fashionable.

Ned Martel is a Deputy Editor over at Men's Vogue and he was kind enough to stare at many pictures of Bill Gates that I sent him. When I got him on the phone, we discussed the matter, starting with some shots from a 1985 Microsoft publicity shoot.

"Sweaters..." I hear Martel think out loud. "The thing that strikes me is that...you didn’t need to dress in the '80s like you were well funded to get funding…it was the opposite—if you presented yourself as pinstriped, you might not be seen as the upstart worth getting behind."

And such may be true even today. When is the last time you saw Kevin Rose sporting a triangle hankerchief that matched his tie? But where Martel described the look as "I'm too busy to think about wearing a suit," it's probably been generalized in modern terms to "I'm too cool to wear a suit."

We flip to a newer shot, this time taken just last year. (It's our lead photo of the piece, minus that Voguesque spoof cover art.) Sweater. Collar. Same thing, right?

"This is more expensive," Martel points out immediately. "I think it’s like a purple cashmere v-neck. That’s probably a bit of a luxury he would not have even sported in his youth...Like he got married and got a life. It's more dad-like."

But something else changed, too.

"His glasses are more grown up," Martel says. "The change that you see in his face because of that. It is a reflection that he’s thought about."

The word "fatherly" comes to mind again.

"It’s a different way of announcing your place in the establishment of American billionaires. I think you see that subtly in the way he dresses because it began as a little bit rebellious and it’s matured into a way that’s said it had a payoff."

So the wardrobe payoff after several billion dollars is wire-frames and cashmere. But is that fashionable? What is a sweater and collar, after all? It's certainly is not a cutting edge trend, nor is it quite a timeless classic.

"Any guy with confidence and a sense of how he wants to present himself is a fashionable guy," Martel explains. Finally, a justification for that plaid shirt my wife hates.

But before I let Martel off the line, there was one last point to be settled. Gates vs. Jobs. No OSs. No fancy keynotes. Just. Wardrobe vs. wardrobe.

(Ed note: Of course, this photo is, like, the one time Gates isn't wearing that damn sweater.)

"Comparing their clothes is like comparing their accomplishments—they both helped together to define an era," Martel explains. "And the fact that we even have an indelible sense of how they've looked of the years means it worked." [Men's Vogue]































Cover art by Richard Blakeley.

Click on the image above to access the full high-resolution version. [Bill Gates' Retirement Party]

Other Gizmodo timelines

Sony Trinitron Timeline Shows Why It Will Live Forever In Our Hearts
The Analog Cellphone Timeline
LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities
100 Years of Tech in the Times Square New Year's Ball

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

The book is set up in these chapters: Recap of Gate Era Microsoft, Buzzwords, People, Short Term Products, Big Bet Products, Tried and True Business Models, Untried but Unavoidable Business Models, On to Microsoft 3.0.

Again, Mary Jo Foley, as a Microsoft devoted Journalist, never falls into the rabbit hole of fandom that so many Apple writers do. She quotes Microsoft's ambitions to embed Live cloud tech into the OS, and then she puts it like this, in regards to Windows: Give users what they want ("a more transparent user experience"). Office is another place she shows her perspective is right. "The Office team is focusing on two simultaneous missions: Introduce new and compelling features that will make existing customers want to upgrade..." She follows that up with a clear line, "Office today is seen by many as a bloated product that includes loads of features that very few people ever use. So Microsoft can't simply keep cranking out more and more new Office features and modules and hope it will stumble magically on something that will win over laggards still running Office 2003, Office XP, or Office 97." The entire book is well reasoned like this. That would be stating the obvious, if it weren't so meticulously researched and steeped in tons of internal perspective culled from that source list.

For example, she has a list of 10 bullet pointed objectives that are to set apart Office 14, and notes that there is no Office 13, for superstitious reasons. She has collated a list of over 40 Windows Live sub brands, and then revisited the pruned list published in 2007. Maybe so she can marvel at their bloat. She explains the subtle divide between Ballmer execs and Gates execs, partial to business minded thinking or tech minded thinking. She dives into executives and personalities and traits of 10 "Baby Ballmers," far beyond the recognizable Allard and Bach or Ozzie, and even does a list of 10 up and coming execs behind that. She touches the main profit centers and goes into heathcare, auto, and far deeper into enterprise than I'd ever care to go. This level of granularity feels exhausting sometimes and I'd gloss over sections I didn't care to know about, but there is a lot there. She draws a picture of the monstrous organization in high granularity, but does not often have a chance to make sense of all of it under the umbrella of a company goal. Could anyone?

It's impossible to explain the depth and random knowledge you will find here. Let me pick out a handful of details by just randomly flipping open five pages:
•Microsoft has been testing an Office rental program outside of the US
•"The Studio" in a branding group in charge of bringing semblance to Xbox, Zune, etc. in the E&D groups.
•Cool codenames like Fiji and Longhorn are being used less and less. Boo!
•In the past, Microsoft research has demoed using the mobile connected to a TV as a low-cost PC in developing countries.
•A huge chunk of Microsoft's future revenue is from piracy crackdowns.

The facts within this book aren't stunners. But there is just so much info about how the company's business works, it can't be undervalued. I could probably pull 2,000 bits like this from the text. Is it cohesively organized? As best it can be. This is Microsoft, after all.

There is one major shortcoming which I've talked to Mary Jo Foley about. It's her ignorance of Xbox and Zune in the book, which get only three pages. Why? Because they don't make any money. I get that, they're tiny in financial regards, but Zune and Xbox are some of the few products done right at Microsoft in the last few years. Even if they don't make money, they're important for morale and example for the Windows groups. Products have to be great before people buy them and love them enough to tell their friends about them. Unless you have a monopoly business model as Windows and Office practically do. Even in that case, it's very clear that people will resist, and resent when it's shoved down their throats, as evident by the way people are clinging to XP. With that in mind, I consider the book somewhat incomplete and I think that these groups deserve more attention and respect from Mary Jo Foley.

Does this book answer the question of how Microsoft will thrive without Gates full time? I'm confident that it's a good look at the company more than anything. I mean, Gates will still be around one day a week, and he's been transitioning ever since Ballmer took the CEO role about eight years ago, so the pivotal moment of his quasi-retirement is not a shocking event as much as it is interesting.

So, I recommend this book not as casual reading, but as an invaluable reference to people who want to read up on Microsoft's inner workings. Most other books don't get past the '90s or the antitrust issues, and books on tech age almost as quickly as companies like Microsoft change pace. Being that this book is the latest and the only one to have such current matter and historical grounding, every tech journalist and follower of tech business should have it in their library. The only excuse for not having it is if you've also been covering Microsoft for 25 years. [Amazon]

It's something that only a real programmer can do, something that company heads who are more business-oriented (Ballmer, Jobs) can't, because they can't drill down and actually understand the nuances of the development cycle. As a former programmer, I have to say that Gates deserves a lot of respect (even if his management style was pretty dicky) for pretty much actually knowing everything that was going on in his company for much of his reign. [INC - Thanks Jae!]

This may be counterintuitive, seeing as our guy who defended Windows doesn't even like Vista, but I've used Mac OS X and Vista side by side and simultaneously for over a year (and before that, Mac and XP) thanks to the dual-computer-controlling app Synergy. Here's why Vista's not that bad:

1. It's more secure than Windows XP. After being implicitly responsible for botnets and security breaches through the incredible popularity of their Windows XP, Microsoft went back and made sure Vista is more secure than its predecessor. And it is. According to security firm PC Tools, Vista had 639 unique threats over a six-month period, whereas XP had 1021. This came from much internal restructuring under the hood, but there's a chance that it might be due to Vista being a smaller target than XP for malware as well.

2. It's the best looking Windows yet. Despite any complaints users may have about Aero hogging up too many CPU cycles or requiring a video card from this millennium to use, it's still the best looking Windows yet. I mean really, do you remember what XP looked like out of the box? With that gigantic balloon of a task bar and the green Start button. Vista's glass definitely trumps that. And then there's the underlying graphical framework changes which allow new features like live thumbnails. All these visual effects may require more power, but you can't deny that it's pleasing to look at.

If you want to disable Aero for certain applications for performance or compatibility reasons, see here.

3. Games work just about as well as under XP. There's a slight performance degradation under Vista when compared to Windows XP using the exact same hardware. Is it noticeable? Probably, but it's somewhere around the level of 10%. There's also the consideration of DirectX 10 and the visual improvements you'll get in the future when more developers really take advantage of it. With a slightly better video card, you won't even really notice that you're going at 90FPS versus 100FPS.

4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR. Microsoft integrates their fantastic Windows Media Center Edition into Home Premium and Ultimate, and it's pretty much the best DVR you can get outside of getting a TiVo. Combine it with various Media Center Extenders, of which there are lots (such as the Xbox 360), you can get HDTV streamed to anywhere in your house from one computer in your office. Our only complaint is still that Cable Labs doesn't allow you to stick a CableCARD tuner onto just any appropriately spec'd Vista PC—you actually have to buy a machine pre-made for CableCARD.

5. The sleep mode works. Sleep mode in Windows XP was essentially a shortcut for locking up your computer and forcing you to reboot. It actually does what it's supposed to in Vista.

6. Built-in search is better and more useful. Vista's searching feature relies on cataloging your hard drive, then searching the resulting database to quickly (and easily) find your files. By default it's just limited to a couple user folders, but if you expand it to your entire hard drive, you'll be able to find anything fast, much like the way Spotlight works on a Mac. The downside is that during the first day or two, everything slows down while Vista indexes your computer. Best to leave it on overnight or over a weekend while you're away.

7. User Account Control is useful for some people. I have to admit that I've turned this off but UAC—the thing that pops up and asks you for your password whenever you do something on the system level—is useful in theory for many people, especially those who share a family computer. Hide the administrator password from your parents/grandparents/kids so they won't be able to install any weird apps they're not supposed to. In practice, it's a bit annoying in that it pops up for mundane things that shouldn't really need system-level clearance. It's a step in the right direction; however, if you want to disable UAC for certain programs, see here.

8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be. Although "Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer" may be an actual non-Onion headline, the root cause of his original woes was that the man installed a Windows XP printer driver instead of the correct Vista one. But there is a smaller percentage of users who—no matter how old or new their peripheral is—can't get it to work with Windows Vista. The blame for this lies on peripheral manufacturers who either can't or won't update their drivers to support the new OS. There's not much you or Microsoft can do here, but it's rarer than you'd think from reading the internet.

9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. This is a bit of a corollary to #1, but out of the many, many Vista users we've seen, they almost all agree that the only times Vista has crashed or blue-screened on them was when they were doing something they usually don't do. The OS by itself rarely crashes in everyday use, and compared to even OS X Leopard, it's pretty damn sturdy. In a year's worth of daily use, we think the OS has probably only crashed once, if that.

10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM. One of the main complaints that users have is that Vista is slow, but they either upgraded Vista from an old machine or they purchased a "Vista Ready" system with only 512MB to 1GB worth of RAM. You can run Vista with 1GB of RAM, but like OS X, you really want to have at least 2GB. Modern operating systems get fatter because they DO more stuff for you under the hood, such as optimizing your memory for the applications you run often so they load faster.

We're not saying that Vista doesn't have its faults or that Windows 7 won't be better, we're saying that Vista is just not as bad as people are making it out to be. If you're on XP and you're afraid to upgrade, don't be. It's no worse than Windows XP if you pay attention to the stuff I mentioned above. As long as you've got a reasonably decent machine—and if you're reading Giz it's likely that you do—you're pretty safe in upgrading.

That said, we do have some major complaints:

1. Things aren't where they used to be. Holy shit. This one is the worst. Various settings are hidden under levels of menus, and for some inexplicable reason, Add/Remove Programs is no longer Add/Remove programs. What's the point of this? So people can use the hundreds of wizards more?

2. File transfers are slower than on XP, which is slightly fixed with Service Pack 1, but still has problems. Here's the reason why. And if you've got problems with slow browsing, see here.

3. Wireless networking is a pain. Windows has never been great at presenting wireless networking with an intuitive UI, and Vista might be even worse than XP in this department. Stuff's buried behind various weirdly-named menus, which you have to (at least the first few times) guess at to see.

4. Lots of balloon notifications pop up on the taskbar. Here's how to shut them off.

5. Folder view in Windows Explorer doesn't remember your settings. Here's another huge pain users have run into when browsing a folder and all of a sudden having Explorer think that these are photos because there's just one photo in the directory. Here's how to turn that off.

Bonus Vista Tip: How to recover files from Vista's built-in shadow copy here.

Name: Paul Allen
Current Job: Owning the World
Years at Microsoft: 8, but stayed on as a senior strategy advisor
Position: Co-Founder
Paul Allen has more money than most countries. He owns, among so many other things, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Seattle Seahawks, the future Seattle Major League Soccer team, most of the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, the seventh-largest yacht in the world, Charter Communications, a large stake of DreamWorks Animation, and you and your entire extended family. He has donated, as of 2007, roughly $900 million to charitable organizations. He bought the guitar Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. He has a flower fly named after him. This is unconfirmed, but Paul Allen may in fact be a mythological money-making deity. He owns the words I'm writing at this very moment. That one, right there, he owns that.

Chris Peters
Current Job: Owner of the Professional Bowlers Association
Years at Microsoft: 18
Position: Programmer, Vice President
Chris Peters, Microsoft's 105th employee, was unable to qualify for the Professional Bowlers Association after his retirement as Vice President. So he did what any self-respecting technology executive/bowling enthusiast would do: bought the league, saved it from extinction, and became a bowling hero despite not really being a pro-level phenom.

Name: Stephanie DeVaan
Current Job: Abortion Rights Activist
Years at Microsoft: 5
Position: Software Marketing
Stephanie DeVaan is the founder of the Washington Women for Choice, a Seattle-based PAC working to preserve women's rights with the help of her Microsoft millions. I've got a lot of respect for her group, but I am annoyed there's really nothing funny you can say about abortion.

Name: Raghav Kher
Current Job: Bollywood Empresario
Years at Microsoft: 8
Position: Acquisitions
Seventymm, Raghav Kher's fourth company, is India's answer to Netflix. Kher saw the endless stream of films—totally and offensively indistinguishable to Americans—coming out of India, and jumped at the opportunity to bring online DVD distribution to the country. The Bollywood film industry has yet to burst into spontaneous, colorful song in thanks.

Name: John Sage
Current Job: CEO: Pura Vida Coffee, Hippie
Years at Microsoft: 10
Position: Marketing Executive
Not to be confused with the 14th-century English torturer of the same name, this John Sage took his Microsoft riches and expertise to a number of startups, currently the philanthropic Pura Vida Coffee Company. Pura Vida trades in organic, shade-grown—and fair-trade—Costa Rican coffee, harvested by angels on high and delivered by equitable-wage-earning teddy bears to your local campus coffee shop. Huggable tree not included.

Name: Ric Weiland
Most Recent Job: Board of Directors, Pride Foundation
Years at Microsoft: 13
Position: Lead Programmer, Project Leader
The project leader for Microsoft Works and lead programmer for the BASIC and COBOL language systems, Ric Weiland was described as a "brilliant programmer" and key to Microsoft's success by Paul Allen. Before his untimely passing in 2006, Weiland was one of the nation's most powerful LGBT activists, contributing over $30 million in his lifetime and bequeathing $65 million more while never seeking the limelight for his work.

Name: Charles Simonyi
Current Job: Space Tourist, Philanthropist
Years at Microsoft: 21
Position: Developer, Project Leader
The Hungarian-born developer Charles Simonyi oversaw the development of two of Microsoft's most profitable products, Word and Excel; started a successful intentional programming firm called Intentional Software; embarked on a ten-day mission to the International Space Station; and donated millions of dollars in grants to Stanford and Oxford Universities as well as the Seattle Symphony and Public Library. More importantly, he has been dating Martha Stewart for over fourteen years. I bet he's got some really beautiful doilies on his unfortunately-named super-yacht, Skat.

Name: Richard Brodie
Current Job: Professional Poker Player
Years at Microsoft: 5
Position: Developer
Richard "Quiet Lion" Brodie was the original author of Microsoft Word, and subsequent creator of that squiggly red underline that makes fun of you when you forget how many Rs there are in "embarrassment." Now a professional poker player who has competed in the World Series of Poker, he was banned in May 2007 from all Harrah's locations in Nevada, California, and Arizona for a string of lucky wins on their video poker machines. The ban was lifted, but his "kind of a badass, at least for a former Microsoft employee and poker player" reputation persists.

Name: Rob Glaser
Current Job: Chairman and CEO of RealNetworks
Years at Microsoft: 10
Position: Vice President of Multimedia
Described during his time at Yale as politically "slightly to the left of Che Guevara," Rob Glaser has used his Microsoft earnings for both business and politics. Politically, he has supported Ralph Nader and Mother Jones, an ultra-liberal/commie/pinko magazine, among others. In the business world, he founded everyone's favorite company, RealNetworks, infuriating music-loving nerds for over a decade. I think that Eagle-Eye Cherry music video I tried to stream back in '98 is STILL buffering.

Name: Andrea Lewis
Current Job: Freelance Writer, Co-Founder of Richard Hugo House
Years at Microsoft: 5
Position: Technical Writer
Andrea Lewis was Microsoft's first technical writer, and one of the illustrious original eleven employees who took part in that deliciously dated and nerdy 1978 company photo below. (We bet Andrea knows how to spell "embarrassment.") She was integral in turning Microsoft's early techspeak into something normal folk could understand, helping the fledgling company get a foothold in the early '80s. Now a freelance fiction writer and journalist, she helped found the Richard Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle.

Name: Bob Greenberg
Post-Microsoft Job: Doll Magnate
Years at Microsoft: 4
Position: Developer
Though currently he is again working in the software industry, Bob Greenberg took a substantial detour from the tech world to create a pop-culture icon of the 1980s: the rotund, empty-eyed and nightmarish Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. The dolls' official website describes the birthing process: flying bunnies sprinkle cabbages with magic crystals, leading to the birth of these spherical-headed plastic terrors from said leafy vegetation. Normally I'd question a story like that, but it's right there, plain as day, on the internet.

Name: Gordon Letwin
Current Job: Environmental Philanthropist
Years at Microsoft: 15
Position: Project Developer
One of the two lead architects of the OS/2 operating system, Gordon Letwin was recognized by Bill Gates as his programming equal. He had the longest tenure of any of the original eleven Microsoft employees, other than Gates himself, and left the company in 1993 to spend time with his family and devote himself to green charitable causes. His other hobbies include making sure that his specific biographical details cannot be found online, as well as infuriating young writers who are just trying to find out which damn charities he's been helping.

Name: Bob Wallace
Most Recent Job: Psychedelics Champion
Years at Microsoft: 5
Position: Production Manager, Software Designer
The builder of Microsoft's first Pascal product and one of the company's original eleven employees, Bob Wallace left Microsoft in 1983 to start his own company, Quicksoft. There, he coined the term 'shareware' and created PC-Write, a popular pre-Word word processor. But Wallace is perhaps best known for his championing of psychedelic substances, funding organizations including the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the Heffter Research Institute, and Erowid. He passed away unexpectedly in 2002, hence the lack of silly drug-related jokes.

Name: Nathan Myhrvold
Current Job: Renaissance Man
Years at Microsoft: 13
Position: Chief Technology Officer
After his company, Dynamical Systems, was bought by Microsoft in 1986, Nathan Myhrvold served as Bill Gates' chief technology officer, heading Microsoft's massive research programs. After leaving the company, Myhrvold began even more thoroughly winning at life. He's a prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer, published in a number of high-profile journals, and is involved with paleontological expeditions. He's also a French-trained master chef, and a winner of the world championship of barbecue in Memphis, Tennessee. He also runs a company called Intellectual Ventures, which manufactures patents for good ideas. The man can just about do anything, which can sometimes give others a sense of inadequacy about their own achievements. If it's any consolation, I hear he is, at best, a mediocre and even uninspired classical bassoonist.

Among this list of luminaries, quite a few were there for that first Microsoft family photo back in 1978:

If you'd like to talk about your favorite Microsoft Millionaires, any that weren't included in this sampling, by all means do it. This isn't a "Top 15" or anything, just a fun roundup of people doing cool things.

I grew up with Windows. Although my first computer was a Mac Classic (I was like 3 at the time, and I only used it to play that helicopter game where you have to drop the little man into the horse-drawn hay carriage), I've been using Windows PCs for nearly my entire life, learning how to fiddle with the command prompt in DOS and dealing with the rudimentary pile of crap that was Windows 3.1. I survived Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME for a short, painful time, Windows 2000 and now, finally, Windows XP. It hasn't always been pretty (see: Windows ME), but through it all I've figured out every little trick there is to know about running Windows. I'm a monster on Windows.

And yeah, while some of those earlier versions were essentially garbage, running Mac as your OS wasn't all that great a choice either, especially before OS X came out. Yes, fanboys, I know you love your Macs and everything, but come on: The OS never really came into its own as a real competitor to Windows until 2001. By then, it was too late for me.

And while I used to be pretty into PC gaming, the whole no-good-games-on-Macs thing doesn't bother me so much anymore. It's just that to me, when it comes down to it, the PC just feels more logical. Windows is an OS that feels structured and it makes sense just because I'm used to them. Macs feel more nebulous and more dumbed down, like the corners have been softened to not intimidate your mom when she uses your computer. Well, I like having the corners exposed. I like tinkering in the registry to improve performance, I like being able to really tweak the system at the base level. Windows has its engine exposed, and while it might not always be pretty, if you know what you're doing you really have access to the whole thing. And hardware choices are choices I cherish as are access to plenty of apps. Apple takes pride in hiding everything under the rug and keeping it out of your hands to not let you mess it up. I don't need kid gloves.

Furthermore, beyond the OS itself, I hate the cult of personality that surrounds Steve Jobs. I like the soon-to-be-retired Bill Gates way more than Steve Jobs, because the guy cares about more than just making enough money to build a castle for himself out of stacks of $100 bills (not that Bill can't do that). Bill Gates is going to be remembered for seriously impacting the global health climate for the better. After all, the Nobel Prize is named after the dude who invented TNT, but his name is invoked a lot more often for encouraging advancements in science, literature and peace. And chances are, if the Gates Foundation keeps chugging along, Gates may even win a Nobel. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, just makes pretty plastic objects, and when it comes down to it, he seems like kind of a greedy dick. I'm more than happy to not give him any more money.

And you know what? Macs are too hip. Oh, look at me! I do graphic design! I wear women's jeans and hang out in coffee shops! I'm a DJ! Well good for you. My computer is not a fashion statement. It's a computer.

But really, when it comes down to it, the main reason I still use Windows is this: I'm stubborn and lazy. I don't want to switch because it will amount to admitting that I've been wrong for the last 15 years or so. And it would be just a huge pain to do it even if I swallowed my pride, having to relearn all the shortcuts and commands and little nuances that make an OS tick. I know all those for Windows already. I am just far too lazy to relearn OS X, and I don't care how easy you claim it is. I've made my choice, and I'm sticking by it. At least until I buy my next computer, because I sure as hell don't want to have to use Vista. I mean, I like Windows, but I'm not crazy.

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.

If you didn't already guess which videos were used above, here's a list. There's The Simpsons, Celebrity Death Match, South Park, 2DTV, Freakazoid and of course Pirates of Silicon Valley.

What about the song you say? Well, it's by a group called, wait for it, Komputer. The song is titled, wait for it, "Bill Gates", and is the third track on their 1997 album The World of Tomorrow. If you can't seem to get the song out of your head, you can buy it on both iTunes and Amazon.com.

At the end of this week Bill Gates will leave his post at Microsoft, but his various TV and film characters will live on forever. Since Ballmer will be taking over, we can only hope that he gets the same treatment, cause a crazy-ass cartoon character of that guy would be hilarious.
Add vids we missed in the comments.
[Bill Gates' Retirement Party on Giz]

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Updale again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

When Seattle Pi recently asked Gates about the email, he replied, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job." There was no mention as to whether or not Gates had time to take names. [Seattle Pi]

Winner — Loosest Interpretation of "Retirement"
Winner — Most Confusing and Perhaps Offensive
Winner — Movie We'd Most Like to See
And now, for the rest of the winners. Thanks to everyone who entered, and sorry again, Bill!

Aw shit, I just annoyed Bill Gates.

I asked about collaborative tech projects between the Gates Foundation and Microsoft. You could see the question practically crawl up his spine and spill out of his eyes as laser beams of frustration fueled by my stupidity. I knew should have asked him about his prison record again—after all, it's a cocktail reception and small talk about his tough youth might've been a better icebreaker. His answer is a bit rambly, with several little examples such as micropayments on phones, PC setups donated to libraries and other tech. Then he turns to say he is going, awkwardly, forcefully, but I stop him to say one last thing: "Thank you for what you've done in computing for all of us." You know in about a week he's retiring from his full time work at Microsoft.

Gates appears on stage in front of many-hued lights with Steve Ballmer, both sitting across from Mossberg and Swisher in bright red leather chairs. It is the first liveblog of All Things D. I warm up my fingers and kick the beer well under my chair, so it would not get in the way. I try to capture the meaning of his words in real time, a familiar feeling washes over me of helplessness. After dozens of liveblogs, I am struggling to comprehend the ramblings of one of the most interesting, richest, smartest people in the world. The last time this happened was a year ago, trying to liveblog Gates with Steve Jobs.

Gates is jovial, carefree, but also speaks in super random clusters of phrases. The phrases are more like strings of bullet points. Yes, bullet pointed tech jargon interjected with business jargon from Ballmer. My mind searches for facts or clear concepts. I could not grasp any. And I realize that it's not me, it's Gates.

All through the hour, Mossberg attempted to gets them to face Vista. They talk about 290m units of Vista sold, dodging questions. But no one can get them to say that Vista is an incredible operating system that people love. They talk scale and business, and draw charts on white boards of data flywheels surrounded by the words advertising and publishers, but Bill and Steve could not talk about the product itself. It's a dead horse, this Vista thing, I know. I use it to illustrate the priorities of the heads of the company—tackling big-scale markets, whether that's desktop software, or email, or advertising or search—but not so much the intricacies or polish of those actual products. Why ignore that? Tim O'Reilly asks the even bigger question: What the hell are you doing?

He actually said this, more or less this: "You had this Big Hairy Vision for Microsoft: To put a PC on every desktop. You did that. What's your Big Hairy Vision now?"

Now compared to my question, this is a very good one, even if Microsoft PR probably hated it. You have the company depending on Windows OEM and Office sales, which do well by the scale and brilliance of the business model. But that is undoubtedly part of a vision they've already accomplished. What's the next big thing? Gates should have answered this succinctly. But he didn't.

Here, as the man's giant brain grasped at the problem in front of an audience, the response is as fragmented as any:

"We've codified the goals into things we call Quests. What is the home going to look like in the next decade? How will you be able to write 1/10th the amount of code that you do today? Why will the IT staffs have no people in them at all? What will information workers' desks look like? How will they communicate? And we write down those goals and we have offsites to discuss them and how they change. Take interactive TV..."

What is he talking about and what are Microsoft quests? Mary Jo Foley writes about them in her new book, stating that the company has 70 of these visions. The way Bill states them here, they seem more like questions than quests. Saving the Princess is a quest. Defeating terrorism, that's a big quest. And putting a PC on every desktop, that is more than a quest, that's a vision. But here, with Microsoft's most senior decision-makers on stage, it's very clear they don't have an answer. Not a good one they can spin at least. That's Ballmer's problem now.

The only comparative thread I can see between the PC vision and what they're doing in advertising is that they can compete in the biggest, most profitable markets they can find using their software expertise. Not quite as romantic as putting a PC on every desk, is it?

The liveblog ends and I fold my laptop into my bag and take a breath. I am looking forward to dinner.

Out of a dozen tables, I drop my bag down at an empty one next to the desserts. I come back after getting a plate of Louisiana steamed shrimp and find Craig Mundie and Bill Gates sitting across from me, and Ester Dyson sitting next to me. I am very very uncomfortable being around all this money, all this brainpower.

Gates is going on about ads as if he is sermonizing himself in monotone, with his eyes rolling all over the place, maybe searching the night sky for some random pattern. It is maddening. He's not listening to anyone and he's talking about data mining and learning how to target ads in shifting profiles and Ester Dyson is trying to talk to him about reaching consumers in a more effective context, but she's being drown out a bit by the noise. I just want to say, hey, you can get rich doing this, but no one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a website. No one I think is smart, that is.

At this point, I'd been listening to Gates' style of speaking for over 3 hours and I can't parse it. I am not numeric. I am not super-random. I am not more logical than I am emotional. I am not roboto and I do not compute search, advertising or finance. Our minds are totally out of sync, and though you'd figure hey, it's Bill, so I should listen, I instead get up and go for a walk. No one looks away from Bill as I slink away from the table, the least significant being in the immediate dining area.

I eat with a friend I bump into, and when I come back there's a crowd. Bill Gates is there, and Dean Kamen is there, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, who looks like a viking version of John Hodgman. Esther is still there and so is Tim O'Reilly. Nathan is leading the talk about curing cancer by filtering the blood and random people from the crowd are shouting out guesses to his questions.

Suddenly, I notice a change in Bill. He is listening. He is speaking clearly. He's focused, he's engaged and nodding and leaning into the conversation. Dean Kamen suggests trying a filter he's worked with before and a fresh treatment idea is born in front of our eyes. Gates nods. He's looking at Nathan, into his eyes, and switching back to Dean and looking into his eyes and he's 100% there. He hardly speaks but when he does, out come clear facts and arguments. Gates is making sense and is alive and happy—finally he gets to talk about his new vision. Forget advertising. He's undoubtedly thinking of the way revolutionary cancer cures can be applied in developed nations and in the less fortunate other half of the world's population, too. And he's excited for it.

After all, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's goal—their vision—is to "Treat All Human Life Equally."

It is at this moment I realize then that Bill already has his new, Big Hairy Vision. It's Microsoft that still needs a new one.

[Bill Gates' Retirement Party on Giz]

Special thanks to Tim O'Reilly for asking that question

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]

I'm kind of worried that he says not once, but twice, that Microsoft's key trait is persistence: "I’d call it our long term approach, which is a combination of taking on bold challenges, being patient, being persistent, being relentless." But, hypothetically, what if you're persistently getting it wrong?

I would like to see agility more than persistence. Of course big companies can be persistent—inertia can be a kind of persistence. He also scrubs on Google for doing basically one thing, and just doing it really well:

"I mean, they have a gestalt, but gestalt is gestalt. Let’s talk about the reality. The reality is one product makes 98 percent of all of their money, search. Oh, they have two products, AdWords and AdSense. They have two products, both search-based, that make all of their money, and it hasn’t changed a lot in five years."

Of course, Google does other stuff, but it's an interesting philosophical question: Is it better to do a zillion different things—a couple of them fairly well, some good, and a lot not so fantastic—or to do just a few really great things? [Financial Times, Thanks Jimmy]

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.

Maglev trains are hella expensive. Sure, the $45 million is only supposed to pay for “environmental studies” in the first phase of the project, but the government can probably expect to spend a hundred times that amount before this thing is over.

Japan's Linimo maglev train, located near Nagoya, cost a cool $380 million to build and it's only 5.5 miles long. China's Shanghai Maglev Train, finished in 2004 in a country where labor's cheap and private land ownership is a pretty new concept, cost $1.3 billion for 19 miles of track—roughly $68.4 million per mile. What will $45 million buy in the States? 10 feet?

I love the concept of mass transit and one of my biggest gripes with the U.S. is how they let their train infrastructure shrivel and rot, but the paltry amount dedicated to such a pricey technology makes me wonder if this isn't just another attempt for Bush to greenwash his last few months in office. [Slashdot]

P.S. The picture is of the Shanghai Maglev Train, which has been criticized by locals for being showy, wasteful and impractical.

Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Mr. Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Mr. Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.

Gradually, Mr. Ballmer made his imprint. He restructured the company to give more decision-making power to executives, and elevated people with general management experience into positions previously held by technology-focused executives. He also worked to settle Microsoft's many lawsuits, taking a more conciliatory line than Mr. Gates typically had, Microsoft executives say.

Once Mr. Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle," Mr. Ballmer says. "Use him, yes, need him, no."

[WSJ]