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January 13, 2000
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Gates shocked the technology world in 2000 with a surprise announcement that he would hand over the CEO role to Ballmer but remain as chairman. At the time, Gates also took on a new role as chief software architect.
Listen up
The reaction in Redmond
What happens to Microsoft post-Gates? CNET News.com's Charlie Cooper speaks with reporter Ina Fried, who was on the ground at Microsoft's headquarters to speak with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
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In recent months, Gates and Ballmer have been planning for the company's founder to step back further. The company began making plans in earnest at a board retreat in March. At that time, the directors made plans to discuss the subject on a mid-June conference call.
Gates, Ballmer and the rest of Microsoft's directors finalized plans on a conference call Tuesday. However, the topic had been on both leaders' minds for some time, including when Microsoft made the decision to acquire Ozzie's Groove Networks back in 2005.
"Certainly Bill and I had begun that discussion," Ballmer said at the press conference.
While Microsoft continues to perform well financially--it pockets nearly $1 billion per month on quarterly sales of about $11 billion--the company's growth prospects and ability to compete with a new breed of competitors has caused its stock price to stagnate. Shares closed at $22.07 Thursday in regular trading, down from a 52-week high of $28.38. Shares have slipped steadily since trading at about $35 in 2001. (Following the announcement on Gates' plans, shares slipped about 8 cents Thursday.)
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Gates, 50, founded Microsoft in 1975 with high-school buddy Paul Allen to sell a version of the Basic programming language for the Altair computer. The company had considerable success in the 1980s, partly as a creator of software applications for Apple Computer's Macintosh computer.
But it was the company's decision to enter the operating system business that would propel it to the top of the technology world. The company's Windows OS runs on more than 90 percent of the world's PCs. The success briefly pushed Gates' net worth, largely through his Microsoft holdings, past $100 billion in 1999. Gates currently holds about 977 million shares.
According to Forbes magazine, he is the richest person in the world with a net worth of $50 billion in 2005.
"Gates certainly has been a driving force in the industry, for better and for worse. I think if you go back to 1981, few would have predicted the degree to which one OS would unite 95 percent of the PCs around the world," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64.
"As Microsoft has grown, (Gates') ability to contribute at a technical level has become ever less critical to the company's success. I would suspect it won't be very different from a technical standpoint with him not involved on a full-time basis," Brookwood said.
"He was really the first technology-oriented entrepreneur who was also a great businessman," wrote Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD Techworld, in an e-mail interview. "(He) kind of legitimized the idea that techies could make money and it was OK."
Gates put business success ahead of pure technology concerns when it came to his company, which probably accounts for some of the backlash against him and Microsoft from the technology community over the years, Baker wrote. "I think if you look at Google today, they are running into the same headwind, admired entrepreneurs doing good things technologically but now being challenged by needing to balance making money and building products."
And former Microsoft chief scientist Myhvold said that even after Gates is no longer roaming the halls daily, the company "has got tremendous opportunities ahead of it. Look at how dynamic IBM has remained."
CNET News.com's Scott Ard reported from San Francisco, and Ina Fried reported from Redmond, Wash.
See more CNET content tagged:
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie, Craig Mundie, chief software architect, press conference
Well done.
Gates stepping down will have absolutely no effect on the company, though, as Vista is still moribund after seven years of development, they still have no strategy for dealing with the threat from the likes of Google, open-source software, the EU, China, India, and, if it ever wakes up again, the Justice Department, not to mention its own customers, who get screwed on a daily basis because of Microsloth's complete inability to deal with security threats in a timely and responsive way. The undisclosed Windows Guaranteed Authenticity phone-home-to-the-mother-ship debacle is yet-another vivid example of how little they really care about their customers.
Well, maybe he'll do better against biological viruses through his charitable efforts, than his company's failures against virtual viruses. I'm just glad my health doesn't depend on it.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
Microsloth????
Seems like a good article...but then again...
From things I've read recently about the Vista development process/atmosphere, it's high time for some management shakeup at Microsoft.
--
Steve - http://tail-f.net/
Well, I guess that's good news for their competitors, but not their customers. I don't know what it will mean for the recipients of the charity, but we can only hope that the laws of random distribution will get the most good to the largest number of people possible. Just saving lives isn't enough, though, and even the $29.1 billion in the fund today can't do much to reverse decades of corrupt government and corporate actions, which is how most of the affected people wound up in such horrid conditions in the first place. It might be more cost-effective to just buy off the corrupt and get them out of the way so that some real benefit can accrue to the afflicted and end the cycle of poverty they're locked in, no matter how much health care they receive.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
Okay he inventended computerproblems, but common. The world
is better of without Gates
Have you guys check your shopping cart lately?
Corporate America keeps repacking the same thing but putting less and less and charging you more money in the process...you complainers do some checking..
Go and ask the folks who worked for Digital Research and any other company "competing" with Microsloth in the 1980s how Bill and his cohorts intentionally coded Windoze 3.x so that their software would cripple their competitors' software products. Ask any of the PC manufacturers how Gates and Co. systematically forced them to pay Microsloth a Windows license fee on every computer they sold, whether or not it actually had Windows installed, or they found that they could no longer sell anything from Microsloth. Ask the judge that presided over the anti-trust case how Bill and his buddies swore up and down that Internet Exploiter was an integral part of the Windoze operating system, and the judge then proceded to remove IE from a computer right there in the courtroom, and Windoze continued to run (well, at least as badly as it normally would - I'm sure that if they waited for a few hours, it would croak anyway, but not because IE had been removed). If you'd like more examples of Bill Gates' immoral and illegal behavior, I'll merely direct you to the warehouses full of complaints, testimony and evidence that the Justice Department and about half of the state attorney generals in the U.S. amassed over the past 30 years.
For those who eat up the revisionist history that passes for PR from Microsloth, Bill wasn't some wunderkind who was merrily tossing PC appleseeds across the landscape in the hope that everyone would benefit from his efforts by having a computer on their desk. He was a born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth kid of one of the most successful corporate attorneys in Seattle, and could pick where he went to college. Apparently, no one at Harvard knew enough to teach him anything (his words), whereupon he spent his nights playing cards with Steve Ballmer and others who wound up at Microsloth. So, it was no skin off of his nose for him to leave and go to work for Ed Roberts at MITS in Albuquerque, NM. The only technical achievement he has ever claimed was porting BASIC to 8080 assembly language for the S-100 home-built/kit computers, and then he complained when people freely copied it when he brought it to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley - an "organization" whose sole stated purpose was to _share_information_ in order to expand the then-tiny personal computer _hobby_.
Then there's the mystery about why, when he had the chance, Bill Gates didn't allow Apple to die, or even kill it off, when he invested $150 million after Steve Jobs returned in the early 1990s. I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that Bill and Microsloth made its first $100 million from a now-forgotten little product called the Microsoft C/PM SoftCard for the Apple II, an 8080-based microcomputer-on-a-card that fit into a slot in the original Apple II computers. C/PM was the de facto OS for the first quarter of a million S-100 microcomputers in existence up until then, especially for business use (there are still banks in Germany and other businesses that rely on C/PM today - it was that reliable a product, unlike anything Microsloth has ever produced). Bill licensed C/PM to use on the SoftCard, and millions of them were eventually sold to go into many of the millions of Apple II systems that were the most popular computer on the planet for years (one is still running a telescope aiming system at an observatory on Mt. Haleakala in Hawaii - the operator's comment: "It it ain't broke, don't fix it."). So, Bill owed a lot of his early money to Apple, and Microsloth earns billions of dollars a year alone from sales of Office for the Mac to this very day.
I'd rather direct charitable contributions to where I think they will do the most good - history has repeatedly shown that too much money in a few peoples' hands inevitably results in corruption and abuse of power. It's just human nature, and unless the rumors are true about him being a cyborg, even Bill Gates suffers from the same weaknesses everyone else does (and a bunch that some might not wish for, like endless guilt for his transgressions, and winding up muttering something like "Rosebud" on his deathbed).
Admiration? You've got to be kidding.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
It is better to burn out, than fade away.
I wonder if he is bowing out as he sees the writing on the wall. Open source and weblications are the future and his company stands to lose a lot of money and cred.
Or maybe he is thinking of joining Google?
Good riddance Gates. Let the real innovation begin.
Bottom line is this: When all of the leaders from the technology companies we discuss so passionately on CNET are long forgotten, history will remember Gates as the single iconic technology figure of his era. He has etched a place in human history and is now headed in the direction of other historic businessmen who spent their latter years giving back to the world.
Say the names Ozzie, Jobs, Hopper, Mauchly, Eckert, Forest and few people know who they are. Say the name Gates and "bingo". And so it will remain for the foreseeable centuries and beyond.
Great job Bill. It's time now for the next Gates' to step up and take this industry to the next level. Can't wait to see what the next generation has to offer.
James.
I wonder if he is bowing out as he sees the writing on the wall. Open source and weblications are the future and his company stands to lose a lot of money and cred.
Or maybe he is thinking of joining Google?
Good riddance Gates and goodbye to Windows, even it is a slow goodbye.
Let the Web Age begin.
I wonder if he is bowing out as he sees the writing on the wall. Open source and weblications are the future and his company stands to lose a lot of money and cred.
Or maybe he is thinking of joining Google?
Good riddance Gates and goodbye to Windows, even it is a slow goodbye.
Let the Web Age begin.
I wonder if he is bowing out as he sees the writing on the wall. Open source and weblications are the future and his company stands to lose a lot of money and cred.
Or maybe he is thinking of joining Google?
Good riddance Gates and goodbye to Windows, even iof it is a slow goodbye.
Let the Web Age begin.
The man will be remembered for centuries (e.g. Microsoft, funding the world's largest charity), long after you're dead and nothing but a spec of forgotten dust.
I wonder if he is bowing out as he sees the writing on the wall. Open source and weblications are the future and his company stands to lose a lot of money and cred.
Or maybe he is thinking of joining Google?
Good riddance Gates and goodbye to Windows, even if it is a slow goodbye.
Let the Web Age begin.
- Love for that traitor?
- by barrack June 15, 2006 2:56 PM PDT
- You got to be kidding me! He makes 90% of the wordpopulation
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 3 pages (108 Comments)that uses a computer leap a decade behind and then leaves
without cleaning up the mess he made and you want us to show
him some respect? My middlefinger he can get!
It's a good thing mister gates goes, if others will follow him
Microsoft might gain what it has been lacking for 30 years real
innovation. No more bad copies of good ideas would be good
start.
So when is Darth Ballmer's time to go?