The Wall Street Journal-20080114-Real Time- A Good Bye To Gates- After a Lifetime of Computing- It-s Odd To See Microsoft-s Icon Exit the Stage- Online edition
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Real Time: A Good Bye To Gates; After a Lifetime of Computing, It's Odd To See Microsoft's Icon Exit the Stage; Online edition
I've never interviewed Bill Gates or reported on his company day-to- day -- my personal contact with him has been limited to being one of a gaggle of Journal editors in the same room. (OK, I did drive rather absurdly fast to get from the airport to that room.) Yet I feel this curious sense of loss at thinking he's in his final days at Microsoft.
That's not new news -- Microsoft said back in late 2006 that Mr. Gates would give up his role overseeing product development next summer to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (He'll remain Microsoft's chairman.) But it was brought home last week at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Mr. Gates delivered what was billed as his final keynote address.
To my ears, the speech was typical product-prophet stuff, none of it very memorable. What mattered was the sense of farewell, complete with a typically star-studded video purporting to show Mr. Gates preparing for life after Microsoft. If you haven't seen it, he makes a pest of himself to everyone from Jay-Z to Bono and Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. Because it's an election year, I feel obligated to note that Mrs. Clinton looks stiff and very carefully lit, while Mr. Obama gets better lines, guessing the "Bill" on the line is "Bill Shatner." (Amusing, though not as funny as Mr. Gates's 2005 turn alongside Jon Heder in a "Napoleon Dynamite" parody.)
After the video ended, Mr. Gates stepped on the joke by saying that "I really don't think it's an accurate representation of what will happen, but it was fun to put together." But somehow that had a certain poignance, as did his observation -- which must be startling for a man of 52 -- that "this will be the first time since I was 17 that I won't have my full-time Microsoft job."
A long time for him, and a long time for me: As long as I've been using computers, Microsoft has been part of the experience. And so, by extension, has Bill Gates.
In the early '80s, my family's IBM PC -- the green-screen one hawked by a Charlie Chaplin look-alike -- ran Microsoft's MS-DOS, and Mr. Gates was one of the oddball band of technologists-turned- entrepreneurs trying to make a hobby into an industry. Later, the succession of Dells I owned ran Windows (in its 3.1, 95, NT, ME and XP flavors), along with Office and Internet Explorer -- and Mr. Gates's public image soared and then crashed, mutating from admired, eccentric visionary to reviled, eccentric monopolist. And then Microsoft and its leader seemed gradually eclipsed in my computing life and day-to-day awareness, pushed into the background by a host of companies and products.
Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that Microsoft became part of computing's warp and weave, and generally unremarked upon. That would be an enormous success for any company whose ambitions had been less lofty -- but Microsoft had never been just any company.
For all intents and purposes, Mr. Gates and Paul Allen fulfilled their original mission -- not just daily work but daily life has become unthinkable without a personal computer. For that to seem unremarkable now is a testament to how thoroughly they succeeded in making what was once unimaginable routine. And it was Mr. Gates who saw that revolution would be build on software, not hardware -- a realization so critical that calling it a billion-dollar insight considerably understates the case.
And Mr. Gates never lost sight of that. In December 1995 he saw the threat posed by Netscape Navigator and reoriented Microsoft away from its traditional bulwark of packaged PC software -- from now on it was the Internet, at all costs. And the costs were high: The browser wars and Microsoft's antitrust battle with the government launched an avalanche of ink and pixels about Microsoft's bare-knuckles tactics, Mr. Gates's own fearsome competitiveness and his company's supposed hunger for world domination.
While Microsoft's tactics will be debated for years, even a cursory look at today's headlines shows Mr. Gates was right about the danger the Net's rise posed to his company. Applications are disappearing from the PC and taking to the Web, where providing them is a free-for- all and Microsoft's historical advantage -- shipping its software in a host of companies' new hardware -- means less and less. Today Microsoft is a player in all matter of arenas, from mobile computing to online services to game consoles to music players. But its mere presence is no longer the stuff of terror to competitors, and it's now known as much for its misses -- MSN, the Zune, Vista -- as it is for hits such as the Xbox. Google is the hegemon whose every move provokes wonder, fear and worry; Apple is the media darling whose next announcement is awaited with bated breath, and Microsoft . . . somehow it's become one of those companies that's big and important but also kind of dull.
Along the way, Mr. Gates himself has changed. He's largely shed his oft-mocked eccentricies, from the rocking back and forth and displays of temper to utterances like "random," "crummy" and "to the max." (OK, there were a couple of "neats" in his CES speech.) And he's become visibly more comfortable in his own skin, even as old rival Steve Jobs seems physically remade by his scorched-earth intensity. A lasting image of Mr. Gates from the browser wars is him perched unhappily in a chair, fencing with lawyer David Boies about the meaning of everyday words. Contrast that with the relaxed, reflective Mr. Gates who made the interview rounds in Las Vegas. He seems ready for a second act with his foundation, and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually he's known more for those works than for his role in the software revolution -- which is intended as admiration for the former, not as a diminution of the latter.
As for me, I started writing this column thinking how Microsoft had largely disappeared from my life -- while I've never been an Apple- ista, at home I listen to an iPod, recently became one of the growing number of people dumping my Windows PC for a Mac, only hit MSN Search by mistake, and abandoned Internet Explorer years ago.
And yet I'm writing this on my work PC, using the familiar package of Windows, IE, Word and Outlook. And even at home, Office 2008 is on pre-order, I bought a copy of Parallels (though I haven't installed Windows and may not bother) and I've ditched my stylish but underwhelming Mac keyboard for a Microsoft Natural. Microsoft's doings may have faded from my consciousness, but the company is still a huge part of the computing world -- yours, mine and everybody's.
And perhaps that's better than spending life in regulators' crosshairs as the supposed embodiment of corporate predation. But when you've dreamed of the entire world, what's it like to settle for half?
At the Journal's 2005 "D" conference, Mr. Gates drew laughs with an offhand comment that "Google is still, you know, perfect. . . . They can do everything. You should buy their stock at any price." The laughter was for the investment advice and his wry "perfect," but two years later I'm struck by the rueful "still." Today the Earth is supposedly Google's to inherit, just as a decade ago it was Microsoft's, and Mr. Gates knows what Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page will one day learn.
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