Bill Gates Steps Donw
Posted by Rin6_Zer0 on July 01 2008 15:21:34
The introduction of three letters on to Bill Gates’s executive office plaque yesterday signalled a new era for Microsoft, the software giant that has brought about the biggest change in global business culture since the invention of the telephone or the internal combustion engine.
Yesterday Mr Gates stepped down from the day-to-day running of the company he helped to found in 1975 to become nonexecutive chairman. The move will allow him to concentrate on running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and anoint Steve Ballmer, already chief executive, as the undisputed boss.
For a man known as being socially awkward, his goodbye was unusually emotional. In a tearful farewell, Mr Gates said: “There won’t be a day in my life when I won’t be thinking about Microsoft, the great things that we’re doing and wanting to help.”
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The introduction of three letters on to Bill Gates’s executive office plaque yesterday signalled a new era for Microsoft, the software giant that has brought about the biggest change in global business culture since the invention of the telephone or the internal combustion engine.
Yesterday Mr Gates stepped down from the day-to-day running of the company he helped to found in 1975 to become nonexecutive chairman.
The move will allow him to concentrate on running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and anoint Steve Ballmer, already chief executive, as the undisputed boss.
For a man known as being socially awkward, his goodbye was unusually emotional. In a tearful farewell, Mr Gates said: “There won’t be a day in my life when I won’t be thinking about Microsoft, the great things that we’re doing and wanting to help.”
But Mr Gates, 52, hands over the keys of the Seattle-based business with an uncertain future. While Microsoft has a highly lucrative global dominance in office software applications and web processing programs, the company is losing out in the fight to win its share of internet advertising.
Ranking behind Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft is desperate to secure a bigger chunk of the internet advertising market, worth $40 billion (£20 billion) a year and which is set to double by 2010.
Within the past month Microsoft has emerged bloodied from an 18-month fight to acquire Yahoo!, the internet search engine, that would have helped it to secure a stronger second slot. The $47 billion approach to buy Yahoo! was led by Mr Ballmer, but it was made with the guidance of Mr Gates. Yahoo! wriggled away in May.
Mr Gates signalled his intention to step down two years ago, but Wall Street has struggled since for guidance on the strategy of Microsoft and the way that it would be run once its co-founder stepped aside. Last month, at a meeting of the group’s chief executive officers, Mr Gates outlined how Microsoft hoped to translate the work of one man into a series of business units run by a group of executives.
He said: “We’ve created this thing we called quests, where we divided our types of customers down, and we got the best thinkers on these things, the practical people who are with the customers, the engineers who write the code and the researchers who may be more unbound in terms of their time frame and imagination, and put them together.”
Analysts were confused by the plans. Mr Gates, however, refused to elucidate. According to one report, an analyst briefed under a nondisclosure agreement left the building baffled.
Paul Degroot, an analyst for Directions, an independent technology consultancy, said that Microsoft was “basically replacing just one man with a collection of primarily technical people, engineers and product groups”. This may be no bad thing. Microsoft has tried to catch up with the rest of the music player market and the latest version of its Windows Vista operating system is widely seen as a disappointment.
Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, said: “Some of the technical folks may even be better suited than Gates to lead the company into the next generation of computing. Some would say that maybe he had too much power. Some would say that Microsoft hasn’t failed enough, hasn’t gone out on enough limbs and been as innovative as they could have been.”
Even under Mr Gates’s own defined measures of success, he cannot be particularly comfortable with where the company stands in some markets. In 1994 Mr Gates took part in a Harvard Business School case study, when he said that the key to Microsoft’s strategy was to dominate markets. “We look for businesses where we can garner large market shares, not just 30 or 35 per cent.” In internet advertising, a critical market, Google – the world’s biggest internet company – remains dominant.
Although the future of Microsoft is uncertain, its past – imagined, shaped, and nurtured by only two men, Mr Gates and Paul Allen, his co-founder – is phenomenal. Microsoft is worth $258 billion with annual sales of $60 billion. There are more than one billion copies of the Windows operating system worldwide, which made Mr Gates the world’s wealthiest man for 13 years until last year.
The corporate world may miss watching a pullover-wearing, bespectacled geek engaging in public feuds with Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, and Thomas Jackson, a federal judge, who accused Mr Gates of having “a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company – an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success”. They may also miss the extraordinary vision of a man who for years has been encouraging us to consider what the future of television looks like, how we will read in the future and how to get all handwriting and reading done through a computer.
Mr Gates intends to spend one day a week in the Microsoft office, which may suggest that company founders never really retire, even if they say they do.
Four driving forces behind the computer empire
Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, 52
Mr Ballmer joined the company in 1980 when Bill Gates, a Harvard University classmate, talked him into dropping out of Stanford University business school to join Microsoft. Since taking over from Mr Gates as the company's chief executive in 2000, Mr Ballmer has been the main decision maker.
Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, 52
He replaced Mr Gates as the company's top software guru in 2006. He joined the company as chief technical officer the previous year when Microsoft bought his software company, Groove Networks. White-haired and softly spoken, Mr Ozzie is responsible for mapping out the company's “software plus services” strategy.
Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, 59
Mr Mundie manages the $7billion research and development budget, believed to be the largest R&D budget of any technology firm. Mr Mundie's Microsoft career began in 1992 in the consumer platforms division, where he was responsible for developing software for games consoles.
Kevin Johnson, President, Platforms & Services Division, 47
Mr Johnson, who joined Microsoft in 1992, has the dual task of protecting the company's most important business, Windows, and developing its future cash generator, online advertising. He was one of the main drivers behind Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo! to aid its push for advertising.
Original article @ : http://business.timesonline.co.uk/
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- Rin6_Zer0 -