the Onda

I'm not a big fan of most Microsoft stuff and I think their best product ever is still Excel. But I am a fan of two things: 1. their full-on embrace of openness with respect to letting their people represent Microsoft to the outside world without the usual corporate filters, and 2. Bill Gates's ability to run a $300 billion company and still keep all of the details of what his vast empire is doing in his head in a deeply technical way. It is the second of these two that I want to focus on here.

If you have not heard Jon Udell's interview with Gates at PDC 2005 run and download it now (for fans of text over audio, he put a full transcript on his blog as well. I am a big fan of Jon's style (going all the way back to a book he wrote that flopped but changed my perspective on software and the net in a deep meaningful way): Jon does his homework, thinks hard before he talks, and always gets right to the core of the issue. So getting him as Gates's interviewer was just an incredible treat.

[ As an aside, Bill is clearly thinking about all the right stuff even if it is from the wrong perspective (fat client). Pay close attention to the part about RSS as a two-way protocol and the way in which the various groups at Microsoft have gotten the religion. ]

Anyhow, I really dig Gates as a software boss because of the way that he seems to be able to operate at so many levels at the same time. He can talk at the CEO-level one moment and then dive right down to implementation issues that the team in charge of a particular product has faced the next. He should be a model in that respect, at the very least to all CEOs of tech companies. I know that McNealey is a ham and Jobs is the ultimate demo man but it would seem to me that above all else, this multi-level talent is what sets Gates apart from the rest of the crowd. (Plus, it's nice to see that he's just not afraid to poke fun at himself).

In fact with the recent fiasco around the handling of the relief effort post-Katrina, I have to wonder whether the Gates model of leadership might not have broader relevance outside of technology.

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