the Onda

Bill Gates is retiring today. Love him or hate him, everyone agrees that he's had an incredible impact on the technology industry by commoditizing the Intel architecture and driving terrific economies of scale over two decades of the PC's growth. Even those of us on the Mac get to benefit from his plan of putting a computer on every desk.

What is most amazing to me about Gates's career though is how he managed to stay at the helm of Microsoft as it grew from small languages/consulting shop to the world's biggest and most successful software company— all the while remaining very close to the nuts of bolts of the core products. Lots of people tell great stories about his intimate knowledge of all of his company's projects; my favorite tale though is the one Joel Spolsky recently wrote for Inc. Gates's zeroing in on the details of the date functions seems so at odds with almost every senior executive I run into at HP these days. If I had to guess, I say that most of these "implementation details" here are often stuck somewhere between a program manager and an offshore software team and certainly not anywhere near the top of the company.

Bye bye Bill— I'm not quite sure what's going to happen to Microsoft without you (though I'd bet on bad)— but you've had quite a ride!

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