Letter From Silicon Valley
06.19.06, 6:00 AM ETBurlingame, Calif. -
So why'd he do it?
Why did Bill Gates decide to walk away from full-time work at
Gates himself didn't offer much of an answer last week. Most commentators have been so busy picking apart the strategic implications for Microsoft (relatively minor) that they haven't tried to probe the private motivations of the world's richest man.
But for those of us who have watched Gates redefine himself over the years, there are plenty of clues. No younger upstart pushed him out; after all, Gates is still Microsoft's biggest shareholder and can do anything he wants at the company. Instead, his choice reflects how much his dreams and opportunities have changed in the two main arenas of his life.
Walk around Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus, and you can tell right away that you're at a mature, slow-growth company. Huge teams of people worry about how to upgrade long-established products so that existing customers will buy them one more time. There's a dash to the parking lot at quitting time. Employees grumble that the stock isn't going up and that their once-magnificent equity compensation packages have lost their luster.
It didn't used to be this way. When I first visited Microsoft in 1990, engineers and even marketing managers were filled with a change-the-world zeal. I remember one young engineer telling me in awed tones how he felt knowing that the code he wrote could change the lives of people he had never met in places he barely knew existed. He could literally feel power surging from his typing fingers into the world.
OK, so maybe that guy had an exaggerated sense of self-importance. But the Microsofties believed in something bigger than themselves. And Gates, who lived, breathed and slept Microsoft, was the most energized of all.
If you want to find that sort of enthusiasm in the Seattle area today, cross Lake Washington and visit the unmarked gray and glass building that houses the Seattle headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There, scores of program officers are running the world's largest private foundation. They talk excitedly about ways to improve education or to battle Third World diseases such as malaria and AIDS.
Their ideas are audacious, teetering right on the edge of genius and possible failure. In philanthropic circles, the Gates crowd is seen as brash--chock-full of a belief that technology will cure the world's problems. And their budget is enormous. Led by the threesome of Gates, his wife, Melinda, and former Microsoft comrade Patty Stonesifer, the foundation is hiring teams of the "smartest" people it can find.
Sound familiar? For Gates, stepping inside this foundation is a lot like turning back the clock to 1990, when Microsoft was young, proud and daring.
At Microsoft, the top job is not about changing the world--it's about reinvigorating the company and sustaining the stock price. That's no place for someone with big dreams.
When Gates has talked over the past couple of years, he has doggedly described the importance of software, how Microsoft is fighting Internet hackers and how it can help make companies more efficient. But his heart hasn't been in it.
Even within internal meetings at Microsoft, people say they see the old Gates passion light up his eyes when he talks about the mind-numbing statistics of mortality due to diseases like diarrhea, tuberculosis and malaria.
But doing good, especially with a lot of money, is surprisingly hard. It's not enough to simply want to do good. You need a plan, a willingness to cope with setbacks, the brains to figure out how to recover when things go awry, and the stomach to deal with misfortune, incompetence and, sometimes, sheer fraud.
Gates believes technology can help save the world--not by handing out computers but by doing hard science to develop new vaccines and by crunching data to understand the supply chain of getting life-saving drugs to remote villages. That makes him unusual in the world of global public health, which typically has been driven by medical workers who started their careers working in rural clinics and ministering to one person at a time.
Gates isn't a one-at-a-time kind of guy (see: "The (Almost) Exit Interview"). Imagination drives great philanthropy--a techno-colored vision of how the world can be a radically different place, writes Mark Dowie in American Foundations: An Investigative History, one of the few hard-hitting books on the subject.
At the Gates Foundation, there are big visions: a world where every child can be vaccinated; where the age-old diseases that cripple developing nations finally can be quashed; and where high-school students everywhere will be excited about school and their opportunities. These ideas are bigger than serving the enterprise. Bigger than software itself.
And this time, the world is probably going to thank Gates.http://www.forbes.com/home/columnists/2006/06/16/gates-retires-microsoft-cz_ec_0619valleycolumn.html
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