Programmatic renunciation

Outwardly, the past week was no different for Bill Gates from the previous 1712, which he worked at Microsoft. The 52-year-old software industry idol met face to face with some of his administrators and held several marketing meetings. Wrote several letters. Showed up at Microsoft TV Studios in Redmond to record a few addresses to attendees at events he couldn't attend.

But the fact that everything was in order was nothing more than an illusion. Everyone knew that at the end of the week, Bill Gates would step out of his office for the last time as a Microsoft staffer. From this Monday, he takes a short time-out, during which, in particular, he will visit the Beijing Olympics, and in September he will focus entirely on work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The fund now has $37.3 billion at its disposal, it is the world's largest charitable organization.

Gates is leaving at a critical moment for Microsoft, but his departure is the latest in a carefully planned process that began four years ago. In the spring of 2004, the Gates family began to talk about how if Bill would get more involved in the fund - putting in as much of his brain as he put in money - he could save a lot of lives. And in 2006, Microsoft announced a two-year transition period that ended last Friday. "I've never seen anyone's retirement so carefully thought out," Gates told Newsweek.

While Gates deliberately left some areas of activity (he limited his activities to only a few key areas, like Internet search and the next version of Windows), his passion for software development did not weaken at all. "Bill came to every meeting like he was going to be here for the next 10 years," says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Although Gates will remain chairman of the board and plans to dedicate one day a week to the company, the idea that he himself will not be there seems fantastic. Is it possible: Microsoft without Bill Gates! It's hard to imagine.

"He's not some Bill Gates, he's one of a kind Bill Gates," says Ballmer, the man who will take control of the corporation after Gates leaves. - If someone were to make a list of the five most famous people living on the planet, he would almost certainly be on the list. He founded this corporation, with him it flourished, he deserved his fame. He is irreplaceable. Among other things, Bill was involved in the development of every technology in this company. I have never met a person with such a memory. And we are unlikely to ever find a person with such a broad outlook.

An era has passed since Gates and his partner Paul Allen created the PC software industry (they formed Microsoft in 1975 to write the first program for the very first Altair personal computer). Critics of Microsoft insist that Gates's departure indicates a recession: the heyday of the company is over. "The era of Gates is over, and this is its epilogue," says Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, the software giant that Microsoft overtook in the 1980s. “Today, Google makes the weather in the industry.”

Was it just ten years ago that Silicon Valley shook at the slightest move by Microsoft? Software developers went out of business only when they heard that Microsoft was thinking of invading their territory; no one wanted to compete with the "800-pound gorilla" that the New York Times Magazine cover of 1995 depicted. Yes, Microsoft's revenues are still huge, and its core products are still flooding the software market on almost monopolistic terms, but as for fear and awe of programmers, the gorilla seems to have turned into a chimpanzee.

It's hard to argue that a company with $50 billion in annual revenue is going through hard times. But the past five years have not been particularly successful for the Gates brainchild. The Windows Vista operating system was a disaster: it was delayed for several years, it came out without the key elements it promised, and its performance flaws led vendors to turn to manufacturers with an unprecedented demand to preinstall the previous version of the operating system, Windows XP, on new computers.

And of course, Google. Gates Corporation looks so pathetic compared to the California search giant - both in terms of search volume and total search revenue - that Microsoft has unsuccessfully attempted to buy Yahoo! for $50 billion. As a result of this fiasco, Microsoft had to admit that its Internet strategy needed a major overhaul, which is hardly expected.

For Gates, such pressure is business as usual: it has always been that way. (Indeed, looking at interviews over the past 12 years, it's easy to see that he repeats this all the time.) “Each year of our existence, we have been delighted to see how rapidly this business is changing. It wouldn't be so exciting if it wasn't so risky," Gates says cheerfully. “Not least of all, the strength of the corporation is that Bill taught us how to live in a crisis - if Google did not exist, it would have to be invented,” says Ray Ozzy, who took over from Gates as the chief software engineer. - Yes, these are serious competitors, but Google and all the others are fundamentally no different from the competitors that were before. Our company is now experiencing a period of unprecedented strength. If you had to choose the time when Bill could move to another place, it is difficult to find a more favorable situation than now.

The question is whether Microsoft can compete as successfully without its founder. Ballmer, who took over as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and was the company's chief executive for 20 years before that, is confident he can. After all, Gates will not disappear from the face of the earth: one day a week he will deal with the affairs of the corporation (Ballmer still symbolically removes the former boss, moving into his office, and Bill will occupy the premises on the floor below). But even if Gates gets so caught up in Third World microfinance deals that he stops answering Ballmer's calls, "we'll be fine," he says. “If Bill really says, ‘I won’t have a minute of time for this all next year,’ I’ll certainly feel uncomfortable. But the company will be fine."

As for Vista, Microsoft is aware of its shortcomings, and Gates wants to make sure that the next version, Windows 7, doesn't suffer the same fate. A few months ago, he told his team how he sees the new product. "He brilliantly brought together the history of Windows, the challenge ahead of us and its great importance, but also reminded everyone to think personally about how they can improve the program," says Stephen Sinofsky, who leads the work on the new Windows. However, Windows 7 is just one of the projects that Gates will keep a close eye on personally. They also include work on Internet search engines and a new version of Office.

While Gates is pretty clear about his role at Microsoft, the details of his new job at the foundation are far less clear. "He's still trying to figure out the hodgepodge of things he has to do," says Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Patty Stonecifer. Something is still known: “He will work with Bono and specialists from Germany and help third world countries”

To better understand the foundation's fields, Gates reads books on education and science and takes online college courses in geology, history, and particle physics. Gates considers the development of an AIDS vaccine to be his most important task. He was very disappointed with the test results, which showed that the drug developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck (high hopes were placed on it) was ineffective. Discussing the vaccine, Gates referred to a study showing that a different version of the same drug might be more effective. Obviously, he approaches the issue in the same way as software development - perhaps version 3.0 will finally work.

Gates understands that his role as a philanthropist will be fundamentally different from that of a software king. “If we talk about real controversy - all these disputes about who uses what operating system - this is such nonsense compared to starvation and death,” he says, and gives an example of the choice he will soon have to make in connection with the funding of the anti-malarial fund vaccines. According to him, you can either spend $ 300 million on testing an existing imperfect drug, or wait several years for a vaccine to improve, which may become more effective in fighting the disease: “You can’t do both at the same time. Depending on what decision we make, millions of lives could be saved. At Microsoft, I never made those decisions."

Interview

“I DO NOT MAKE A SACRIFICE BECAUSE MOM TELLS IT SO”

Leaving his job at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation, Bill Gates agreed to speak with Newsweek columnist Steven Levy.

Are you leaving Microsoft at a very difficult time for the company?

Every year of our existence, we were delighted to feel how rapidly this business is changing. I would say that today we are stronger than ever.

Didn't you have a desire to stay to fight Google?

If I said to myself: “Damn it, I won’t leave as long as there are interesting competitors,” I would have to stay here until my death. Now I have a unique opportunity to really get involved in the foundation, when its activities are just gaining momentum - I also love this kind of work. Yes, something has to be given up. The corporation is moving forward, and the change in the form of my participation in its life does not mean at all that I have lost interest in software.

Vista didn't turn out the way you wanted it to?

Whichever of our products we take, there are always elements that I would like to put into the program, but it didn’t work out. There is no perfect software. And thank God - what would we do next?! In Windows Vista, we were able to do amazing things, but sometimes we said to ourselves: "Hey, aren't we posting too many tips, and are the device drivers really ready?" Will Windows 7 be fundamentally better in some respects? Still would!

Microsoft offered for Yahoo! almost $50 billion. Does this mean that the company was not able to use the opportunities in the Internet sphere that you outlined in 1995 on its own?

Let's see what has changed since 1995. Have our sales increased? Have our incomes increased? What was our main goal with the Internet in 1995? Ensure that Microsoft products will be used to develop websites, which have become an essential type of application. Most websites today are built using Visual Studio running on Windows. We have made the Windows platform the most popular platform for writing web applications. Our browser has become the most popular. We created an [online] company called Expedia, learned a lot, and generated over a billion dollars in additional revenue. So since 1995 we have done a lot of things. Did we do everything we wanted to? Would we also like to do what, say, Google has done? Yes, sure. But no one can stand the comparison with our achievements since 1995.

For years, Microsoft has had a reputation for being a very, very tough competitor. How well is your corporation portrayed?

Depending on what you mean. Take the development of a text editor - were we a fierce competitor? Yes, we created a wonderful product that won trade shows, got the best reviews, and at some point really won market share. Is it tough? After all, the point here is not at all about squeezing out the weak and skillful negotiation, we just gathered specialists who are best at writing text editors.

Could you point to a low point in the history of the company?

Honestly, no.

What about the antitrust case?

No, because the company lives a very turbulent life, and antitrust lawsuits have never been a matter of paramount importance to us.

And the competition with Google on the Internet?

Of course, we've had honeymoons in our lives when the truly successful tech companies approached us thinking we knew everything. Banks wanted us to tell them about the future of banking, airlines about air travel, financiers about how they could launch their applications at Microsoft. But it is foolish to think that we are magicians. So it turns out that today this role is played by someone else. It all started in the late 90s, when no one seemed interested in research work, long-term development of speech and visual recognition technologies. There was some disappointment - all the money was thrown at people who did not make truly multi-product products, something designed for the long term, but were engaged in very narrow developments. We tried to be better than them, and we were told strange stories about a guy who made millions while his roommate was developing much more important things at Microsoft Research.

But it seemed that the story of antitrust proceedings touched you personally.

I did not like it. If I could change something, perhaps I would take a "virtual brush" and paint over this episode. But at that time we were developing our best products. Look at our sales and profits during this period, what we have done for the blind, for students, and our innovations in the global digital economy - and you will see that these were the most amazing years.

What will you do when you fully dedicate yourself to the foundation?

I will have about four times as much time for strategic analysis - what we are doing in education, medicine, agriculture, microfinance. My trips will be mainly fund related. I'm going to travel mainly to Africa and India. I will be meeting with companies, including pharmaceuticals, to discuss what they can do in line with "creative capitalism" (Gates announced the need for the development of "creative capitalism" that distributes profits to the poor at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January this year - Newsweek ). I will meet other donors. I'm going to learn more about science, about health care. Education is one area that I would like to better navigate. In this regard, I would like to meet with many people. There are some really great thinkers out there thinking about how teachers can learn from each other, what equipment they need, how to improve the curriculum. To be honest, here Melinda beat me to it.

How will your public activity change in a new capacity?

Well, there is no Consumer Electronics Show on malaria, and 50,000 people will not come to town and say to each other, “Listen, listen! Now Bill's report on malaria is coming!" A lot of what we do - new seeds, new vaccines - is not a topic for a big humanitarian forum. I will have the opportunity to speak from high stands, but I would not like to annoy the audience too much.

But there are also pluses: you will be less bothered by Microsoft haters ...

The new world is more contradictory than the old. We do family planning. We fund yield research that can help the poor, save them from starvation. Some people think that genetically modified drought-resistant seeds will cause environmental changes and that science should not be used to help the poor. And if we talk about real contradictions - all these disputes about who uses which operating system - this is such nonsense compared to hunger and death!

To what extent is your decision connected with a sense of responsibility? I mean the message in which your mother wrote about the duty of a rich man to give away his wealth.

As far as the fund is concerned, breakthroughs in health care for the poor have a very strong beneficial effect, so my parents knew what they were talking about. But it's also incredibly exciting to do it day in and day out - say, to go to India and figure out for yourself how they designed their cities, how people get water and where health services do not operate; and if, say, the vaccine must be stored in the cold, then where to get the right amount of refrigerators, how much it costs, who pays for it and who calculates the costs, when and why something works and something does not. I really enjoy meeting scientists who have dedicated their lives to saving people from disease and hunger. No way would I say, "Oh, I'm making this sacrifice because my mom told me to do it." I really do what my mother told me, but because it promises to be a terribly exciting activity!